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IX— Alchemist
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IX—
Alchemist

The search now for a vision of the nature of creativity and the question—what, finally, is an artist?—became Guston's obsession. Pushing matter around on his canvas, thinning it, shaping it, and twisting it, while groping for the most precise expression of his état d'âme, had brought him up short before the very questions he had posed to himself as a youth—those metaphysical preoccupations that Melancholia seemed to summarize. Since matter and form assumed a life of their own as soon as they were deployed on his canvas, Guston's suspicion that he could create a parallel universe had a certain justness. But, since his imagination could not be braked once the forms were there, transpiring in the total environment he had created almost without thinking, the old dichotomy between the structured mental exercise called thinking and his intuitive participation in natural processes rose sharply in his consciousness. His reading now served to elucidate the confused accumulation of insights the abstract experience had brought him. He began to search among the philosophers, particularly those who brought a scientific background to their speculations. In 1960 he remarked how much he was struck with Einstein's statement that, at the end, he had discovered the universe to be contentless. "Density is man's


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invention," Einstein had concluded. Such density was all too familiar to Guston. The question for him was, and remains, the evaluation of the possibilities of man's inventive imagination. Was he, in fact, creating images of the functioning of the emotions? Was he making a homologue for the whole complex of human experiences groups under such abstract categories as tragedy and comedy? Where was the dividing line between "man's invention" and the contentless universe? In his countless returns to Kierkegaard, Guston found his questions amplified. Kierkegaard and Kafka were his constant goads. But in other writers he found temporary solace. For a while he had been inspired by Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man. Teilhard's approach to the question of consciousness was consonant with Valéry's and yet it opened out beyond the isolated problem of the individual. For Guston, it must have been a source of excitement to find, even in Teilhard's diction, a reflection of his own intuitive discoveries on canvas. Teilhard, in outlining the evolutionary process, speaks of the "ramifications of the living mass," saying that considered as a whole, the advances of life go hand in hand with segmentation. "As life expands, it splits spontaneously into large, natural, hierarchical units. It ramifies. " He goes on to speak of "aggregates of growth," and in his explanation seems almost to be describing one of Guston's paintings:

Let us return to the living element in the process of reproduction and multiplication. From this element, taken as a centre, we have seen different lines radiating orthogenetically, each recognizable by the accentuation of certain characters. By their construction these lines diverge and tend to separate. Yet, so far, we have no reason to suppose that they may not meet with other lines radiating from neighboring elements, become enmeshed with them and so form an impenetrable network.[1]

Ramifications (those splitting movements in Guston's heavy, loosely plaited forms), convergences, aggregations—all these had appeared quite spontaneously in the artist's evolution as an abstract painter. Teilhard's speculations on the implications of evolution were even more exciting. He recognized the distinctive nature of modernity. "What makes the world in which we live specifically modern is our discovery in it and around it of evolution. And I can now add that what disconcerts the modern world at its very roots is not being sure, and not seeing how it ever could be sure, that there is an outcome—a


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suitable outcome —to that evolution." He then makes an audacious leap which, in retrospect, seemed to Guston to be the essential one. He suggests that man, contrary to Darwin's hypothesis, is as yet unfinished, that man's capacity for thought is yet to be fulfilled. Guston was struck by the idea of the continuing evolution of man. "Teilhard talks about what a great leap it must have been when man started becoming fully conscious of his actions and judging them—to be conscious that you're conscious is an evolutionary process that leads to new content in art. It has to." Such speculations, expressed in other terms by Valéry in Monsieur Teste, and in La Jeune Parque where he says "I saw me seeing myself," accompanied Guston daily during the years leading up to his large retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in 1962. They continued to trouble him until the late 1960s.

