Art Review
A show of his works from 1964–1978 focuses on the artist’s transformation and on his wife, poet Musa McKim, as a principal supporter and source of inspiration.
Philip Guston loved poets. In 1968, after he and his wife, the artist and poet Musa McKim, and their teenage daughter moved to Woodstock, New York, he began to radically shift his work from abstraction to a cartoonish world of people and things. This change coincided with his beginning to collaborate with a close circle of poet friends, particularly Clark Coolidge, who lived nearby. From then until his death in 1980, he did drawings for many poems, including ones by Coolidge, Bill Berkson, and William Corbett, and also gave drawings to illustrate covers of inexpensively printed little magazines and poetry books published on a mimeograph machine. His generosity to poets was unmatched by other artists. With few exceptions, he was scorned by critics, artist friends, and the art world. It was the poets who saw the change, supported, and celebrated it, because they agreed with the sentiment expressed by a line from Robert Kelly’s poem, “Finding the measure” (circa 1968): “Style is death.”
Life With P. – Philip Guston: Paintings and Drawings 1964–1978 at Hauser and Wirth brings together work from this time when he pared down his drawings to a line or two and began again. Drawing, particularly the bare line, was central to Guston’s practice. This period of questioning resonated with Coolidge, who wanted to move beyond his early poems, which were sonic and decidedly non-descriptive, without giving up his love for sound. While the exhibition focuses on the transformation that Guston’s work underwent, it calls attention to the principal support he got from McKim as his lifelong partner, inspiration, and a poet in her own right.
Three large easel paintings in one room are about Philip and Musa. In “Untitled” (1976), a large cadmium-red head, set against a dirty grayish-pink ground, is rising from a red horizon, eyes looking up. “Blue Cover” (1977) shows the couple pressed close together in bed, under a plain light blue cover, their heads in the blanket, underscoring their mortality. “Two Hearts” (1978) depicts a black heart pierced by a gray arrow lying on top of a red heart with a row of stitches placed on a low blue pedestal. The black and red hearts are a motif by Guston that I have never seen before; it is heartbreaking, intimate, wounded, and desperate. His use of pinks, blues, and cadmium reds adds a contradictory note of sweetness to his melancholy, desperate subject matter. Lush and forlorn, Guston’s art is full of contradictions.
