III—
Martial Memory
Competition had been keen for the World's Fair walls, the first important opportunity for exposure for many young artists. Guston won the competition for the curving entry wall over the Federal Works Agency's own display building. He and the other project muralists were well aware that these programs were under increasing fire from Washington, and that this was an opportunity to display the high proficiency and public importance of the unit. In his diary, the muralist Anton Refregier, who was working inside the WPA Building at the Fair, noted: "Every person here is dedicated to the Project. Everyone feels and knows that we must do our utmost.…"[1]
Guston's theme was "Maintaining America's Skills," for which he devised a boldly simplified figure scheme portraying a woman scientist, a surveyor, an engineer, and a laborer. He had considerable difficulties, not only with the problem of a curving wall but also with the United Scenic Artists Union, which hailed him down from the scaffolding to inform him he had to have a union card. He also had to find the proper medium for outdoor exposure (rubber paint) and a means of modifying his usual tonal palette. After many adjustments, he finally settled on a strong, simplified scheme of black, red, yellow, white, and blue.
The result of Guston's mastery of the wall was the gratifying award of first prize based on a poll of the public. In addition, Guston won the first lengthy appreciation of his ability in The New York Times. The writer, Ruth Green Harris, extolled his clear, positive statement, his magnificent composition, and his solution of one of the most difficult intellectual and visual problems—the treatment of a concave wall: "This is achieved by two great supports, the positive movement of a workman's hand and arm on one side balanced on the other—buttressed rather—by the body of a kneeling man and the angle of a brick wall he is building."[2] This wall, recalling both Renaissance devices and de Chirico's, she calls one of the most beautiful passages in the mural because of the way it is angled from the light.
Months later the final accolade was given by an inspector from the Federal Art Project who reported to his superior: "While most of the exterior mural decorations are badly faded in color, the outstanding exception was Philip Guston's fresco over the entrance of the WPA Building. This appeared as fresh and clean as the day it was painted and has not been affected by an unusually severe winter."[3]
Guston's next big commission for the WPA was the Queensbridge mural, which he regards as his first important pictorial statement. In it he resolved, at least temporarily, a number of esthetic problems with which he had been grappling for several years. Moving decisively away from the high modeling that had characterized his large cartoons for the Kings County Hospital, Guston brought to fruition his musings on the relationships between Cubism and the Renaissance
Municipal Art Gallery in 1937 showing a cartoon by Guston; James Brooks is at
the left.
A detail of Guston's Queensbridge
mural, 1940.
mural masters. The cross-patterning of verticals and diagonals in Uccello's Battle of San Romano particularly inspired Guston's fresh approach to the picture space. He felt that in his earlier work he had seen the pictorial space as a negative entity, a void in which the volumes alone spoke. With the Queensbridge mural, he began his long ascent to the sophisticated and specifically modern spatial complexities.
Since the mural has long since been defaced, and few photographs remain, the official description of Work and Play in the mimeographed dedication pamphlet is useful:
The mural is placed at a focal point in the Queensbridge Housing Project above the doorway in the lobby of the Community Center. It covers a space of 300 square feet and is painted in the medium of casein resin emulsion on gesso ground.
On the extreme left . . .is shown the symbolic family group. Next is a group of young children playing near slum buildings in the process of demolition. . . .
Over the left doorway three basketball players represent one phase
of community recreation, and a related trio of musicians and dancers is shown above the right doorway. The figure of the doctor and child at the right of this scene indicate the importance of public health, and at the far right are shown a group of youngsters engaged in various activities typical of community life—painting, reading, building model airplanes, and learning carpentry.
Of these various sections, one was to prove seminal for Guston's future work and has frequently been reproduced. It is the section showing boys in mock battle in which many of Guston's formative experiences with art are reflected. In the scudding and stylized clouds, with their emphatic horizontal bases, are echoes of the Quattrocento. In the scaffolding and the free-standing stageprop arch, the influence of the Italian primitives is seen as rehearsed by de Chirico. The X-like composition of rope and wooden pike contains an echo of Uccello's condensed play of forces. The dog, carefully rendered without high modeling and placed beneath the boy's leg, may well be a paraphrase of the cleverly installed dog in Picasso's Three Musicians. (Guston's dog, incidentally, was the source of a two-week delay when the ubiquitous inspectors from Washington, always alert for a Communist message, thought they spied a hammer and sickle in the way the dog's tail curved around the child's leg and ordered the artist off the scaffold until they could investigate his background.) This intricate composition, in which forms are piled up in thin layers very much in the manner of de Chirico's later metaphysical paintings, was to provide Guston with a motif and a pictorial approach that would preoccupy him for the next few years. Indeed, the careful delineation of the sole of a shoe directly parallel to the picture plane can be seen as a forecast of Guston's distant future.
His dialogue with Cubism continued to flourish and was fed by the large Picasso exhibition of 1940 at the Museum of Modern Art. Undoubtedly the range of modes Picasso permitted himself helped Guston to free himself from restricting habits of stylization. But it also fed a gathering storm of doubts that was to erupt within the next two years.
Before the pressure of these doubts became unbearable, finally propelling Guston to abandon murals and concentrate on easel painting, he was to do two more wall projects, both based on designs submitted around the time of the Queensbridge project. The first was executed in collaboration with his wife, Musa McKim, for the U. S. Forestry Building in Laconia, New Hampshire, and the second—his
final one—for the Social Security Building in Washington, completed in 1942. He had resigned from the WPA after completing the Queensbridge project in 1940, and had withdrawn to Woodstock, New York, an artists' community of long standing, where he began to focus on specific problems of easel painting. (The interplay between the demands of easel and mural painting can be seen in the Social Security Building murals, Reconstruction and Well-Being of the Family, a 12 ́ 17 feet work in three sections. In the central panel the tilted still life and jug recall Cézanne, while the boy's figure in a striped shirt with monomental modeling of the arms again reflects Picasso's impact.)