His concern with the aboriginal impulse to art was readily related to the tendency during the 1950s and early 1960s to see painting in terms of process or, as Harold Rosenberg said, "action." The cultivation of anxiety as a method of artistic discourse was practiced by many in various arts. Guston himself began an article on Piero with the sentence: "A certain anxiety persists in the painting of Piero della Francesca," and, echoing Valéry, added: "What we see is the wonder of what it is that is being seen. Perhaps it is the anxiety of painting itself."[2] Years later, his closest intellectual companion of those years, Morton Feldman, wrote an essay entitled "The Anxiety of Art," speaking of it as "a special condition" that comes about "when art becomes separate from what we know, when it speaks from its own emotion."[3] The poet Robert Creeley, writing about Guston's work as early as 1956, spoke of "care" in its old Anglo-Saxon connotation of sorrow and anxiety.

I think—in that denseness of anxieties, and sorrows, like a nightmare world, of forms which are all exact and there, yet not the forms? What are the forms, one says. It is not possible that one should not arrive at them. Somehow not to be accidental, not even enough or too much "accidental." No one understands, but some know. It is a very articulate determination which can, at last "…take care by the throat & throttle it…" with such care.[4]

Far more familiar with "care" in its long literary tradition was the poet Stanley Kunitz, with whom Guston shared many affinities. Since the mid-1950s Kunitz has maintained relationships with many artists,


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among them Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Giorgio Cavallon, and Adja Yunkers. At his home on West 12th Street, and often at the home of Yunkers, long conversations wound around themes in Kunitz's poetry that were often the themes of deepest consequence to the painters. Guston found his conversations with Kunitz inspiring. They shared a passion for the poetry of William Butler Yeats and Gerard Manley Hopkins. They sought to refine their views of form and meaning in both poetry and painting. Kunitz's poetry reflected his preoccupation with the cosmic motifs long held sacred in the Romantic tradition. The reverberations of history in Kunitz's work, and his reverence for the mythic, found a deep response in the painter who was struggling to wrest form from chaos, and to mitigate the terror, so deeply ingrained in the human psyche, of unform.

On another level, Guston found a companionable element in Kunitz's work that few other American poets shared: the element of irony. Kunitz could invoke the great tradition of Rimbaud (as when the American poet begins "Journal for My Daughter" with the line: "Your turn. Grass of confusion," recalling Rimbaud's "Illumination" beginning "A moi "). He could remember Apollinaire and Baudelaire and Blake and Coleridge. But he could also slash through to the present with trenchant ironic diction as when he begins "After the Last Dynasty":

Reading in Li Po
how "the peach blossom follows the water"
I keep thinking of you
because you were so much like
Chairman Mao.…[5]  

Still, it was the Yeats-like echo of ancient tragic wisdom in Kunitz's work that probably nourished Guston most during those difficult years of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the voice that spoke of "care":

Within the city of the burning cloud,
Dragging my life behind me in a sack,
Naked I prowl, scourged by the black
Temptation of the blood grown proud.…[6]  

For Guston the master of anxiety was still Kafka, and he gradually defined for himself what it was that so enthralled him in that writer. It was Kafka's ability to create a world parallel to our own—"parallel,


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Stanley Kunitz , 1955. Pencil on paper, 10½ x 8½ in.

but not this world," as Guston emphasizes. "Fantasy would be something else." Guston read Kafka as Kafka read others, and even cited Kafka's own statement on reading in an interview with another of his close literary friends, the poet Bill Berkson:

The books we need are of the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, that make us feel as if we were on the verge of suicide or lost in a forest remote from all human adaptation. A book should serve as an axe for the frozen sea within us.[7]

A deep preoccupation with Kafka is reflected in Guston's way of posing to himself the nature of the activity in which he engages. In an


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Drawing , 1960. Ink on paper, 18¾ x 23 7/8 in.

