Philip Guston

Hello, hello, and welcome to the Exhibitionist Podcast. This is a podcast where we examine artists through their solo exhibitions. My name is Emily Harding. I'm an art lover and someone who enjoys seeing and talking about art. And Joanna Pierre Neves, my co-host, is an art curator and a critic. This episode will discuss Philip Gustin. This is an exhibition that took place at the Tape Modern, and it's an exhibition with a bit of controversy around it. It was supposed to come out in 2020, but was postponed for four years. And then it was brought back forward. And there's been a lot of back and forth and ink spilled, quite frankly, about the hows and whys of that postponement. So we'll dip into that quite a bit, and you'll see that I am not the expert of the duo as I talk about Philip Gustin as being an impressionist rather than an expressionist at various times. But you'll forgive me for that, and Joanna kindly corrects me, so that's all okay. Joanna brings up Alice Neal and the banality of evil which comes through this episode. And Barbie makes an appearance, which is great. Yeah, I really hope that you enjoy it and let us know what you think. Hello and welcome to the Exhibitionistas Podcast. We visit exhibitions so that you have to, so that you can't resist but to go and see an exhibition. We explore the work of an artist through their solo shows. I'm Emily Harding. I'm an art lover and an exhibition goer.

And I am Joanna Pierre Nevis, a contemporary art curator and writer. So we decided to do this podcast because as someone who works in contemporary art, I find that we lack certain platforms of discussion. So I listen to a lot of podcasts about contemporary fiction, stand-up comedy, even film and politics, but very few about art, which aren't jargony or too superficial or too celebrity-oriented. So that's why I am exhibitionista number two and very happy to be here with you.

Hardly, hardly a number two. Yeah. So I mean, and I just want to say too that it's like, you know, I think with this podcast too, is someone who is not a professional, you know, a professional art curator or professionally in the art world, but just someone who really enjoys it a lot. I think it's, you know, it's just nice to have a place that's a little like lighter on pretense, perhaps, that might crop up occasionally in the art world, some place that's just really joyful and and fun to meet and talk about art. So yeah. So Emily, without further ado, do you want to introduce the artists that we're talking about today? Sure. Yeah, absolutely. So today we're going to talk about Philip Gustin. He has a retrospective at the Tate Modern, which is open from the well, it opened on the 5th of October. It runs until the 25th of February. So if you're in London, there's still lots of time, hopefully, by the time this airs to uh to go and see the exhibition. Can I just add something, Emily?

Can I just say that this is hopefully it will reach, you know, other people. We are based in London, so obviously we talk mostly about exhibitions in London. You don't have to go to the exhibitions if you don't live in London or if you don't have time, because this is really a pretext to talk about compelling arts and artists and their body of work. So obviously, if you can go to the exhibition, please do. It's that's why we do this, because going to exhibitions is such an experience that you have to talk about afterwards.

So, yeah, Emily, back to you. Yeah, no, very good point. Yeah, it's it's certainly not a requirement or a prerequisite to see this exhibition before. So Philip Gustin lived, to my mind, what I would think of the classic artist existence. I mean, he smoked, he drank, he was mostly self-taught, he was prolific, he was a bit of an outsider. He produced work that was loved and that was absolutely hated. You know, he he was one of these guys that sequestered himself with his art for long periods of time and couldn't be interrupted, but he was also absolutely essential to this super vibrant scene at the Cedar Bar with the likes of Pollock and De Kooning and Rothgo that all made up the New York school. By the way, uh Jackson Pollock, who he went to high school with.

Yeah.

Which, you know, sometimes in life it's just up to the basic time. Exactly. It was meant to be. So I did a bunch of reading on him, which was which was a real pleasure. But the main sources that I drew from were um Night Studio, a memoir of Philip Gustin by his daughter Moossa Mayer. It's uh Hauser and Wirth publishers. Uh this was so brilliant, I loved it. Like, even if you don't necessarily want to read more about Philip Gustin, it's a brilliant memoir, like the relationship between father and daughter, and you know, kind of a peek into the life of someone who is certainly a genius. I I saw a few videos.

I went on YouTube and I read Ross Feldon's book uh about Paula about Paula about Gustin. And Musa Meyer, I I I became much more interested in her than in Philip Gustin. Yeah. Because cute as a button, that woman. She's so cute. She's just the cutest person on earth with like, you know, cute intelligence. And she's because you say she he's the typical artist, but for me as a professional, he's the cliche male artist who really did not play a big role in his family and let Musa, i.e. the muse, do the difficult work in the family. I don't know, you read the the biography. I didn't. And Musa was a writer, so his wife, and then the daughter started writing. So, yes, please read the book because she's an excellent thinker and writer about uh a daughter coming to terms with that kind of figure from that time.