The result of Guston's first sojourn in Woodstock, a small town ninety miles from New York City, was the painting he now considers his first mature statement as an independent easel painter, Martial Memory. Painted in the winter of 1940–41, it shows the pictorial problems that were to preoccupy him for the next several years. There is a noticeable compression in the composition—the result of his long meditation on Cubist values—and his old curiosity about "plastic values," which had been aroused when he was only seventeen, has now reached its peak. Like many of Guston's notable paintings from various periods of his career, it has all the marks of a summum, relating to many earlier experiences and containing the nuclei of future works.
The motif itself recalls the Queensbridge mural, the section that showed boys in combat, using garbage-can covers for shields, sticks for lances, kitchen pots and paper hats for helmets. This was not an unusual theme during the 1930s. Several artists had undertaken to show the street fighting of urban children, among them the cartoonist and painter William Gropper, who had published a drawing of boys with garbage-can cover shields in the New Masses. But Guston's first use of the theme in the mural alluded not only to the social situation of boys during the Depression, which he had actually observed, but also to the paintings of Uccello.
Before Martial Memory, Guston worked out his first variation on the theme of fighting children in Gladiators, a small painting of 1940 whose modeling is pronounced but highly stylized. The draftsmanship recalls the large simplifications employed by Picasso in Guernica, although the color suggests the harsh contrasts favored by the Surrealists. By the time Guston undertook the next version, he had arrived at a decisive and consistent mode, one that subsumed his previous experiences and yet was particularly suited to the criteria of easel painting.
The transfiguration of the boys in Martial Memory calls upon Guston's longstanding desire to achieve the immutability he so much admired in the reproductions he had seen of works by Piero della Francesca. The figures are fixed in ritualistic positions, reflecting Guston's interest in the mystery of ritual games. The faces of the children are not all masked, as they are in the two previous versions, but simply stylized to suit the solemn tableau. Memories of Italian predecessors are retained in the colors Guston has employed: sienna, ocher, and slate blue. These colors also suggest another memory—that of the Turin scenes of Giorgio de Chirico—which is reinforced by the smokestacks in the distance and the procession of blind windows receding in the upper plane.
It is clear that in this painting Guston has made an ambitious move in the direction of symbolism and mythology, slowly severing the 1930s tradition of social commentary. One boy is winged like Icarus, but the carefully rendered props are contemporary (garbage-can cover, rubber tire, old door, and a detached column typical of smalltown American houses). The atmosphere already engenders that sense of timelessness for which Guston so longed.
In reducing the highlighted, dramatic modeling of earlier works such as The Conspirators, Guston achieved the planarity he admired in Cubism. The even distribution of light has enabled him to render the major figure, a boy seen from the back, in contrasts of nearly flat value. On the other hand, Guston's need to deal with the easel format has opened up new possibilities to him. The broad simplifications of
Gladiators , 1940. Oil on canvas, 24½ × 28 in. (color plate I)
monumental scale were no longer suitable, so now, he could allow himself the pleasure of fine detail. In the paper hats and pasteboard boxes his brush worked with a delicate gradation of tone that brought him into his first real contact with the tradition of painterly pictorialism. This painterly lyricism was to develop rapidly during the next three years.
In Martial Memory Guston performed the kind of shift of emphasis that has characterized his entire life's work. The props have been carried over from earlier pictures, but the contexts in which they are set have been thoroughly revised. These contexts are both psychological and compositional—such as the brick wall that has so often appeared previously but which in this painting is brought forward to serve as a frankly theatrical backdrop. The shift in mood here is subtle but radical. Like many of the early artists of the modern tradition who worked in Paris during the mid-nineteenth century when street cries, popular entertainments, and the remnants of the commedia dell'arte inspired artists and writers from Flaubert and Baudelaire to Mallarmé, from Daumier and Manet to Cézanne, Guston sought to infuse his art with a vigor drawn from his experience with popular life. At the same time, he hungered for an ideal fusion of modern life and the wealth of traditions from which it had evolved. Martial Memory was painted at the very moment when the life of the United States had moved far away from the privations of the 1930s. The Second World War had already erupted, and war industries were flourishing. Artists were employed as illustrators of army manuals or mapmakers, and the public was becoming familiar with the propagandistic posters issued by Washington. Guston's work, on the other hand, was actually moving away from the street life he purported to illustrate, for, like his nineteenth-century forebears, he used the motifs of the modern world to transcend it. He was, as usual, out-of-phase with his contemporaries. Yet Martial Memory, with its firm air of resolution, made its impact; it was shown at the Carnegie Institute within the year and purchased by the City Art Museum in St. Louis in 1942. The art historian H. W. Janson wrote about the painting for the museum's spring bulletin, stressing the "spiritual" aspect of the scene and praising Guston's ability to balance the various tendencies in recent American painting. A note of contemporary significance emerges toward the end of the article, where Janson remarks that "Guston has found the true image of this war-torn world, suggesting at once the tinsel glitter of martial trappings and the deep emotional crisis that underlies every human conflict."
Sanctuary , 1944. Oil on canvas, 22 1/8 x 35 7/8 in.