article he wrote entitled "Faith, Hope, and Impossibility," he adopts the metaphor of judgment again: "The canvas is a court where the artist is prosecutor, defendant, jury, and judge. Art without a trial disappears at a glance. It is too primitive or hopeful, or mere notions, or simply startling, or just another means to make life bearable."[8] The attenuated trial Guston describes was fully underway by 1960 when he revisited his visual sources in Italy. He cross-examined himself mercilessly, accusing himself and his peers of "hiding" from the implications of the third dimension, and he ransacked his store of visual images for justifications. Once again he challenged his premises, and began the long, inevitable, but not necessarily conscious, alteration of his approach. A disaffection appears in the work that followed his return from Europe. It appeared in the forms even before his mind was aware of it. Kafka had said that truth is the mountain, the rock, the blade of grass, but man is always masked "without knowing or


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desiring it." Guston knows, has always known, but he defies the judgment. In the fall of 1960 he was deep at work, rephrasing, shifting. He spoke of "the last mask" and of how close he was to tearing it away. (James Ensor, whose rusty orange, pale watery blue, and scarlet palette is similar to Guston's, had once written in pencil on an etching, "Ensor, l'arracheur des masques.") Guston demanded of himself: Why is it that I can't paint the real object? He slipped into reveries in which the tormented paint coalesced into simple forms: cups, cans, jars, heads. Long trailing verticals became hints of the strings and

Close-Up III , 1961. Oil on canvas, 70 x 72 in.


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Looking , 1964. Oil on canvas, 67 7/8 x 80 in.

dangling ropes that constituted the theater of earlier dreams. The unmasking process was gradually pulling him back to sensations and visions that had once been uppermost in his imagination.

He set the stage in Alchemist, a mass of tangled, darkened strokes engulfing densities struggling to be forms. The blue ball, uneasily ensconced in a nest of kneaded strokes, grows almost into a head (or boulder?) while to its left is a form that could be a winged chariot or the tottering shape of a saltimbanque. It cannot be exactly known what these protagonists are up to yet, but a gathering storm of an-


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thropomorphized activity is clearly developing in this and subsequent paintings of the early 1960s. The light darkens. There are rusty oranges, dark reds, many shades of gray. Guston lived in a blustery atmosphere at this time, preparing for his first major retrospective exhibition—at the Guggenheim Museum in the spring of 1962—where he saw for the first time the complete range of his work up until that moment. In several works entitled Painter, he has images of himself, usually as a clump of dark strokes—head?—buffeted by the seething environment. He moves ever closer to his canvas, painting furiously and building his surface. He is enacting. There is a painting called The Tale, and one called Close-Up III. Both propose new structures and a staged atmosphere. They are cast in a silvery light, oblique, with just a few highlights of rusty orange or apple green. The activities of the strokes are designed to weave themselves into semblances. A strange shape that can be read as a great masked head or as a

Air II , 1965. Oil on canvas, 69 x 78 in.


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Harold Rosenberg , 1955. Pencil on paper, 10½ x 8½ in.

cupola predominates in both paintings, and barely survives the onslaught of the loping interwoven strokes. There is no stasis here, and only a few hints left of the empyrean that once illuminated his abstractions. Within months, even the warm glimpses of sky blue disappear. Forms become fewer and denser, hanging together in clumps of two or three, in a closely woven matrix (literally woven, for, as Guston concedes, he was obsessed with his brushstrokes at that moment) that barely supports them. They are writhing masses of thick black strokes, congealed by their own weight, but they are somehow entrapped in the encroaching silvered network.

Guston had found another plane of feeling, as one of his titles. New Place, suggests, and by 1965 when he was painting his most hermetic abstractions, he was calling them by elemental names like Looking, Path, or Air. At the same time, the smaller gouaches were taking on the character of things, reflecting his many exercises drawn in India


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ink during the mid-1960s. These drawings are memories of still lifes or heads, and they freely extrapolate on the ambiguous character of form in space. Traces of his old caricatural line appear more frequently, wavering but inexorable. Analogies to stones, heads, cups, and fruits are suggested, played upon sometimes with outright humor, sometimes with a touch of savagery. Brooding, disquieting forms emerge in the gouaches, on the verge of metamorphosis.