Yeah, living in living in the shadow of that kind of greatness. And you're right, like he was not happy when she was born. He thought it was really going to be a drag on his artistic output and concentration. I mean, he loved her wildly, which was, you know, clear in other ways, but he was not sort of a the attentive, doting father who was full of, you know, unconditional acceptance that we all wish we would have had. But um, but yeah, a really beautiful book. And she was so insightful in her writing. It was a really moving, really moving uh piece of work on its own. And then I uh Dore Ashton wrote a critical study of Philip Gustin. It was published by the University of California Press. And then there's a great short documentary that you can get on Amazon called Philip Gustin, A Life Lived. It's one hour, it's right at the end of Gustin's life. It was actually published published or you know, released rather, uh just after his death. And that was uh done by Michael Blackwood. Uh so great resources out there. But so I'm gonna start with a quick potted history of Gustin. So he's uh his parents emigrated to Montreal from Odessa to flee the pogroms that killed and targeted Jewish people. He was born in 1913 in Montreal as Philip Goldstein. He changed his name later on. He was the youngest of seven kids. They moved to LA when he was six. When he was 10, he found the body of his father, who had committed suicide, and he also lost an older brother to an accident in his teens. So some pretty primary tragedies and traumas there that he said, you know, certainly uh influenced him and his work throughout his life. His mother supported his art by sending him to a comic correspondence school, and she enrolled him in the manual arts high school later on, which is where he met Pollock. He didn't complete either. You know, his mother was so supportive of him and his talent that she would lie to visitors when they came around that he wasn't home when really he was locked up in his closet with one bare light bulb, which is an image that comes through a lot of his work, just working on his drawing. And that was something that was, you know, sort of endorsed by the rest of the family to just let Philip do his thing.

He went to comic correspondence school. I think he went to the Cleveland cartoon, cartoon school of Cleveland, something like that. He was relearning how to, which I think is important because at the end of his life he does go back to that particular kind of drawing and and imagery.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think it might, yeah, you're right, it might have been the Cleveland, uh, the Cleveland school. But it was, I mean, he he did, it's like, I think it's the kind of thing where it's like, here, draw a bunny and then send it back, was the was the image that I got of it. And he only did it.

Because I tried to research it very quickly and I didn't find anything because now it's the Cleveland Institute of Art. I don't know if it's the same thing, but if you look into it, there's lots of um people who either taught there or like art cartoonists or comics authors that are related to that online. So I think that's an important reference because later on it will make sense to us.

Absolutely, absolutely. He went to the Otis, the Otis Art Institute, and again didn't finish, but that's where he met his wife, who was a painter, also a painter at the time, and later a poet, Musa McKim. Throughout his life, he was a mural painter, he was an abstract impressionist, he was a figure maker. Uh he he just like the breadth of his work is pretty phenomenal. Uh, and we'll talk about that in the exhibition. It looks like seeing the exhibition of at least three different, four different artists. And then he died of a heart attack in Woodstock in uh New York in 1980.

I love that you say that he's an abstraction press abstract impressionist because he was actually uh he is the art historian comes in with the you know with a heavy with the heaviness, but he was an abstract expressionist. Oh because his work was so atheric, some people deemed his work to be more of an abstract form of impressionism than expressionism. So that's that's it was kind of a play. I don't remember which was the art critic who said that, but it was kind of a play with words. Um and he was sometimes called the Monet of abstract expressionists, if I'm not mistaken.

Got it, got it. Okay, so do you want to tell us a little bit about this exhibition? Maybe just start with There was a bit of controversy around this exhibition. Do you want to tell us a little bit about it?

There was, yes, there was Emily. Uh there was a lot of controversy around it. So this was a a travelling exhibition that started at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, then went on to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and finally in the US would uh finish its travels at the National Gallery in DC. However, George Floyd's death propelled a four-year postponement of the show that was to open um in 2020. And you can ask what's the connection between this horrendous thing that happened and Philip Guston's work? Well, this is because Guston, as we'll see, created in the last decade of his life paintings with figures wearing Ku Klux Klan hoods as a form of satire and philosophical quest about evil and exclusion.

It actually wasn't just at the end of his life. He was painting KKK figures in the 30s as well, at the very beginning of his career. In a different way, a very different gave it a very different treatment, but it's certainly something that ran right through the length of his uh his his body.

Yes, absolutely. And the exhibition, by the way, showcases that really beautifully. Like you really see how aware he was, you get a sense that he was aware of his past, of his Jewishness and the problems that entailed in Europe for his father as well, because his father couldn't live in Canada, he was oppressed, they went to California and he became a scrapper in California. Like he would sell old junk and collect junk. Um, and he ended up committing suicide, which obviously is not uncommon for people, you know, fleeing the Third Reich. So he did inherit uh a consciousness.

Sorry, he wasn't fleeing the pogroms, right? The pogroms. Yeah, he was fleeing the Russians.

Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Emily. And yeah, so that so you can see that he inherited um a lot of transgenerational trauma, but also a consciousness of terrible things happening to communities for two different communities of people who suffered exclusion, uh to say the least. So, of course, when the exhibition was postponed, people thought this was a condescending attitude. And so there was a letter of protest against the postponement of exit uh of the exhibition signed by many black artists such as uh Pope L, who passed away recently and who has an exhibition at uh South London Gallery uh at the moment. Julie Merritt, Adrian Piper, Lorna Simpson, you know, these major artists came in defense of Philip Guston's exhibition. And so the postponement was um unpostponed, so it was shortened, and the exhibition finally travelled until it came to us at the end uh of last year. It's which is I I think as well ironic, um, because Philip Guston was not Philip Guston, as you said very um rightly, he was Philip Goldstein. Also, the KKK was not and still isn't very nice and inclusive to Jewish people.

Yeah, no, they they targeted, yeah. Yeah, the KKK. Absolutely targeted. I read this book earlier in the year about the KKK and kind of how it was popularized and it was looked at through this guy who kind of really, you know, garnered support for it in the Midwest. Apparently, I think it was Indiana, was sort of the capital, like had the the biggest KKK membership, as it were, and any state, which is kind of unusual. I mean, I'm from the Midwest, you know, I had no idea. So it was really fascinating to look at the rise, but I mean, the the targeting of Jewish people was intense as well, but the Jewish population is a lot smaller than black population in America. And you know, it's yeah, didn't didn't get but I mean Gustin was seeing this in the 30s in California, you know. I mean he was seeing the KKK alive and well, and it certainly made a deep impact on on him and his work.

