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拍品专文
Painted the year after Philip Guston’s groundbreaking return to figuration, Untitled (Two Hooded Figures), 1969, is a refined double vision of the artist’s iconic alter-ego. Described in graphic black line, two of Guston’s triangular, cartoonish ‘hoods’ face one another as if in conversation. Dotted squares seem to indicate that they have been patched up, like well-worn Halloween costumes. Their slot-like eyes are endearingly expressive. The figure to the right gesticulates with a pointing finger, while the left-hand character holds a cigar whose smoke blends with the rose-grey background. Many of Guston’s ‘hood’ paintings depict a form of dialogue, enacting Guston’s questioning of his motives and position as an artist. In The Studio, 1969 (Louisiana Museum of Modern Art), the hooded stand-in paints an image of himself; he holds both a cigar and a paintbrush, and it is unclear which of the two is releasing smoke. This ambiguity figures Guston’s dissatisfaction with the abstract work he had left behind – work as vaporous, transient and idle, he had started to feel, as smoke dissipating into air. In the present painting the cigar fumes similarly blend into hazy abstraction, while the heads are solid and bold. The hoods were part of a unique lexicon of forms through which Guston explored the ambivalence and complicity of the act of painting from 1968 onwards. He debuted this new figuration in a 1970 exhibition at Marlborough Gallery, which was met with consternation by many critics. The great New Yorker critic Harold Rosenberg, to whom the present work was gifted, was one of the few to recognise the paintings’ bravery and importance. ‘Guston is the first to have risked a fully developed career on the possibility of engaging his art in the political reality’, he wrote (H. Rosenberg, ‘Liberation from Detachment’, The New Yorker, 7 November 1970, p. 141).
Guston had made his name as an Abstract Expressionist alongside his friends Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning in the 1950s, with shimmering, lyrical abstract paintings so serene his style was sometimes even called ‘Abstract Impressionism’. In the late 1960s, living a relatively isolated life away from New York City in upstate Woodstock, he effected a dramatic shift. ‘I was feeling split, schizophrenic’, he recalled. ‘The war, what was happening to America, the brutality of the world, what kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything – and then going to my studio to adjust a red to blue. I thought there must be some way I could do something about it’ (P. Guston, quoted in J. Talmer, ‘“Creation” is for Beauty Parlors’, New York Post, 9 April 1977). The hooded surrogate in Untitled (Two Hooded Figures) was a key part of his solution. As a young political activist in Los Angeles, in the early 1930s Guston had exhibited a series of paintings critical of the Ku Klux Klan at a Hollywood bookshop, where they were vandalised by Klan members. It was this memory, said Guston, that inspired the ‘hoods’ some three decades later. ‘They are self-portraits. I perceive myself as being behind the hood. In the new series of “hoods” my attempt was not really to illustrate, to do pictures of the Ku Klux Klan, as I had done earlier. The idea of evil fascinated me … What would it be like to be evil? To plan, to plot’ (P. Guston, ‘Philip Guston Talking’, 1978, in Philip Guston: Paintings 1969-1980, exh. cat. Whitechapel Art Gallery, London 1982, p. 52). Provocative, unstable and witty, works like Untitled (Two Hooded Figures) display Guston engaging with the thorniest responsibilities of image-making, unafraid to make art that tackles the danger and darkness of real life head-on. The ‘hoods’ are at once sinister and goofy, transforming menacing presences from Guston’s youth into ambiguous joke-shop ghosts.
