IV—
Sanctuary
The moral and emotional climate in New York had changed rapidly with the onset of the war, and when in the fall of 1941 Guston was offered the post of Visiting Artist at the University of Iowa, he accepted with alacrity. He was twenty-eight years old, had come to the end of his adventure as a public muralist, and was eager to develop his inner life through the more intimate means of easel painting.
The move to Iowa City was the beginning of many changes for him. This high-school dropout from Los Angeles was called upon to be a professor in a small midwestern town. He armed himself with reproductions of Cubist paintings, of Piero, Uccello, and other Renaissance masters, and vowed to himself that he would extend his own education in the process of teaching. This city boy, who had known only Los Angeles and New York in any depth, was transplanted to the hermetic culture and strange landscape of the prosperous Midwest. The quaint frame houses, with their variety of porches, columns, scrollwork, and large windows, did not fail to make an impression on him, as many of his Iowa paintings attest. The confines of Main Street, familiar to all small-town denizens, seemed exotic to Guston, who had never known provincial monotony and its peculiar rhythms.
Oddly enough, Guston had moved into the very seat of the regional school of painting that had so exasperated him and his colleagues in the New York project days. The art department to which Guston came had had the distinction of playing host for years to America's best-known regionalist, Grant Wood. The Midwest had been eulogized by Wood, and one can assume that his stature as local master would have made the lot of a younger painter rather difficult. But Guston was, as his most notable student, Stephen Greene, recalls, "a man of stature by personality and by his obvious desire to be a great painter."[1] He brought to the enclave of the university the same fund of enthusiasm and restless energy that has propelled him through so many climates.
"Iowa City, which had been labeled in a long article by Life magazine as 'the Athens of America,'" Greene writes, "was anything but that. Other than some spots on the campus, it was a small, somewhat shabby-looking tasteless midwestern town, isolated. We had students who had never seen a single exhibition of any import. We had a gallery but it had no shows that I can remember. I remember walking on the railroad tracks late at night in sheer desperate loneliness and the need to walk someplace else. In the middle of all this Philip was a 'missionary' as an artist, simply by being a true artist." He recalls, as do other former students, how Guston's confident physical appearance impressed everyone. "He was a remarkable looking man in the sense of looking as if he had just stepped out of a Piero painting…I, as well as the other students, was involved with the romance of the artist, highly sensitized, romantic, giving but finally leaving you as well as himself alone."
The romantic and, at that time, "passionately outgoing" personality Guston brought to Iowa, as well as his air of confidence, had been acquired in spite of years of conflicting thoughts and desires. Certainly in some ways Iowa was a haven. Guston had left behind, in New York, a community of artists who were constrained to begin again, to reshape their destinies in wartime New York, with its new preoccupations and its clear isolation from modern Europe. During the four academic years he spent in Iowa, his erstwhile colleagues were breaking ground for a new "movement" to be known eventually as the New York School. His closest boyhood acquaintance, Jackson Pollock, was making headlines with audacious paintings; de Kooning was moving into a radical abstract mode; and Gorky was becoming known for his "biomorphic" abstractions. The long conversations about abstract art were continued in New York cafés with new em-
phasis. But Guston had left all that behind, possibly because he unconsciously recognized his need to work through the problems that had long been nagging him. His interest in symbolism, expressed in Martial Memory, required further meditation, and for this Iowa was a perfect situation, being thoroughly remote from the urgency of New York. Moreover, the students and teachers alike there were interested, as Greene points out, in an art "in which the human figure was the central image, and perhaps it was also central to the core of meaning intended."
Guston amply fulfilled the expectations of his students. Another of them, JoEllen Rapee, remembers how he challenged Iowan sensibilities by introducing live models into the classroom; he especially liked gymnasts and dancers.[2] He worked on his own paintings alongside his graduate students, and they were able on a day-to-day basis to watch him bring several of his celebrated works of the 1940s to completion. He also made himself available outside the classroom and would spend hours in the Student Union, conversing, drawing caricatures, and drinking beer. He introduced his students to Picasso, Piero, and, as Rapee recalls, de Chirico "about whom he was mad!" Guston himself remembers his tremendous effort to reconcile fifteenth-century artists with Picasso, Braque, and Léger. "I taught still life in which elements were constructed via Picasso and Braque." He spurred his students to study the formal values in different modes of painting and, in Greene's words, "created a world that was urgent, sensitive, and very much in the great tradition of 'man as artist.'"