So, how was this exhibition organized? It is somewhat of a chronologic exhibition, but it strikingly starts with one of Gustin's last paintings called The Legend or Legend. It sets the tone, right? So Guston's work and painting is much about his worries and values as it is about his failures and breakdowns. And in this in this painting, he's in bed surrounded by objects, which remind us of his childhood, his dad's occupation as a scrapper, and you know, his obsessions such as food, reading, small, humble objects. And a j adjacent to this room is another one with Guston's paintings, incredibly made when he was 17. Yeah. And they were they are quite technically impressive, you know, also very, you know, picking up here and there references to surrealism. He he loves uh the Kiriko, for example, but it's not, you know, he's not he's not grown into his own artistry uh for sure. And then the whole exhibition is separated in two, which is kind of a weird thing because the second bit of the exhibition is about the the last 10 years of his life, and the other, the the first bit of the the first half of the exhibition is the whole path that leads in some ways to these last 10 years. Because let's say it, and I want to know what you think of it, but for sure Guston was someone who loved painting and hated art. I think it's fair to say that he was not comfortable with the whole structure around art, the system, the people, the way art was talked about, and the and the and the dogmatic, there was some dogmatism around abstract expressionism, and he was never comfortable with that because he was also very politically aware. So he was very um critical uh of himself and also of art and its function in society.

Totally, yeah. I mean, I think that goes to his outsider thing. I mean, he was he resisted that formal kind of training that would give you that kind of dogma of, you know, this is what artist is, this is what art is, this is what artists do. You know, even when he had success and was living in, you know, for for a time he was living part-time in New York City, part-time in Woodstock. And in New York City, he talks about how he really disliked having to go to all of these galleries all the time and see all the people and have all the conversations. And, you know, when he finally retreated to Woodstock, he could just do what he wanted to do, was which was be in his studio and make his make his art. And so, I mean, he he just didn't play the game in the same way that a lot of artists, you know, do and sometimes need to do to kind of get it together. He really doubled down on his own instincts and his own relationship, I think, with the art he wanted to make.

It's very strange, isn't it? Because I think there's a whole myth around him. Just to explain to our listeners, when he so he was a muralist for a while, um, he went to Mexico, painted a very important mural that still exists today, and it was um, again, very political. It depicted war, it referenced, because of course, by then, you know, he was aware of the Second World War, and he was again felt that that war particularly targeted his community and his family family's community. You say he's an outsider, but I think I I need to break that a little bit because he did, you know, hang out with the Kooning, he hung out with lots of important people, that whole intelligentsia who were a group of men who basically, you know, he wasn't included in that big exhibition called Eleven American Painters. I mean, there was only 11. He was there, so he was pretty much a part of that group, and he started, he moved completely to abstraction. And what was really interesting is that his abstraction, I don't know how you felt about it, it wasn't overly represented in the exhibition, and it felt reluctant. For me, it was something trying to emerge from the center of the painting, so everything's concentrated at the center. You can see his famous signature pink and red. So apparently that pink comes from cadmium red medium and titanium white, and you could see the whites, you can see the pinks, you can see the reds, you can see lots of colours that come back later. Lavender, you know, all those beautiful colours. He's such a colourist. I mean, for sure, it feels like he was working on his colour spectrum. And I understand why he was called the abstract uh an abstract impressionist, because there is something that is not quite there. I mean very specifically the Greenbergian. So Clement uh Greenberg was this very important art critic who kind of like established what painting was. Not only was it the most important form of art, so drawing had no place there. And we know that Guston started with drawing quite a lot. I work with drawing, as you know, so for me that's really important. And I saw someone who was a draftsperson wanting to emerge but couldn't because there was no platform for that at the time. And so the painting was an autonomous space, and you painted painting, you know, the painting was about itself, it was an absolutely free, autonomous space, and in some ways, and that was rather exciting, but also a very reductive definition of abstraction, but exciting to think you're building a fifth dimension, so you're building something. Um, there's a very famous cartoon actually of Ad Reinhardt, an amazing abstract painter, where he he did a lot of cartoons about abstraction and modern art and You can see a visitor looking at an abstract painting. I hope I remember this correctly, saying, What is this? And what is this doing? It's not representing anything. And then the painting comes out to him, if I remember correctly, and says, And what are you doing? And what are you about? And so for the first time, the spectator is looking at something in their own bodies, in their own space, looking at another space and not using representation to stand in for something or to represent something, to represent something. It's not a window onto the world, it is a space. So that was quite really exciting.

Yeah, and I gotta say, I've never really thought of it that way. I've never, yeah, that's really, that's really interesting. I mean, I've never thought of the way that it was approached and what it was trying to do and how that was different. I've just always really enjoyed the, you know, the kind of enjoyed it, which I guess was the point, you know, as as Jesus described. It was, it was for me to evoke whatever it was evoking for me, you know, rather than here's an image and I'd like to tell this story that's very narrative. It's saying, go ahead, wow, what does it feel like to be in front of this thing? You know, in those later ones, especially, you could see him trying to make an image and then containing it, you know. I mean, there's kind of the late ones where it's like those heads, you can kind of see sort of the outline of human heads or a couple that look sort of like buildings, cities, scapes, you know. I mean, so yeah, so you could see that he there was part of him that was enjoying the exploration, but there was another part of him that was just as eager to get back to kind of what was inside him, which was image making.

