Philip Guston: A Life Lived (MBP, 1981)

one always quarrels with what one is i'm a modern painter i suppose my quarrel with modern painting is that i feel that much of modern painting in fact perhaps some of my early work too that it was too easy to elicit a response you know painters could put down some swatches of color and everybody responds i mean you need so much sympathy you know it had such a sympathetic audience i think i wanted more and more specificity in the work there's too much of a love affair in modern art you know i have a personal question which i don't expect you to answer but i am fascinated wondering what happened between 1962 and 1969 particularly in 1964-65 same thing that happened in 1910 what what do you mean to my painting yeah i don't consider myself i think when i paint this or that or that i i'm i'm still in 1940 uh or or 50 or the 50s yeah i mean i don't know what i'm going to do i mean many of these pictures have many pictures underneath that have been scraped out as the older ones do the appearance may change that's why the comments about style sound strange to me you know you're working this style and that style as if you had a choice in the matter what you're doing is trying to stay alive and continue and not die therefore it's circular you're still back there i don't feel any differently now than i did in the early 50s when i was doing so-called non-figurative things i recognize that they're you know i know that they're dissolved and they don't have this figuration and all that well that's but that's really beside the point because what is to the point is the that i'm in the same state but that's not my business manifestation the rest is not my business all i want to do is stay in that state the rest is not my business well actually i've known phillips work for a long time back when i was a student at the audience of chicago in the 1940s i first saw paintings by philip gustin in the old chicago annuals and the american shows at that time it was before abstract expressionism just after world war ii and uh so i was aware of gustin i wasn't aware of his history or where he came from or anything else but simply by looking at paintings like marshall memory i felt that's exactly the way i wanted to work because it was the advanced painting of the time and then i was called into the service and when i was gone from 1952 to 1954 it was during that period of time that museums began to pay a great deal of attention to the new abstract painters to pollock declined augustine the whole rest whole bunch of them so when i came back to school for my master's degree what had been the old augustine was gone and what was the new gustin was there with his particular kind of abstract expressionism or abstract impressionism whatever you want to call it the colors were so attractive the whole thing related in some vague way to the late monet and you could feel a historical attachment i then i i would say in fairness i lost track again as everyone did we got involved with the jasper johns and the robert rauschenbergs and the frank stellas and a few other of the early 60s artists but i wondered always what he was doing and when the marlboro show happened in 1970 i think it was a shocker for all of us in a way not so much a shocker for me because i knew consciously knew his work of the 1930s and the 1940s where not dissimilar things appeared the young boys in in cardboard hats and newspaper hats and fighting with wooden swords weren't too far away from the kind of rendering of the new ku klux klan painting the whole sense of them is so tough and so strong at a time when painting generally appeared to have the signs at least that it was getting burned out one way or another and to see one of the alzheimer's come back with this kind of vigor at that point in his life was irresistible uh though i admitted that at that time i did not know that back in the 1930s he had been dealing with the fan in quite a different way than the marble show and i will admittedly say that as the painting went on through the 70s the shock of the early marble paintings was nothing compared to what happened after that oh [Music] good to see you good to see you you look great you even put on the very exhilarating put on a little weight that was the food on the plane yeah yeah bologna i haven't seen this 25 years i know so did i is that funny memory memory does wonderful things yeah this is the one show i can touch pictures and nobody's going to tell me not to but when you painted that picture that was a very big picture when you're had all these green yeah they're in pretty good shape yeah they were doing pretty good shape they got the frame on the mother child yeah the mother and child that was 17 years old i was studying the renaissance painting as well as the cuticle the picasso of the 20s well you have to come from somewhere you don't come out of the sky holy moses you ready jesus the power base oh here's the here's the knockout that's exactly right like two different shows phil yeah this is the knockout like two different shows okay oh it's overwhelming henry yes it is overwhelming i don't know how much more i can take of it marvelous yeah are you happy oh i'm very happy get it how's jan she's in great shape she's in great shape what's been on my mind you asked this last decade say but primarily the last five six years is the for me the cruciality of a contest of the inevit of to me every art painter artist has his own temperament of course my temperament seems to need or i'm not happy not happy not involved unless i have i call it a contest contest between a subject and the plastic form it will result in and the reason i enjoy the contest is that this contest between the means of painting i mean scale distances location spaces