Guston saw his move to figurative work as a way of troubling his medium from a keen new angle. ‘I knew that I would need to test painting all over again’, he said, ‘in order to appease my desires for the clear and sharper enigma of solid forms in an imagined space, a world of tangible things, images, subjects, stories, like the way art always was ... I have an uneasy suspicion that painting really doesn’t have to exist at all … unless it questions itself constantly’ (P. Guston, ‘Philip Guston Talking’, 1978, in Philip Guston: Paintings 1969-1980, exh. cat. Whitechapel Art Gallery, London 1982, p. 50). Indeed, there is an ominous tension running through these works that undermines any coherent narrative, seeming to probe the paintings’ very right to exist. Guston is constantly asking what painting is for, and what it should communicate. By the late 1960s, he had begun to see abstraction as false, escapist and cowardly, peddling a myth of autonomy that deliberately sealed art away from the political and racial tumult that was rocking America at the time. Disavowing the prevailing style of the New York School, he declared that ‘American Abstract art is a lie, a sham, a cover up for a poverty of spirit. A mask to mask the fear of revealing oneself. A lie to cover up how bad one can be … What a sham! Abstract art hides it, hides the lie, a fake! Don’t! Let it show!’ (P. Guston, quoted in M. Mayer, Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston, London 1991, p. 170). Works like Untitled (Two Hooded Figures), in which Guston openly dons his own mask, see him enlisting the impurity and ambiguity of images – both personal and drawn from the wider world – as a mode of radical honesty to society and to himself.
Guston had made his name as an Abstract Expressionist alongside his friends Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning in the 1950s, with shimmering, lyrical abstract paintings so serene his style was sometimes even called ‘Abstract Impressionism’. In the late 1960s, living a relatively isolated life away from New York City in upstate Woodstock, he effected a dramatic shift. ‘I was feeling split, schizophrenic’, he recalled. ‘The war, what was happening to America, the brutality of the world, what kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything – and then going to my studio to adjust a red to blue. I thought there must be some way I could do something about it’ (P. Guston, quoted in J. Talmer, ‘“Creation” is for Beauty Parlors’, New York Post, 9 April 1977). The hooded surrogate in Untitled (Two Hooded Figures) was a key part of his solution. As a young political activist in Los Angeles, in the early 1930s Guston had exhibited a series of paintings critical of the Ku Klux Klan at a Hollywood bookshop, where they were vandalised by Klan members. It was this memory, said Guston, that inspired the ‘hoods’ some three decades later. ‘They are self-portraits. I perceive myself as being behind the hood. In the new series of “hoods” my attempt was not really to illustrate, to do pictures of the Ku Klux Klan, as I had done earlier. The idea of evil fascinated me … What would it be like to be evil? To plan, to plot’ (P. Guston, ‘Philip Guston Talking’, 1978, in Philip Guston: Paintings 1969-1980, exh. cat. Whitechapel Art Gallery, London 1982, p. 52). Provocative, unstable and witty, works like Untitled (Two Hooded Figures) display Guston engaging with the thorniest responsibilities of image-making, unafraid to make art that tackles the danger and darkness of real life head-on. The ‘hoods’ are at once sinister and goofy, transforming menacing presences from Guston’s youth into ambiguous joke-shop ghosts.
Guston saw his move to figurative work as a way of troubling his medium from a keen new angle. ‘I knew that I would need to test painting all over again’, he said, ‘in order to appease my desires for the clear and sharper enigma of solid forms in an imagined space, a world of tangible things, images, subjects, stories, like the way art always was ... I have an uneasy suspicion that painting really doesn’t have to exist at all … unless it questions itself constantly’ (P. Guston, ‘Philip Guston Talking’, 1978, in Philip Guston: Paintings 1969-1980, exh. cat. Whitechapel Art Gallery, London 1982, p. 50). Indeed, there is an ominous tension running through these works that undermines any coherent narrative, seeming to probe the paintings’ very right to exist. Guston is constantly asking what painting is for, and what it should communicate. By the late 1960s, he had begun to see abstraction as false, escapist and cowardly, peddling a myth of autonomy that deliberately sealed art away from the political and racial tumult that was rocking America at the time. Disavowing the prevailing style of the New York School, he declared that ‘American Abstract art is a lie, a sham, a cover up for a poverty of spirit. A mask to mask the fear of revealing oneself. A lie to cover up how bad one can be … What a sham! Abstract art hides it, hides the lie, a fake! Don’t! Let it show!’ (P. Guston, quoted in M. Mayer, Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston, London 1991, p. 170). Works like Untitled (Two Hooded Figures), in which Guston openly dons his own mask, see him enlisting the impurity and ambiguity of images – both personal and drawn from the wider world – as a mode of radical honesty to society and to himself.