Yeah, absolutely. So at the end of the first half of the exhibition, there's these beautiful drawing paintings, these linear shapes. Because it's you know, yeah, the thing is that he was so masterful in what he ended up doing. Like his line is absolutely incredible. So tell us a little bit about that because in the show it's kind of like you you have little references of like huge breakdowns of Philip Guston, and then you're like, oh okay, he had another breakdown, and then you hop off to the next room, and then the the following room is like, oh, he moved away from home because he had another breakdown, and it never really is quite explored, you know, what it is that breakdown. Is it collect connected to his status or his um the reception of his work? Is it you know personal?

He was a very self-contained guy, you know, very ambitious and very kind of driven by himself. I know I I realize he's part of this New York scene, but there weren't that many people that just extracted themselves from New York and did something else. Well, I mean, he was also muralist when people were starting in New York. So he was in the Midwest and had a professorship in Iowa and then in Missouri, and so he was sort of away from the crowd for a long period, so kind of a bit of an outsider in that sense. So even though he had this sort of strong personal will and drive, he still really cared about what people thought about his work. He certainly had probably his biggest breakdown after the Marlboro show. I mean, he was a depressive guy. He talked about, you know, he suffered from depression, right? Absolutely, absolutely. So I think there was, you know, there was sometimes the the the kind of breaks were because of receptions to his work. Sometimes it was just he was a depressive guy. He drank a lot, he smoked a lot, he apparently was a great cook, but you know, he wasn't uh feeding himself maybe the best, you know, lots of you know, traditional male diet, yeah, of the 1950s and 60s and 70s. He had insomnia. Moose's book is called Night Studio because he was often in his studio at night working all night.

That explains the lost room and some paintings at the end that so black.

Yeah.

So like layers and layers of thick black paint. What paint black paint mixed with greens and such weird paintings.

Yeah, yeah. So he would take things to put him to sleep and then things to wake him up. You know, there's some of the drug taking going on, it seemed, as well, which probably doesn't help a depressive state and a, you know, fragile mental health for anyone, quite frankly. But this is a good time to talk about that next period of paintings that he went into. So he went from very abstract work. One thing in the reading that really struck me was all of these artists were sort of part of this Sydney Janice gallery in New York in 1962 when pop art hit the scene and Sidney Janice started carrying pop artists of the time. So Andy Warhol and Liechtenstein, is that right? Am I getting the name right? Um, so the guys who did the Campbell soup and sort of the comic strip images, they all left. All the impressionists left that that gallery in protest. They were like, we are not that and we don't want that association. So going to your point about like how that New York school was a very, very big thing in terms of setting the standard of what they thought was acceptable and what art is and what it isn't. And and then he goes, he goes to making lines again and these small framed images that are, as you say, an arc of black across a canvas or something, which are miraculous, I have to say. It's really it's incredible. And I I think that is one of the things that is so incredible. The the line is so alive, like it looks like something that is living, which is something that he said he was always going for. He wants something that, you know, when he's working in a studio and he goes away and he comes back, he wants to be surprised by, like, oh wow, that happened. I did that happened. That's incredible. You know, and you feel that, you feel that in his work. So he went and he did those, you know, incredible kind of basic images. And then he went to do the work that ended up going into the Marlboro show in in uh in 1970. And that was when he went back to his comic kind of underpinnings, where he, you know, had all of these images of KKK people, you know, hooded figures. He calls them the hood, the, I think he calls them the hoods. And they're driving in a car, smoking a cigarette. There's uh there's a hooded figure that is a painter painting an image of painting a self-portrait, so painting another hooded figure, they're drinking, they're hanging out, they're being casual. And you know, I think so much of what he was doing there was looking at everyday evil.

And also the so the style of the paintings was so strange because it comes from that background of abstract expressionism, so very painterly, very filled with that material, that paint material. Very big, they're real painting. Well, not real, not that small paintings aren't real paintings, but you mean like they're painting, yeah. They're they're big. Exactly. So he takes on the same sizes almost of his previous paintings, but then he just paints these figures that are cartoonish and that are doing horrible things, you know, things that Americans probably don't want to look at. And this comes back to the postponement because I think in Europe it's a bit harder to understand what's going on in America. I was in DC for three months doing research at the Smithsonian, and white people are a minority, not a minority, but there's less white people than other ethnicities in DC, for example, which was I learned when I went there. And it's a whole different relationship to the violence of racism in America. It it's it's much more discussed, to be very honest. I think it's in that ways it's much more it's taken up by institutions and now it's it's spread to all the communities and ethnicities that aren't that weren't ever contemplated by, and even with Gussen, they were subjects, they were not, you know, peers in some ways. Things have changed a lot in the United States, and when you go, you know, especially in DC, we went to conferences, and the person doing the conference recognized that this was the land of whatever Native American community had lived there. So that's something that completely, you know, blew my mind. We're not doing this in Europe at all. I hear a lot about like, oh, can we stop it with the apologies and the you know and DC is a city of extremes as well.

I mean, it's you know historically one of the more segregated cities. But interestingly, in in one of the interviews with Musa Mayer, she was saying that she talked to the art director, whoever is the head of curation at the National Gallery in DC. And the the person in that position said that when they came on board on the job, there were 47 curators. None of them were black. So in DC. In DC.

It's incredible.

And all of the staff who make the gallery run, most of them were non-white. So the the initial letter for the postponement came from the National Gallery, and it came from this group of people that were white, essentially. I mean, maybe there were some non-white folks in there, but there weren't black curators in that group of people. There's there's a lot of good things happening off of the back of tragic occurrences in the past few years. It's good to see that that is finally taking place. Certainly not as fast as we'd like. But this this exhibition, I think, also brought up some of those really good questions. So Gustin is working on this exhibition. He releases the exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery in 1970, and people hate it. Like they hate it so much. I mean, you know, back to, you know, you think of eight years previous, Gustin was quitting the Sydney Janice Gallery because pop art was pop art had an exhibition there, and now he's doing something that I mean, it's not pop art, but it's figurative and it's cheeky and it's a renaissance influence in it, even with some of the horizons and things like that, but but it is cartoonish.