surfaces color that's right sin are thick and so on leads since i constantly change on a single painting i mean scrape out and repaint a lot as you know leads to structures which are surprising i was born in montreal canada and at a very early age family moved to los angeles california where i was reared until about the age of 18 when i left for new york the earliest contact with an art school was about i think the age of perhaps 16 or 17 an art school in california where i'd won a scholarship but i couldn't afford to stay in art school i had to work for a living i worked at odd jobs at the time i drove trucks worked in a cleaning plant doing all sorts of things [Music] and painted at night and weekends i started drawing and painting when i was about 11 or 12. well in the west coast i mean in los angeles there was very little by way of any excitement in art there were they used to call it i think the eucalyptus school of painting landscape painters and so on it's not at all what it is today however there was one source of inspiration there was a doctor walter aaronsberg who had perhaps the only collection of modern art there and it was a very good collection it was a collection that he commissioned marcel duchamp to collect for him and it was the first time i had seen picassos and miros brancusi clay the whole school of paris modern movement was available to me for the first time i was mostly struck by de kiriko they hit me very hard in fact it was seeing these paintings by de kiriko it's what made me resolve to be want to be a painter not resolved but i felt as if i'd come home a high school friend was jackson pollock and my memory is of going with jack he was jack then two old second-hand bookshops and fighting each other to buy old dial magazines there was like you'd find i suppose in any province a small group sort of an underground group of young painters and politically interested people and poets and writers musicians and this was a small rebellious group which we were interested in all the advanced forms of poetry and painting then which would come to us by way of magazines and reproductions never uh an original exhibition and we decided to do a group of frescoes on the scottsboro case which was a hot case of that time you remember this cotsboro nine black boys who were sentenced for life for raping a white girl and it was all circumstantial evidence and so we did a series of frescoes on the scottsburg case which was shown at the john reed club which was in north hollywood at that time the kkk which was very strong you know at that time had an immense membership and they just with lead pipes and guns shot through the eyes the black guy being whipped by a clansman i just thought i'd give you the way it was then in l.a and about 1935 or 36 i went to new york i came to new york and i saw those brick walls i felt as if i'd come home i remember going to the first artist union meeting of 2500 painters and sculptors and this was incredible pollock and his brother had gone to new york the year before and so when i first arrived in new york i lived with them in their loft on eighth street and then gone on the federal art projects in new york on the mural part of it it was to follow up from the ahrensburg collection it was the first time i i was exposed to galleries and the museums in new york and my painting kept changing constantly being influenced by what i was seeing in one of the last murals i had painted a part of this mural which was a section which depicted some children young children fighting on the street with ash cans and various pieces of lumber and sticks and so on and for some reason or another this struck a chord in me and for the next six years or so i painted a number of easel paintings of this subject of children i remember destroying a whole group of pictures in the latter part of this period because they didn't ring true to me and it was a sure sign to me that i wasn't involved with it and i was using the subject as an excuse to make pictures and nothing is more boring in the world than to make pictures i mean what you want is an experience of making something that you haven't seen before in that way when i you know i was studying piero and obviously but when i reached the bottom and working with this i had a year in which i kept destroying paintings and i told this to henry because i didn't want to paint the subject i was through actually i was getting through with this subject yeah right well when i reached down here and i started to paint so i didn't feel it wasn't real to me like if this be not eye or martial memory so then i realized well this relationships have a different meaning and that's why look at that on this and that came next but it was a year later let me show you and that's what happened just for fun if you can block out i felt good about this it felt well not that it was abstract but that it was moving to a place i didn't know where i was going and that's what i enjoy of not knowing where you're moving because that's full of potentials of course but you know those are still the hooded figures so when i reached this point i went to europe for the first time i was on a pre to rome i faked it i i got a pre to roam by submitting these pictures i just wanted to wander the streets alone think about painting and i knew i was headed for the change i didn't know where or what i didn't just stay in rome it's when i traveled all over i saw my pantheon of painters for the first time in the flesh i mean piero masaccio designs i drew out of hotel rooms and i did a lot of drawings like that and then i came back in 49 and began painting as if i were just beginning to paint and from 49 for me up until say 55 was this very intense active period in new york of the what's called the new york school