VII—
Drawing
Guston threw himself into the maelstrom of New York with an alacrity bred of near-despair. He once again led a life of extremes, full of the clamoring sounds of discussions, street life, exposure to encounters of many kinds. He resumed his old city habit of night wandering, sometimes like Stephen Dedalus in Nighttown, sometimes like Bloom, participating and reflecting, and from time to time fleeing into the arms of his muse. He usually stayed up until morning, pursuing conversations in bars (not only the established Cedar Bar to which the artists went, but to other less sacrosanct places). He walked the streets, sometimes with a companion, sometimes alone. He had long painting sessions, in which he would tack up his canvas on the wall like a piece of paper, and see if he could paint a painting all at once, "without stepping back." He went fairly regularly to the Friday night meetings at the Club, staying long after the formal debates to drink whiskey from paper cups and go on talking. His pattern was determinedly random, characterized by extreme nervous tension (he was a chainsmoker and a pacer) and the high irritability that existentialist philosophers regarded as the hallmark of the artist.
He found a studio on East 10th Street, in the very heart of the new Bohemia, moved from there to Walt Kuhn's old studio on East 18th
and eventually, in 1959, to a loft over a firehouse on West 20th Street—a long, dusty loft with deep wells of darkness between skylights, but with islands of light in which to place his drawing tables and ample wall space to tack up his canvas. On East 10th Street there were other artists, among them de Kooning, coming from and going to their own studios on the same block, and a little later, several cooperative galleries installed themselves on the first floors, bringing their hosts of young enthusiasts.
There were hours for reading, and it was a period in Guston's life when reading again assumed a special importance. The nature of the questions he posed to himself in the studio lay not only in the history of painting but also in the moral institutions that certain works of literature represented. He came naturally to Dostoyevsky, whose questions and counter-questions led always to the kind of irresolution Guston himself recognized when he said that a painting would have to be a continuing argument. In Dostoyevsky he found stated again and again the idea he had found so compelling in Kafka: that in one and the same protagonist in life are the judge and the accused, the jury and the plaintiff. Camus, whom Guston also read assiduously during the 1950s, cites a revealing passage in Dostoyevsky's diary, to show the genesis of the character Kirilov in The Possessed:
Since in reply to my questions about happiness, I am told, through the intermediary of my consciousness, that I cannot be happy except in harmony with the great all, which I cannot conceive and shall never be in a position to conceive, it is evident…
Since, finally, in this connection, I assume both the role of the plaintiff and that of the defendant, of the accused and of the judge, and since I consider this comedy perpetrated by nature altogether stupid, and since I even deem it humiliating for me to deign to play it…
In my indisputable capacity of plaintiff and defendant, of judge and accused, I condemn that nature which, with such impudent nerve, brought me into being in order to suffer—I condemn it to be annihilated with me.[1]
Camus, though firmly anchored in a pessimistic vision of the absurd, addressed himself to the problems that were on the surface of every serious artist's mind in the early 1950s. Guston had not ceased thinking of the holocaust; he had not forgotten his early social concerns, nor had he ever become cynical about the importance and nobility of art in the human history. He found solace in Camus's own deep belief
in the survival of art itself. In 1953 Camus summed up his attitudes toward the conflict between social action and the notion of art-for-art's sake, which his own position had helped to inflame:
I shall certainly not choose the moment when we are beginning to leave nihilism behind to stupidly deny the values of creation in favor of the values of humanity, or vice versa.…Today, under the pressure of events, we are obliged to transport that tension into our lives likewise. This is why so many artists, bending under the burden, take refuge in the ivory tower, or, conversely, in the social church. But as for me, I see in both choices a like act of resignation. We must simultaneously serve suffering and beauty. The long patience, the strength, the secret cunning such service calls for are the virtues that establish the very renascence we need.…[2]
Such a moral charge—to serve suffering and beauty simultaneously—was perhaps more than a painter could sustain, but Guston and the others in the New York School took it on nonetheless. The shift in values from the painting as object, as it had been seen by the Cubists, to the painting as a moral undertaking was radical and extensive. Constant discussion fanned the flame of rebellion. There was to be no act of resignation. It was, under the circumstances, a time for acute questioning, and the writers who could frame the most difficult of questions were those to whom the more meditative painters gravitated. Guston, reading Sartre, Camus, and Kafka, followed them back to Kierkegaard, whose grave riddles could be transposed and made to serve the artist. His recent friendship with Robert Motherwell, who had once studied philosophy at Harvard, gave him an opportunity to compare reactions. Both artists, concerned with problems of choice and risk, were struck by Kierkegaard's dramatic parable of Abraham (who had attracted earlier painters; Rembrandt, for instance). But Guston, perhaps, was more attracted to Kierkegaard as discerned by Kafka, the Kierkegaard who had more than a little in common with the questioners of the Talmud. Max Brod, in his biography of Kafka, points to a passage in a letter Kafka wrote to him which emphasizes a side of "hopefulness" in Kafka that existentialism in general seemed to abjure. Kafka quotes the following sentence from Kierkegaard:
As soon as a man appears who brings something of the primitive along with him, so that he doesn't say, "you must take the world as you find it" but rather "Let the world be what it likes, I take my stand on a
primitiveness which I have no intention of changing to meet with the approval of the world" at that moment, as these words are heard, a metamorphosis takes place in the whole of nature.…[3]
It was this Kierkegaard, and this Kafka, who bolstered Guston's resolve to paint without "standing back," to find a kind of primitiveness that would, like the magical words Kierkegaard hears, symbolically change everything in the universe.