Outwardly all went well in those first years at Iowa, but Guston's inward doubts continued to mount. He found himself looking at such Romantic painters as Corot with new interest. He wavered, searched, and set about expanding his education. The presence of such intellectuals as Austin Warren, then head of the English department, and H. W. Janson, who was teaching art history, was immensely important to him, aware as he was of the gaps in his educational background. With obsessive thoroughness, he set out to read the great art historians, beginning with Heinrich Wölfflin's Principles of Art History. The neat dialectic employed by the German historian—his description of two kinds of pictorial logic, the linear and the painterly—undoubtedly braced Guston's spirit, for it was a kind of schematic rendering of the conflicting ideas that had long been troubling his mind. As Guston was consciously teaching himself the nuances of easel painting, he must surely have been affected by Wölfflin's acute analyses of Baroque and
Classical modes. By contrast, the organic approach favored by the French historian and esthetician Henri Focillon nourished Guston's sense of the mysterious vitality lodged in "true" forms. Focillon did not limit himself to discussing historical stylistic modes; he was a warm enthusiast whose responses to various masters were poetically transcribed. He could discuss with equal fervor the intensity of Gothic stonecarvers and the infinite variety of graphic signs that Rembrandt had developed to indicate space and mood. The very title of his most celebrated work, The Life of Forms in Art, would certainly have inspired Guston, who had intuitively grasped the principle of vitality of form while still in his teens. In spite of their different approaches, both Wölfflin and Focillon stimulated Guston's innate interest in the formal history of art. In addition, he encountered for the first time Berenson's books on Renaissance art, Élie Faure's sensitive discussions of the spirit of forms, and Roger Fry's essays.
Erwin Panofsky, whose writings Guston also devoured at the time, amplified his knowledge and interest in the symbolic. Guston's long concourse with the Renaissance masters had naturally led him to explore the sources of their themes, and his exposure to Panofsky's lessons in iconography was essential to his dialogue in the early 1940s. Since that period, many visitors have remarked that wherever Guston has lived, there have always been three reproductions hanging in his kitchen: Piero's Flagellation, Uccello's Battle of San Romano, and Dürer's Melancholia. Not much has been said about Guston's interest in Dürer, yet the print is an emblem of a strong philosophical tendency on his part. Its mood of intense seriousness, and even the symbols it contains, speak to that side of Guston's imagination that brought him to Giorgio de Chirico (whose own education in German symbolism was crucial to his work).
The Melancholia was originally conceived as a counterpart of Dürer's image of Saint Jerome. As a linked pair, the two prints represented antithetical ideas according to Panofsky, with Jerome epitomizing the vita comtemplativa and Melancholia representing the state of "gloomy inaction." It is the account of divine bliss versus the tragic unrest of human creation. Melancholia is the eternally unhappy genius, and Dürer sets out an array of symbols to indicate her preoccupations. There are scales, an hourglass, a bell, a magic square (with hermetic numbers), and tools to measure space and time: a plane, a saw, a ruler, pincers, a hammer, nails, a turned wooden sphere, and a truncated stone rhomboid. Panofsky says that Dürer pictures a "Mel-
The Gustons' kitchen in Woodstock, 1975. (Denise Hare)
ancholia Artificialis," or Artist's Melancholy: "The mature and learned Melancholia typifies Theoretical Insight which thinks but cannot act" (in the old meaning of Kunst as knowledge). And he notes that in the medieval period the humanistic furor melancholicus was associated with Saturn. "Hers," he writes, "is the inertia of a being which renounces what it could reach because it cannot reach for what it longs."[3]
The significance of Melancholia to Guston becomes unavoidable when the cycles of his entire oeuvre are reviewed. Again and again he has encountered the roadblock of "Theoretical Insight which thinks but cannot act." His recurrent anxiety about "meaning" has always stopped him. Then he banishes the Kunst and paints, as he has often said, as though he were the first primitive painter in history. The
plethora of symbols, which he had so much admired when de Chirico piled them up in his later paintings, eventually emerge like old splinters in Guston's works of various periods. The tragedy of knowing and not knowing how to enact is intimately familiar to Guston, and to most artists of a romantic stamp. The disarray of potentially powerful tools in Melancholia's environment is analogous to the disarray of the restless imagination of the painter. Her isolation corresponds above all to the familiar isolation of the artist who speaks but rarely finds a respondent. Unlike Saint Jerome, comfortably installed and with a sense of place in a glowing study, calmly pursuing his scholarly interests, Melancholia sits dejectedly in a ruined site, no human within earshot. Her solitary life is cluttered with the indecisions and chaos Dürer has so carefully strewn around her. She is harassed by time, by the mysteriousness of her drives (the magic square), by the infinite mathematical complexity of apparently simple forms, the sphere and the rhomboid. No single turn of thought could simplify this eternal chaotic portrait of the conjunction and disjunction of thought and life itself. Yet curiously, Guston has responded to this image with relief: "This Dürer has always quieted me—all the world's essential forms pause for a moment." And he has made, in his mind, a different kind of diptych: "Although it is more literal, it is close in its way to the Piero Baptism —a certain graveness, a wisdom of forms, sweet to my eye and mind. I never tire of them."