which i much prefer and i think many of the my contemporaries prefer that term to the term abstract expression it's because it simply defines a place and a certain period where a number of artists for many reasons were together at one time de kooning i knew on the wpa projects on the federal art projects rothko and motherwell i met at that time barney newman we all electrified each other i know what i ate that day you know the lunch i ate when the picture finally came off is that true sure and i can remember you know stories when this picture came off in the old cedar bar days about three in the morning i was on 10th street you know the artist's blog and i go in the cedar bar and bill cunning's at the bar with franz klang and i had a oh i'd been on it for i don't know two three weeks and finally came off and you know all those all the surround are just you know they're erasures of other forms and i had this look on my face and bill said looked at me and he he said good strokes based on good strokes so i mean i remember all these little intimate details about each picture uh it seems like uh every five or six years or something like that i begin feeling that i've exhausted something and gradually move into another thing dissatisfaction enter in to the work you've done for the past five years not the problems have to be solved because nothing is ever solved in painting it's a continuous chain that sometimes doesn't go in one line but goes in a serpentine line or in the crooked paths detours which have to be investigated i felt like an explorer who almost got to the top of mount everest and somehow stopped just short and remembered and thought well perhaps maybe i forgot some gear you know i forgot some equipment but in going down to recover this equipment i took some side paths that looked exciting and full of possibilities what equipment did i lack was a stronger contact with the thickness of things i suppose i was reacting against being too imaginative and wanted everything to come from [Music] things the graining of wood the feeling of stone [Music] the corruption of the world the violence in the world nothing new at all i wanted to be more like the art of the past that i liked i mean a montagna painting doesn't care if 500 spectators fall off a cliff you know it's there and so it goes in my loft in new york when i lived in new york and i had this 100-foot grimy loft and full of crap and junk and so on and uh over a firehouse and chelsea and uh i uh i hadn't painted for about a month or two months it didn't feel like it and and my painting was beginning to bore me i mean what i've been doing and i set up a 10-foot canvas not in a stretcher i paint on the wall on a partition wall and squeezed out tons of paint and i'll paint the room i'll paint all this junk and i had an eight hour stint i painted the cracked and broken mirror and the paint table with paint on the floor scraped out you know the oil dirty you know new york loft and the wires and useless wires hanging down and other easels and stacked up drawing i i painted like uh my eye i looked in pain i didn't think at all and i painted the whole thing and in fact i did ended up about eight nine hours i looked back and i thought well jesus i'm a painter you know it looked like a you could look like a boner or you know it was really wonderful a lot of colors and everything and i was doing these black pictures and beginning with these dark heavy black pictures and uh we lived across the street and i woke up musa about four in the morning i said you gotta look at this and of course she came over and she said gee it's wonderful then i uh couldn't sleep because i thought what's happening am i uh am i going to have a new career as a painter my painting changing does this deny all my previous work you know and well to make stories short when i came in the next morning to look at it my euphoria was gone just disappeared and the painting itself looked as if i could just peel it off didn't stick and naturally i destroyed it this desire for more solid forms continued all into the early 60s with these more or less ambiguous images but they were very solid these black pictures and more and more a desire grew to make them even more objective and even recognizable and after i had the exhibition of this work in 66 i started drawing a lot such as the books on the table or the clock hanging on the wall or my shoe on the floor and felt free somehow to make it a recognizable object paint it as if i was seeing the object for the first time unconsciously as i look back on my own work on this early work now it's as if i was preparing the scenario so to speak unconsciously i mean i didn't know that what i was doing it but these fragmentary pictures were all later incorporated in the large work princess these are very early drawings of books that i did years ago in which i wanted to get the thickness and solidity these led into as you can see in the back here some paintings of a book some small paintings of books that and they kept changing their forms as they as i worked into them i mean they became stone tablets and something like this became like some ancient manuscript or something like that um this is a recent one which i wanted to give the feeling of an old an old crumpled book that had been in existence for thousands of years then i began drawing this is a very early drawing i began drawing a subject which i dealt with many years ago of uh hooded figures they're obviously based on [Music] ku klux klan figures but i didn't mean to make a story about the ku klux klan i'm just using them as a i suppose you'd call it a symbol of hooded masked figures i guess the violence of those years oh yes oh indeed you mean of the you mean politically speaking here uh very definitely had a big