Guston's conversations with Robert Motherwell, which were intensive during the mid-1950s, centered on the difficult distinctions that now had to be made between art as a set of coveted objects and art as the direct expression of an emotional and moral quest. Motherwell had a broad knowledge of philosophy and a deep interest in modern French poetry. His need to formulate a position was as urgent as Guston's, and during the 1950s he frequently sought to crystallize his speculations in writing. For the catalogue of the New Decade show at the Whitney Museum in 1955, Motherwell wrote a statement in which he asserted that pictures are vehicles of passions and not pretty luxuries: "…the act of painting is a deep human necessity, not the production of a hand-made commodity." Putting the stamp of ethics on his aspirations, he concluded: "True painting is a lot more than 'picture-making.' A man is neither a decoration nor an anecdote."
While both Guston and Motherwell frequently turned to the writings of philosophers for support during this period, they did not limit themselves to that. With rare exceptions philosophers are not close enough to an artist's sensibility to provide nourishment for the imagination. Between an artist, his speculative thought, and his beholder lies a work, which is a fusion of all three, yet alive to still other factors and incapable of being schematized. The writings of artists themselves (poets particularly) held important questions in more delicate balance and with less rigidity. Guston at this time was reading essays by poets, among them Baudelaire, Henri Michaux, Jean Cocteau, and Wallace Stevens. And he was reading newly translated poems and essays by the Russian Boris Pasternak, at that time known to very few Americans. In Pasternak, as soon after in Isaac Babel, Guston found affinities that were based as much on his own distant identification with Russia that occasionally asserts itself (although he was not always aware of it) as it was based on the intense nature of the questions posed. In Pasternak (as also in Paul Valéry) the primary question is always: What is creation? By probing again and again the
Robert Motherwell , 1955. Pencil on paper, 10½ x 8½ in.
process of his own poetic behavior, Pasternak was able to frame certain tentative responses to his own questions, and these were eagerly absorbed by Guston. At the moment when Guston relinquished the consolations of tradition, Pasternak's attitude toward the act of creation itself was important to him. Pasternak, in his memoir Safe Conduct, muses:
Yet all art in its conception in particular is experienced more directly than anything else and on this point there is no need to indulge in guesswork.
We cease to recognize reality. It appears in some new form. This form appears to be a quality inherent in it, and not in us. Apart from this quality, everything in the world has its name.
It alone is new and without name.…
The clearest, most memorable and important part about art is the conception, and the world's best creators, those which tell us the most diverse things, in reality, describe their own birth.[4]
There can be no question that in the 1950s Guston's most pressing need, which sprang from the deepest recesses of his imagination, was to experience what he hesitantly called "freedom." The experience he longed for—recorded so often by Pasternak's "world's best creators"—
was to feel a reality in the work more vital than any known emotion, and more seductive. The craving for this experience is as insistent in an artist who has known one such moment of "freedom" as the most primordial erotic impulse.
Behind Pasternak, and all other twentieth-century artists, lay the potent Symbolist tradition that had lured Flaubert, just as it had lured Rimbaud, to the edge of the abyss, to the Void. Certainly no single word has borne so much complex discussion over so long a period of time as the Void. It was as much a part of the modern consciousness, which was straining away from the solid materialism that had preceded it, as the notion of rebellion itself. And the Void was really a name for something that had no name, a vessel into which the artist pondering the nature of his activity could pour endless questions, and which silently enclosed them.