Throughout the period of the gray paintings following the Guggenheim exhibition, Guston worked with increasing momentum, seizing upon whatever means he could to encompass the full range of his feelings. Since his feelings seemed always in a state of emerging, he worked from image to image, trapping now one state of mind, now another. The throbbing, heaving surfaces often mirrored both thought and thing instantaneously, in a way that many viewers found difficult to understand. But that is because the nature of feeling is so thoughtlessly consigned to pure subjectivity. If feeling were perceived to be, as Susanne Langer has pointed out, anything that may be felt, "the felt responses of our sense organs to the environment, of our proprioceptive mechanisms to internal changes, and of the organism as a whole to its situation as a whole,"[9] it would not be difficult to understand the flow from thought to feeling and back in a painter's work. Feeling, Langer says, seems to be the generic basis of all experience—sensation, emotion, imagination, recollection, and reasoning. Some experiences, it follows, are felt as thought. It is in this complicated realm that Guston navigated with such intense excitement; in these paintings he discovered avenues to feelings of anguish, humor, tragedy, comedy. Thoughts are felt as situations of comic despair or of tragic levity. Huge doses of paradox, in which things felt as unformed were juxtaposed with things felt as volumes, overwhelmed him.

The direction of Guston's "thoughts" emerged in a dialogue with Harold Rosenberg held in 1966 and published as an introduction to his large one-man exhibition at the Jewish Museum in January 1966. (From the late 1950s, and during the rest of their lives, Guston and Rosenberg explored areas of mutual interest in lengthy discussions, often leading to published statements. Rosenberg was one of those close intellectual companions on whose responses Guston greatly depended over the years.) Guston still held to the notion of process: "To preconceive an image or even to dwell on an image, and then to go ahead and paint it is an impossibility for me…it's intolerable—and also irrelevant—because it's too abstract. By that I mean that it's simply and only recognizable. The artist had a thought and then pro-


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ceeded to paint the thought." He went on to cite a phrase from Valéry that he had often mentioned before: "A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning." The trouble with recognizable art, he said, is that it excludes too much. "I want my work to include more. And 'more' also comprises one's doubts about the object, plus the problem, the dilemma, of recognizing it." Still adhering to traditional Romantic views of the detachment of the work from the personality of the artist, Guston mentions the Other (Rimbaud's "I is another" was firmly lodged in the imaginations of many painters of Guston's generation.):

There is the canvas and there is you. There is also something else, a third thing. In the beginning it's a dialogue—between you and the surface. As you work, you think and you do. In my way of working, I work to eliminate the distance or the time between my thinking and doing. Then there comes a point of existing for a long time in a negative state, when you are willing to eliminate things that have been looking good all the time: you have as a measure—and once you've experienced it, nothing less will satisfy you—that some other being or force is commanding you: only this shall you, can you accept at this moment.

Later in the dialogue, he comes back to the Other:

I know that my saying that the Other does it can easily be misinterpreted as a kind of subjective self-indulgence. Yet paradoxical as it may sound, the more subjective you become, you also become, in those moments, more critical, hence more objective. There is done a work which is recognized by yourself at some point as a separate organism.

The notion of the "separate organism" was not new for Guston, who had always striven, even in his most "objective" works, for a totality that could, as he says, live its own life. What was new in this discourse was his emphasis on displacement and ambiguity—his need to create a separate organism that was a container for such a multitude of experiences, thoughts, emotions, and yet could be returned to the basic problems of the painter: how to describe and locate form on the plane surface. Guston saw in his own work, as he told Rosenberg, certain definite characteristics:

…in the last years there's been, obviously, no color. Simply black and white or gray and white, gray and black. I did this very deliber-


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ately, and I'll tell you why. Painting became more crucial to me. By "crucial" I mean that the only measure now was precisely to see whether it was really possible to achieve—to make this voyage, this adventure and to arrive at this release that we have been talking about without any seductive aids like color, for example. Now I've become involved in images and the location of those images, usually a single form, or a few forms. It becomes more important to me to simply locate the form.…But this form has to emerge, to grow, out of the working of it, so there's a paradox. I like a form against a background —I mean, simply empty space—but the paradox is that the form must emerge from this background. It's not just executed there. You are trying to bring your forces, so to speak, to converge all at once into some point.