Yeah, I you kind of wonder what was going on in his mind at the time, and you kind of wonder when this came about and when he started realizing that this is what he wanted to do. Parenthesis from The Art Historian. I have a real problem with the mystification of artists, especially male white artists, and the mystification of Philip Gusson. Because the problem is that when you have this kind of context and this kind of um controversy, then you kind of aggrandize the artist. And I felt a little bit a prisoner of that when I went into the exhibition because I didn't love the exhibition as much as I thought I would. And I went in there like militantly, like, yes, let's go to the Gusson. And it was with someone who was really not enthralled by it. You know, Liechtenstein, Alice Neal, you know, Pop Arts, Andy Warhol. He wasn't he didn't single-handedly bring back, you know, figuration to the art world. Let's just put it out there and stop with the mystifications. Okay. Especially if you see the videos and you you hear there's a there's um uh a film called Questions to Philip Gars and something like that, with Roberta Smith, who's a very important art critic, telling him, you know, and and talking about him as if you know he's he brought back, you know, representation to the art world, and you kind of think, oh come on. Yes, yes, he did. I mean, he was very courageous because I think from the perspective of masculinity, I think that's amazing what he did, and maybe it should be framed like that. I mean, he was in that very patriarchal group of artists, amazing art. I love attractiveism, yeah, you know, a big part of it. I it's it the impact of those paintings is uh not to be frowned upon. It's beautiful, you know. I love Klein, I love the Kooning, and then the Kooning was actually also painting figures, by the way. It it was a huge influence, and because there were so many, the context in the United States at the time was of a country that had had terrible painting until very recently. Then they welcomed Marcel Duchamp over there, who, by the way, was rejected in Paris, went to America, welcomed, you know, like the star, you know, the star artist of Europe of what everything American art wanted to be. And there was this effervescence at the time. There were lots of art critics, lots of art criticism in newspapers, lots of magazines, and people were listening to art critics. It was a very strange time. No one pays attention to them anymore, no one knows who they are anymore. But at the time, there were people who, you know, were mentioned by musicians, you know, he was very good friends with uh Morton Feldman, the musician, the the you know, the minimalist musician. I mean, there was in there were intersections between art languages, it was a big deal. There was a big, big power around these people, around these artists. And I think in terms of that context, wow, Philip Guston, wow, he was alone afterwards. Everyone everyone ditched him. Everyone, and I think he said he there's a there's a um an interview with him where he says, I said to John Cage, you know, you lock yourself in your studio, and then one friend stops coming, another friend stops coming, another friend stops coming, and then none of your friends come, and that's when it starts. And he was courageous like that. He was really there was something about him that you know his ghosts were more important than friends or you know, the the the living people surrounding him. Yeah, and that that is that is incredible. I think we need to reframe a little bit, you know, the context of uh, you know, he's not saving art or saving figurative art. He is actually extracting himself from a group and being unique and developing his own language that he probably should have developed way earlier and and making these incredible paintings that the Americans-I mean, that's a question for you, you know, Emily. I think must have been very hard to look at at the time because they were the criticism was also like, why are we looking at this? It's it's fine, we've solved it. We solved the KKK.

Yeah, no, totally. I mean, I think, you know, in 1970 it was still in the visible in the rearview mirror, you know. I mean, the the KKK and its legacy, and there's always that instinct to run away from things when it's still reasonably fresh. The US has never been great about having a discussion about race, you know, and what it means, which is I mean, we have it, it gets violent at various points in history. The fact that, you know, an artist is bringing this to this kind of forum and and format, I can imagine the establishment was, you know, really displeased. Really displeased. And I mean, I think it was misunderstood too, that it was being casual about the KKK when the a different reading of it is is that evil in the everyday, that it's it is in you, it is in me. I mean, racism is alive and well, whether you're putting up and burning a cross or you are driving around in your car smoking a cigarette, it's there and it's a it's a through line. Uh, and I I think that's what he was trying to say with it, and I think it was just a difficult message at the time. Why do you think people accuse him of being casual about the KKK? Because they look kind of cute, right? I mean, like the images are kind of they're kind of in the button. They're kind of endangering. They they're pink.

They're the cadmium red and the titanium white are pulling a lot of the lot of the weight of those paintings. They're ink, it's incredible.

He uses those uh those long vertical lines for the eyes. And and that long vertical line is kind of repeated in lots of different areas uh in the paintings. But but yeah, they're kind of cute, they're kind of cuddly, they're kind of endearing. You kind of look at them and think, like, oh, you know, it's not a horrible, menacing image of something that is horrible and menacing. But again, I think that was the point of it, is that you could be looking evil in the eye and think, oh, nice, you know, I mean, which is which is absolutely true.

But that's what's so fantastic about it. It's because especially, I think people mentioned the painting. I can't quite get the title, but maybe you remember that painting where you have, like you say, uh hooded figures in a car just smoking cigarettes, you know, driving casually, a bit disorganized, a bit chaotic in the out about in town, and then there's a a corpse in the back. There's a body. And then you think, is this casual or is this more violent to speak of another amazing Jewish immigrate, you know, Hannah Arendt, who said like the banal talked about the banality of evil, and that's the problem. It's when it's now people love to, you know, the the youngsters have like to say normalize. You know, it is normalized. Yeah, and I think that's the issue, isn't it? He's talking about normalization and the banality of evil in such a poignant way, with that pink that just numbs you because it's just so sickening and at the same time so attractive. He really knows how to convey an atmosphere with colour, it's just so impactful. It's almost cute.