If we consider that it was probably around this time that Guston developed his unswerving passion for the works of Franz Kafka, it is not difficult to understand the intellectual and emotional upheavals that occurred in Guston's inner life during the 1940s. What he has admired all these years in Kafka is an ability to evoke a parallel world that is utterly convincing. The room in which Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis lives, the embedded apple, the village inn in The Castle, and even the Great Wall of China are vivid images that achieve commonplace believability through Kafka's genius. No object in Kafka remains inert, despite the strong savor of allegory in everything he wrote. Guston's struggle with abstraction, or Kunst, and his instinctive regard for concrete representation in art, found myriad confirmations in Kafka's stories, diaries, and conversations. As remote as his experience was from the culture of Prague, Guston could identify with the Jewish artist working in an alien environment (like K., who longs to settle in the purlieus of the castle but never can), who sets artistic ideals in a clear and concrete framework. That "justice" was ulti-
mately an artistic ideal in Kafka would not have seemed strange to the young painter who was later to speak of himself in the Kafkaesque terms of judge and jury in the drama of his work. Kafka once told Gustave Janouch, a young student who recorded his conversation: "I am no critic. I am only a man under judgment and a spectator.…Indeed, I am also the usher of the court, yet I do not know the judge."[4] To the same young poet Kafka tried to convey the value of life itself. It is a mistake to rely entirely on books, he told Janouch; a book cannot take the place of the world. "In life, everything has its own meaning and its own purpose for which there cannot be any permanent substitute..…One tries to imprison life in a book, like a songbird in a cage, but it's no good. On the contrary! Out of the abstractions one finds in books, one can only construct systems that are cages for oneself." And again, "one huddles into one's so-called private life, because one lacks the strength to master the world.…Being is most of all a being-with-things, a dialogue. One mustn't shrink from that.…"
Kafka's healthy regard for the great writers in the "realist" tradition would not have escaped Guston. Kafka always maintained that the fundamental problem of all art lay between the subjective world of the "I" and the objective external world. He admired Charles Dickens and Heinrich von Kleist for their calm balance between the two poles. He urged his young admirers to study "perfectly natural" proportions in their work. Kleist, he said, was no juggler or emotionmonger. There were no verbal flourishes in his work. He used a clear, universally intelligible language.
Kafka's other great love was the work—novels, journals, and letters—of Gustave Flaubert, which he always recommended to his friends. He shared Flaubert's obsession with form and purity and his idealistic consecration of his talent to Art, a word Flaubert always, and quite seriously, spelled with a capital A. Kafka saw parallels between his own bachelor life and Flaubert's; both remained unmarried presumably because of their passion for their work. At the same time, as Max Brod mentions, Kafka was terribly excited to read in a memoir by Flaubert's niece that after a visit to a friend, whom they found in the midst of her charming children, Flaubert remarked: "Ils sont dans le vrai," and gravely repeated it.[5] Kafka, with his steady awareness of the importance of the external world and with his half-conviction that Art was not enough, often repeated this remark of Flaubert's to his own friends. But in all likelihood, the true significance of Flaubert for
Kafka, and for those who like Guston responded to Kafka, was his dedication to the impossible, to Art.
It may have been under the spell of Kafka, all of whose published works Guston has read and reread, that he turned to Flaubert, especially the remarkable letters in which Flaubert's esthetic is set forth in incomparably crystalline form. Flaubert's preoccupation with purity of form and precision of address could easily be transliterated by a visual artist, especially one who was beginning to turn his mind in the direction of things-in-the-world.
It was easy for the young painter, the admirer of Dürer's Melancholia, to find affinities with the man who wrote to his mistress, Louise Colet:
Because I always sense the future, the antithesis of everything is always before my eyes. I have never seen a child without thinking that it would grow old, not a cradle without thinking of a grave.…[6]
And:
My deplorable mania for analysis exhausts me. I doubt everything, even my doubt.…Take away my nervous exaltation, my fantasy of mind, the emotion of the minute, and I have little left.… You must not take these words in a down-to-earth sense but rather grasp their metaphysical intensity.…[7]
And:
There are in me, literarily speaking, two distinct persons: one who is infatuated with bombast, lyricism, eagle flights, sonoroties of phrase and the high points of ideas; and another who digs and burrows into the truth as deeply as he can, who likes to treat a humble fact as respectfully as a big one, who would like to make you feel almost physically the things he reproduces; this latter person likes to laugh and enjoys the animal sides of man.…[8]
On the other hand, the young painter who admired Piero della Francesca was certain to respond with pleasure to Flaubert's other voice, which announces:
…what I love above all else, is form, provided it be beautiful and nothing beyond it.… I admire tinsel as much as gold: indeed the poetry of tinsel is even greater, because, it is sadder. The only things that exist for me in the world are beautiful verse, well-turned, har-
monious, singing sentences, beautiful sunsets, moonlight, pictures, ancient marbles, and strongly marked faces. Beyond that, nothing.[9]
Or:
What seems to me the highest and most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to rouse our lust or our anger, but to do as nature does—that is, fill us with wonderment. The most beautiful works have indeed this quality. They are serene in aspect, incomprehensible.[10]
And to the young painter whose addiction to the past was a source of constant worry to him, and which located him in a tangent to the course of modern art, Flaubert's exclamation would have been a solace:
I love history madly. The dead are more to my taste than the living. Whence comes this seductiveness of the past? …Incidentally, a love of this kind is something entirely new. The historical sense dates from only yesterday, and it may well be the best thing the nineteenth century has to offer.…[11]
If This Be Not I , 1945. Oil on canvas, 41¾ × 55 ½ in.