This convergence of forces, which had become the central problem for him by 1966, had been evident in his work for several years and had been recognized by a few perceptive critics writing at the time of the Guggenheim exhibition. (The daily press, as usual, had not been enthusiastic.) By the time Guston had his Jewish Museum exhibition the climate in New York had changed. There was a new generation who favored "hard-edged" paint application and a host of critics who were tired of the conundrums of highly personal Abstract Expressionism, of which Guston was one of the most arcane exponents. One of the strongest attacks came from Hilton Kramer, critic for The New York Times, who wrote of the Jewish Museum show that Guston's style was "genteel," but that "a painter so limited in range of feeling, who restricts himself so severely to slender and much repeated vocabulary is not an ideal candidate for an exhibition of the sort currently installed." He insisted that the show was "an attempt to re-inflate a reputation that has admittedly grown a little flat in the op-pop hurly-burly of the sixties."[10] Kramer's hostility, directed at almost all the painters of the New York School, reflected a mood of irritation that had crept into the art world in the mid-1960s. A hunger for the immediate, stimulated by the enormous increase in marketplace activity, was answered by younger artists who shunned the notion of slow emergence and frankly abhorred the psychological foundation of Guston's art. Guston was not alone in keenly feeling the shift in values. In a taped interview in the spring of 1966, he spoke of how isolated he felt because his contemporaries had either died (Pollock, Kline, Baziotes) or scattered. "Rothko thought too that the smoke that existed ten years ago was a false situation; that this is the real situation."[11]


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If the subtleties of Guston's abstractions of the early 1960s had merely irritated the American critics, they assumed considerable significance for most British critics who had seen a large part of the Guggenheim exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London early in 1963. David Sylvester praised Guston's ability to encompass both exquisite gradations and violent juxtapositions in a single painting. He recognized that "a Guston is a fragment of a world apart," and that the paintings "are intensely withdrawn and private, with the privacy of the dark not of the ivory tower." Best of all, Sylvester accurately identified the character of Guston's painterly meditation: "What matters is that these paintings are palpably about a man's struggle with himself and reflect its reality and urgency…the more recent works (which seem to me the finest) are so packed with doubts and denials as to have gone far beyond the brink of what we think of as coherence.…"[12] John Russell, writing in the London Sunday Times, sympathized with Guston's situation: "Guston is now in a position in which every move he makes is scrutinised, dissected, and where possible held up to ridicule. This is always an unpleasant position, and it is espe-

Full Brush , 1966. Ink on paper, 18 × 23 in.


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cially so in the case of one who is essentially a scrupulous and introspective artist."[13]

Russell's observation about ridicule was accurate enough. The very works in which Guston found the means for continuing—those paintings which had, as Sylvester said, gone beyond the brink of coherence—were the paintings that most mystified and angered critics who above all instinctively mistrusted the elements—not quite apparent as yet—of self-irony. The bobbing headlike forms and the teetering balances of the last paintings in the Jewish Museum show were an announcement of Guston's future works. The comic, the grotesque, and the ironic were waiting in the wings of Guston's drama, just as they had done in previous periods of his life. Those drunken shapes, shambling through the large paintings or sitting incongruously in the midst of nowhere in the small gouaches, were the prototypes of later, frankly satirical works. And they themselves had prototypes in Guston's earlier work both as a caricaturist and as a respondent to the scandal of human savagery in the twentieth century.


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Inside Out , 1970. Ink on paper, 18 x 24 in.


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IX— Alchemist
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