Yeah, it's almost a Barbie pink.

A Barbie pink, but a bit dirty with some lines of blue and grey. It's a dirty Barbie pink. It's such a powerful thing. He goes very far with that with that, doesn't he? When he says that he saw himself, he wanted to see himself as the hooded figure, yeah, and he wanted to understand what it would be like to live as an evil creature. He wanted to perform that evil in some ways, and it's a very performative kind of image that he did there. It's so also he was fascinated by Crazy Cat. He loved Crazy Cat, apparently. You know, the very famous comics or cartoon.

I mean, kind of, is it famous? I don't know. I mean, if you I hadn't I wasn't. Well, at the time at the time it was famous. When he was a kid, when he was a kid, I had to look at it. When he was a kid, yeah. Yeah, I had to look it up. Yeah, of course.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, he struggled with his relationship to the turmoil in the world generally. I mean, wars, Vietnam, Korea, you know, World War II, obviously, civil rights, and what was happening to the black community in America. And he, you know, he has this quote saying, it's a famous quote of his, what kind of man am I? Sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything, and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue. So, I mean, he clearly struggled with what is the role of the artist in society and in hopefully trying to right some of the wrongs that are happening in front of his eyes. And this, you know, this is I think part of his response. And what was the role of art?

I think it's like, what can art do? I think it was his main worry. Like, I am here. And especially when you said adjusting a retro blue, obviously he's also talking about, you know, the movement he was part of before. But I think this is a question that we are asking ourselves now. It's such a timely exhibition because whether you, I mean, you in your job that we won't disclose here, but we we will if you want, uh, maybe have more of a a feeling of kind of touching, you know, politics and policy and and you know, and and and having an impact. But when you're in your studio as an artist, male artists nowadays are kind of thinking, is this my time? Should I be doing this? Should I be, you know, uh white people, you know, are thinking, you know, should I be taking the platform, you know, as it was uh given to me? And how do I take a platform? You know, understanding that it's given to me in a in a much more in a freer and and accessible way more than to other people, you know, we are asking ourselves a lot of questions. So I think it's a really timely exhibition. But it is also to me, I felt it was so courageous and so impactful what he did. And that the other paintings, I could see that he also went back to his depression. So the paintings after that, so he quits Marlborough, Marlborough quit him. I don't quite know how that happened, but I can imagine that Marlborough was probably not very happy with the outcome of the exhibition. And he went into a very strange uh Keys, I think, gallery that was in um in an area that was not an area of New York that was not fashionable. He decided you know, he worked with someone completely different. He kept going to um away from New York and he he You know, you can see that he's struggling with his personal life. He painted his wife quite a lot, who, if anything, lived in his shadow. Apparently, she was a very quiet person, she was a very intelligent person, but socially she presented as someone who's was kind of in you know in the back, you know, trying to keep things together, hold things together like your typical female-male dynamic. Let's say she took the mantle on.

If anybody has seen uh Maestro recently, I mean, there's definitely a through line. The wife of uh Leonard Bernstein and Musa Philip Gustin's wife was called Musa as well. So his daughter and his wife have the same name, confusingly. So his his wife Musa definitely takes that that kind of mantleon of being the supportive wife while being phenomenally talented herself. She painted a mural alongside his when they were doing the mural paintings for the the Works Progress uh administration, and and she was a poet as well, which she incorporates some of her poetry in his late work. But there's an anecdote where, you know, if they had people over at their house in Woodstock, and you know, it would be after dinner, and everybody would be in the living room, kind of smoking and drinking and talking, and he would try to charm her out of the kitchen, and she would just say, No, I've got the dishes to do, and I have the, you know. So she would kind of be there in the background, but she was, I get the sense, uh, just a very shy private person and didn't enjoy that kind of thing, perhaps, as well, just on a on a because he was a social animal, he was a very social person.