In the twentieth century, the Void transformed itself into Nothingness, which as Sartre saw it was the opposite of Being. The notion of Nothingness became an important ambiguity in the arsenal of ambiguities employed by poets and artists (many more, indeed, than the seven types described by William Empson). Guston was drawn, along with his contemporaries, into this web of speculation. Here he found close companions in two composers whom he saw regularly, the already celebrated John Cage and the younger Morton Feldman. Guston had met Cage around 1948 while attending a concert of prepared piano pieces at the American Academy in Rome. The two had conversed briefly at the time about Zen Buddhism, and later, when they renewed their acquaintance in New York, Guston went several times with Cage to hear the Zen philosopher Suzuki at Columbia University. Cage's sparsely furnished loft bordering the East River on the Lower East Side became a meeting ground for vanguard artists in both music and painting. It was there that Guston met Cage's admirer Feldman, who had studied with the older composer Stefan Wolpe.
Cage brought to the painters his ready wit, and his inveterate habits of rejection. He was a master at rejection, a model. And Nothing was his special province. He gave a lecture at the Club entitled "Lecture on Nothing." He spoke constantly of the Eastern vision of the universe, with its assumption of the significance of the Void. The old definition of the fence as the spaces between the palings, or of the cup as the space it encloses, was enlarged imaginatively by Cage, who saw its application to almost every experience in the universe. In his own work he sought to express it explicitly. Cage enforced his Oriental
perceptions of the void through what Henry Cowell called "the dynamics of silence, a relativity of silence as well as of sound, expressed by rests and extreme pianissmi. …"[5] Feldman concentrated on the pianssimi, tracing delicate configurations that Guston was to find analogous to his own drawings at the time.
Cage held musical soirées in his Grand Street loft, to which many painters were invited and where they heard, most of them for the first time, the strange music that Cage evolved from his various sources, including the Eastern philosophers. The emphasis on silence (the Void) and on isolated "events" within Cage's compositions at the time
Painting No. 9 , 1952. Oil on canvas, 48¼ x 36 in.
was not lost on his visual admirers. They too sought large areas of expressive silence in their work, particularly those who had taken to large formats. In Guston's case, Cage's interest in other sources, particularly those from the East, served a momentary need. Earlier in his life Guston had sought relief from the demands of his analytic mind by looking briefly into the mysticism of Ouspensky and Krishnamurti. Now he retreated from the rigors of his dialectic by seeking both in Zen and in Hasidic thought a kind of sanction for dialectic irresolution. Yet these modes of thinking were ultimately not congenial to him. There was too much of the formal artist in him to accept the chronically open vision sponsored by Zen. The Void had to be named at all costs, or it would be meaningless. There was, and is, in him a sense of irony that is foreign to the Zen mystic. Like Paul Valéry, Guston did not care to sink too far into the endless; his need for form was always to check that impulse. As James Lawler has written of Valéry, "Doubt leads to form, form to doubt, as criticism and creation become intimately reciprocal."[6] This kind of dialectic, so inherently Western, was much closer to Guston. Valéry, Lawler tells us, "once put this method succinctly in painterly terms in answering a critic who had sent him a commentary on his work: 'It seems to me,' he writes, 'that you have found in my verse more 'nothingness' than I had thought I put; perhaps I used that word as a painter uses a certain color: he needs a black so he paints one."
At the time when Guston was seeing a great deal of Morton Feldman, he was susceptible to the "nothingness" that could be used unthinkingly, as when a painter needs a black and paints one. But Feldman's exploration of aleatory music, with its attenuated forms, its horizontal, disembodied generalizations, its persistent flirtation with the Absolute Void, was a source of contention for Guston. Feldman's sensibility had peculiarities that could not fail to interest him, for Feldman saw himself related more to the painterly esthetic than to music, which he felt had become academic and institutionalized. At one of his concerts, which were attended primarily by artists, he told the audience: "I have always been interested in touch rather than musical forms." His "touch" was rendered in delicate, sparse compositions that often receded almost to inaudibility, played caressingly on a piano. The trailing short phrases could easily be apprehended with the same sensibility that read the pale, trembling calligraphy of Guston's paintings at the time. Feldman saw the affinities and was an enthusiastic, ideal audience for Guston's work. The two spent hours in the studio comparing visions. Occasionally Feldman would bring
Drawing No. 9 , 1951. Ink on paper, 17 x 23½ in.
other friends, among them the genial master of vanguard music, Edgard Varèse. Once Cage came with Feldman at a time when Guston had completed one of his sparsest abstractions. He responded with an exclamation, "My God, it's possible to paint a magnificent picture about nothing." To which Feldman replied, with characteristic speed, "But, John, it's about everything."