Because with all this outsider thing going on, and I I do want to say something about this idea of the outside, but with all this outsider thing going on, he was a charmer, he was a very supportive man. He had this way to him, like this kind of fragile, big, kind of like not completely well put together bird, lost bird, but then he started talking, and it was so fascinating what he had to say. He really could grab you through food, through smoking, through walking around in New York with you. He loved going to small restaurants, small, unassuming restaurants, and he would take critics to the restaurant where he was well known. He was almost kind of like at someone, Ross Feldon says that at a certain point when he goes to Connecticut to visit him, he goes to the butchers and he said, I almost had the feeling that the butcher wasn't going to invite him to come to meet himself, you know, they were so close, you know, they're such a symbiotic relationship with the butcher. And he loved talking to all kinds of people. He was interested in people. And, you know, to the point of like, you know, just a parenthesis about the women, you know, this is the same thing with Jackson Pollock and Malik Rasner. I mean, you know, she was an incredible painter. And no one ever spoke about her. She had no no no place in society. Alice Neal, who had an amazing exhibition of the Barbican last year, was such an incredible painter. She was, I honestly, I that exhibition just shook me. Was she the weight of someone as well? No, Alice Neal is very interesting because to make a parallel with Philip Guston, she was an incredible activist. She was a communist, uh, she was part of loads of movements, and she painted portraits, figurative work, in a very specific Alice Neal style that's almost undescribable. She paints directly onto the canvas, it's quite impressive. And she's interested in people, so she had a chaotic personal love life. She had a child with a Cuban man who took the daughter after losing a daughter to diphtheria. Uh, the father took the child Isabetta to Cuba and she never saw her, saw her again. I mean, she did see her in her older years, in her adult years, and Isabetta ended up by committing suicide. Um, she was very troubled by the fact that her mother, you know, there was no relationship with her mother, and then Alice Neal had two boys, and they lived in a very peculiar house filled with paintings, not a lot of space for the boys to develop. And they and there's an amazing documentary actually about Alice Neal and her life, and she was relentless, she lived uh from benefits all her life until her last years, where she finally got the appreciation she deserved, and the paintings are absolutely incredible because she made she does this beautiful thing, which is to make you look at a person with their own kind of beauty. She ditches conventional beauty, and and there's no conventions, and everyone is beautiful. That's the only way I can describe it. It made me think of a makeup artist who said, Because as a makeup artist, biggest joy of my life is that I get to work on everyone's faces, and at a certain point, conventional beauty just fades away, and I find the beauty in everyone, and that's what Alice Neal did. So, in terms of like in comparison, you can see that Alice Neal was not a depressive person. She tried to commit suicide when she lost her daughter, but after that, she just was a force of nature, she was completely dedicated to her craft, and I think mental health plays such a huge role in who you are and who you are as an artist. Van Gogh comes to mind, for example. It doesn't affect the art, but to Hannah Gatsby's point, you know, she she talks about that in her stand-up comedy. Maybe Van Gogh would have produced more, been a happier artist if he had had the help he he could have had, you know. And and Gustin, you can see that, you know, the moments where he's doing well, he's painting. And he also has painting as a catalyst to paint, you know, and to paint his troubles.

Um, so after this 1970 show, when he is, you know, just just racked with this rejection from the community that he's been a part of in in New York, the New York art community.

Except the Kooning. We have to say the except the Cooning was.

Exactly. Yeah, yeah. And Gustin was like, what do they think we all are? A baseball team? We're not all doing the same thing, you know. So I kind of like that. But but two-thirds of his lifetime output happened in the last 10 years of his life. So between 1970 and 1980. I mean, and he was prolific throughout his life, right? But I I heard this in an interview with with Amusa Mayor, his daughter. And okay. That's the the hof-hof thing. Okay, that explains it. He he dug deep into that rejection. That was a real propeller for output. And maybe it was just the turmoil he felt, you know, and the depression he felt. Uh, and it all came out. But his his late works as they are described, you know, kind of after the KKK images and the, you know, sort of the last shows of his life, um, you know, are filled with these depressive kind of images. So you would see himself depicted as a cyclops, this really adorable cyclops. I loved, I've not seen a cyclops that isn't adorable, but um, you know, kind of this image of him, you know, lying on his back with cigarette butts all over and drinks bottles everywhere, and he's in his studio. So there's a lot of you know, self-reference there. And then he starts um using some of his wife's poetry in his work and in depicting her kind of the from the forehead up, this there's this sort of half moon image of her forehead and her hair that you see.

I have to say, men cutting women, men cutting women's bodies really troubles me. I was not, I was a bit, I don't know, I was a bit troubled by Musa. You know, I kept thinking of her, and I kept thinking of those those paintings with her forehead as a hill, as a sort of a landscapey kind of thing. And also her mind. I think he was worried about her mind. He was worried about her, probably, because he also has a she had a horrible health scare, and he stroke he finally had to, she had a stroke, didn't she? And I I read somewhere that he he said, Well, you know, I went back home, no one was there, had to do my chores, had to do all the house tasks, which in interestingly is the first thing he mentions, and then he talks about the worry, the horrible worry. I mean, he he must have felt completely abandoned. Um and knowing that he lost his dad and he found his dad by suicide, everything comes back, and I find that so interesting when you look at a lot of artists, you can see where they go back. You know, life's a circle, but you do the whole circle, you do the whole journey. So you go back, but you don't end up at the same place. So, of course, cartoons, of course, comics, but you can see his worry with his wife as a parallel with, I'm sure, you know, whatever went on in his life when he was a child in regards to his dad, and also then his mum being a widow. You can kind of see, you know, all that hurt and all that pain. Yeah. But I I wanted to say something about outside, because you're quite right to point that out. He said something at after that 70s show and in into that big prolific period of the 10 years of his life. He spoke with uh Ross Feldon, who actually wrote uh positive reviews about his work, and they became friendly. Ross uh was a was a poet, but he also was an art critic. And they became friendly. Um, Feldon was much younger, and and he says, Well, I'm reading Balter Benjamin, and I'm really taken by his description of allegory, and I think that's what I'm doing. And of course, Felden was like, What? That's so, for lack of a better word, tacky, you know, that doesn't exist in art anymore because there's symbolism, so symbolism is when an image something stands for something else, and then allegories is just a system of of something that is not in the image, right?

Yeah, allegory, yeah, allegorical, yeah.

Allegory, yeah. So he's you know, so he told um uh Gustin, what do you say? I didn't think that's what you do, and Gustan very stubbornly said, Yes, it is. I'm really taken by it. And also, Walter Benjamin talks about the painting as a ruin, and that is really what takes me because that's how I see my paintings. My paintings are flawed.

The paintings as ruined, you said? As a ruin. As a ruin, okay, gotcha.

Yeah, not as ruined, but as flawed, yes. Um, he says, well, it it was forbidden to him to bring anything from the real world to the painting, right? He was creating a fifth dimension with his paintings because it was abstract and it shouldn't reference anything outside. What already, you know, he was called impressionist, so he was already kind of referencing something that people saw that in him, that he had that need. But then he says, Well, I am bringing something that is heterogeneous, let's say, to painting. I'm bringing something of the world into the painting, and the painting is always impure, is always going to have something from the outer world, from out there. And that's really interesting because not only is he talking about politics, but he's also talking about aesthetics. He's saying, I'm bringing cartoons back, baby. You know, I am bringing, and I know a lot of artists who are so excited by his work, especially the little paintings, because I talked about big dimensions, but there's a big there's a big wall with smaller, much smaller paintings that are out of this world cute, but at the same time funny, they are exciting, they are so interesting in their plasticity because they bring that kind of drawing. You know, for me as someone who works with drawing, and I work a lot with people who actually work with comics and and and who take them to the exhibition space and to bring that into art, not like as a sort of a slick way like Listenstein did, but like really in the messiness of it and the small narratives of crazy cat of those aggressive, violent comics and cartoons that the same story repeats itself over and over again. I think that's what he's saying as well. There's no purity. We we live in the world where there's no hierarchies, and everything we look at feeds our brain and and and is imprinted on us, and everything is part of it.

So if we think about so we might need to wrap up, I think.

I think we need to wrap up this time. It's such a pleasure, but we have to at some point.

So if you could have an artwork of his that you could live with in your house, which one would you choose?

Oh, I would choose the painter, definitely. So that's the the painting you describe. Is it the painter or the studio? I think it's the painter. I think it's the painter, right? Where he paints himself. It was in the Marlborough um exhibition, if I'm not mistaken, and it was it's a painter in front of its his a herded figure. So the painted is a KKK person figure, and painting a s a self-portrait as a KKK, so as a herded figure as well. And I thought that was so striking. It is something to denounce violence as if you were external to it. It is something else to say we we are somewhat participating in this, whether we are doing it willingly or not. But it goes even deeper than that, and I think I haven't understood yet what he's trying to say because as a Jewish person, he could have placed himself as the victim, yeah, and he placed himself as the the most horrendous predator you can think of. I I'm still thinking about that and what that means. I remember the Dalai Lama, another controversy around the Dalai Lama recently, but he did say some good stuff, and he said, like, we all have Hitler in us. And he also said that when kids are violent, someone asked him once, you know, when children are violent or aggressive towards each other, what do we do? He said, Well, they have to act out that violence because we have all of us have that in us, but you as the grown-up have to you have to say that that's not good, that you're the one who's setting up the values, so that means we're born with that. Um, I don't know, I'm still trying to figure it out, and I I love that painting because it's huge and it mocks the tradition of painting as well. Um, at the same time, it's it it reveres it, it's very ambivalent, and I love ambivalence, I love complexity, and and yeah, I think that's the one. I would I would have it in a sort of a back room though. I wouldn't want to be looking at it every day, perhaps. I don't know, maybe I would. I know, who knows?

It's a big idea to sort of put in the living room, you know, over the over the fireplace, you know. Um so I think that mine is the line, which is sort of the main image used for the exhibition. So it's there's clouds at the top, there is a giant hand exactly coming down, and its two fingers are holding a pencil that is drawing a giant line across sort of a big landscape. And the reason I like it so much is, and I'm gonna I'm gonna tweak your quote a little bit. This is a quote from John Cage that Philip Gustin liked a lot. And it was when you start working, everybody is in your studio. Oh, yeah. The past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas, all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving one by one, and then you're left completely alone. And then, if you're lucky, even you leave. And, you know, and thank you for correcting that. Yeah, no, you know, that is an idea that is so drawn through his his painting. You know, there's so much that is self-referential in the work that he did. I mean, you're not seeing landscapes, you're not seeing vegetation or animal, it's like it's it all just comes from somewhere deep inside of him. And when when he when I when you see him talking about his own work, particularly in the Michael Blackwood documentary, he talks about all of the destruction. Like, so he he ruins a lot of his own paintings. Like if he doesn't think it feels alive enough, if it doesn't feel like a living thing that is there on the canvas, then he just gets rid of it. And I found that notion just really, really exciting. And when I look at that painting of the line, I can imagine that that is, you know, on his best day in the studio, that's what's happening, is just there. That's what it feels like. It's what it feels like, is there's a third hand there that is, you know, that you are communing with. And I think that's I mean, that that sort of metaphysical idea is really exciting. And yeah, I think that that that piece of work really embodies it. And I mean, I think it would, I would I don't have a wall big enough, of course, so I'd have to buy a different house, but that is the one I'd go for.

Why not?

Exactly.

Well, amazing choice. Yeah, that's a that's a really good choice. Because I also see it as a sort of the weight of being an artist, because as soon as you draw a line, you're marking, and that's it, it's done, sat in stone. I mean, of course not, because you, as you said, he destroyed a lot of his of his paintings. Um, but there's something about marking that is so incredible, and I see it also, I'm really preaching to my choir here, but um, I also see it as um, you know, drawing because it's a stick, you know, it's not a brush, exactly, and that's how he started. And a lot of um people say that when he was hid hiding in his closet, there was this lamp, and that lamp is very often in his paintings.

Yeah, the light bulb, the bare light bulb, and that was in his studio as well. So, yeah, that's a that's a key figure, yeah. Yeah, so yeah, well, this was fun. Yeah, thank you so much, Emily. Thank you. No, this was great. Um, so that's that's Philip Guston, and thank you, Joanna. This has been lovely. Thank you, listeners, for listening. And next time we'll see you with another show and another artist. Take care. Thank you.