If one part of Guston was drawing closer to ethereality, pondering the weightlessness of spiritual existence, another part of him continued to ramble among the solid obstacles in everyday life. The old moviegoer in him had ample opportunities in New York City and Guston was a steady customer at the 42nd Street theaters that until late in the night would offer films of varying quality from all over the world. A confirmed addict, Guston sat through everything from thirdrate Westerns to continental thrillers, smoking his way through the night and sharing the theaters with homeless bums. His early experience as a film extra gave him a special appreciation for the technical accomplishments of even Grade B productions.
In his youth Guston had studied film theory and discerned the inevitable parallels with painting. His early enthusiasm for V. I. Pudovkin, whom he read conscientiously at the age of eighteen, was
undoubtedly based on Pudovkin's own awareness of the affinities between modern painting and film. Pudovkin repeatedly wrote that a film is not shot but built. His preoccupation with structure answered Guston's own need at that time. Pudovkin recognized that an artist, using materials drawn from life (objects and people), was nonetheless functioning as a creator, that the composition of forms was central to his art. "Between the natural event and its appearance upon the screen there is a marked difference. It is exactly this difference that makes the film an art. "[7] In his rather elementary way, Pudovkin set forth the themes that later filmmakers were to pursue assiduously. He raised questions about the differences between "filmic" time and space and "real" time and space that were to become central to the modern esthetic.
The extensions of Russian film theory, especially its preoccupation with the transformation of real situations and objects, could be seen in the late 1940s and 1950s in the works of Italian filmmakers. For Guston, the most important film artist during the 1950s was Federico Fellini. He relished Fellini's sharp, observing eye, which could draw meaning out of the "taste and flavor of life." He could appreciate a sensibility that recognized the importance of the concrete detail in order to weave an ambiguous pattern of meanings that could go far beyond the pretext of the model. When The White Sheik appeared in 1952, followed by 1 Vitelloni in 1953, Guston saw them several times, marveling at Fellini's "emotional tone, in which there is never anything direct or simple." He admired Fellini's ability in the later films to explore his own possibilities, to keep moving toward the fusion of autobiography, myth, and art. Perhaps Guston was also drawn by Fellini's use of small Italian towns, with their magical central piazzas and the narrow vistas that had been so important to Giorgio de Chirico.
Fellini's works, with their passages of realistic event and image sliding into passages of fantasy and their irregular rhythms, would have impressed Guston particularly in the early 1950s when he too was working for openness and inconclusiveness. Fellini's working method was highly improvisatory, and he himself has said that his pictures never end. "If I knew everything from the start," he told an interviewer in 1959, "I would no longer be interested in doing it.…Because for me to make a picture is like leaving on a trip. And the most interesting part of a trip is what you discover on the way."[8]
The rhetoric of the Romantic poet, to whom the voyage is the
archetypal analogue of creativity, recurs among artists of the 1950s, and Fellini masterfully translated the old Baudelairean vision into modern terms. Guston had also embarked on the inspired journey and was moving from picture to picture with the sense that there could be no predetermined destination. The "primitiveness" of which Kierkegaard had spoken asserted itself.
In his ink drawings, copiously produced in the early 1950s, Guston explored spaces that were not bound by systems of perspective but rather corresponded to the vast dislocations that occur in dreamlike mental conditions. He denuded his old forms, reducing them to their most elemental signs. He constrained them, turned them, made them rush like torrents on the white of the page, or form arabesques flowing into nowhere at the edges. In place of symbol, with its burden of memory, he found the sign—an acute contraction that is swiftly registered in relation to a whole constellation of signs. At times, the mark of his reed pen would be disembodied, seeming to fall from nowhere. At times, it would half describe some distant recall of a solid form. But always these ink drawings seemed to conjure a space in which the familiar could not long survive. This process, which Guston thought of as "dissolving form," led him naturally back to certain initial questions he had asked himself as a young painter. In Piero he had understood that composition was based on extreme attention to the location of forms in space. In painting nothing is more difficult than that. What he sought to do in this long series of drawings, in which forms are released from specific context and yet are made to subsist in a small universe created by the artist all at once on the page, was to "locate" an image. The old dialogue persists: While he was "dissolving" form, he was at the same time seeking to "locate" the traces of form in space.
Attar , 1953. Oil on canvas, 48½ x 46 in.