influence on me fortunate particularly everything the war the the political conventions state of the world everything i don't think is limited just to america either i mean the violence in the world ever since i've been alive which everybody everyone experiences that i moved away from new york in 67 upstate 100 miles upstate and my productivity you know increased new york you've got a good opening to the social life and it's too much you know time i've learned is not actual time for an artist it's continuity of time so if i can have months of just no nothing pulling on me you know nothing ahead or anything that's a wonderful time because you continue from you know you paint all night and sleep and then you can paint you know what i mean you continue in new york i couldn't i was on a crest of the wave when that finally broke about 68. my old interests came surging back and i felt like i felt like fellini i felt like a movie director i could i had to make memos to myself have him around the table playing poker have them drinking beer eating hamburgers and you know someone riding cars and i was attacked you know that goes with it i'm used to it i get the opening of the marlborough show and i did those hoods there i mean the painters would come up to me i remember i have to name them and they'd say now phil what did you have to go and do that for well you have no idea how opinionated people are oh the fine hatchet jobs were done on me it bothered me it bothered me the you know what's happened to this painter was such a nice painter i mean john cage said you were living in such a beautiful country you know he hated the new work uh caged together with other people and some painters didn't talk that i'd known for years wouldn't even talk to me like i had entered into a a covenant with a in a church and i had i was being excommunicated well bill the kooning put it a better way he says what do they think we're all on the same we're on a baseball team you know and bill said what's all this nattering about figuration and politics he says it's about freedom so you know embraced kissed each other and said of course the first thing in ours is only possession is freedom finally that sounds easy doesn't it but it's rough [Applause] you know that story about someone who knew a child and then seeing the child when he's an adult you know says my how you've changed the child doesn't feel he's changed in that 20 years or 15 years he's the subject i'm the subject the first thing always looks good and then you start to doubting it you know nice fronts here this arched one is nice i used to draw these and paint them years ago i used to put them in paintings you know as a background i put in those windows but i love old brick buildings anyway particularly the river uh hudson river buildings well it hasn't changed you know at all since the turn of the century oh i just like the looks of it actually i also like the fact that it's old and it's uninhabited i've done drawings of this something about the fact that it's not used anymore fascinates me in other words it's original intention is vanished so that it exists now as a kind of object like a work of art there's no function whatsoever that fascinates me what do you like about the building clark those metal stars any metal attached to this brick yeah yeah i know the rust i like the way things decay yeah he's a poet you can say it's better than i can huh looks like a jail too yeah oh no philly no parker wouldn't have those nice eyebrows that's what they are eyebrows with teeth if you look at a lot of these it's almost like a movie in a way i mean the sequence yeah yeah the way it is here i don't know how it would be singly one of the hooded figures all like he just dipped his uh jam smeared all over him or something i like this one the back of a head like a real um almost half vegetable have a root or rock have rock or root or something like that yes i wanted like a really bunch of dumb creatures a really dumb just dumb creatures yeah i mean the world we live in you know the real world well somebody was here the other day who had these kind of thoughts this wasn't as good as i really wanted to kick him out i i thought you really don't know you really don't know how it works that's just not the way the thing works i mean he came in here and he looked at all this and yeah this isn't as good that's right and and uh i can't understand or not as good as something i painted last year or and uh because you're if you if if the artist starts evaluating himself yeah it's an enormous block isn't it oh yeah oh yeah do you think of yourself as kind of pessimistic or or in inattitude in terms of say the large subject of your art yeah i don't know if that's maybe that's too large i don't i don't think it was pessimistic i think it's doomed i don't mean i can't just set out to paint doom is that an aspect of say the of the modern condition then yes yes i think so you lived it i think so um then quite a number of paintings in the last five six years of our uh my impulse in doing them were quite frankly autobiographical i mean i was quite conscious and autobiographical in a sense i mean to be very specific uh two or more years ago my musa my wife had a minor stroke and she was in the hospital for quite a while and i became obsessed with her with her situation she became a kind of symbol of just the top of her head her hair parting off the horizon and i'm quite aware that what i'm doing there is using specific in that case specific subject matter look what henry did very nice he put the coats picture not necessarily but you can gather them the two together and then the musa as he calls them pictures that's right this one that one and this one you know uses horseshoes and this one char it was you then it became a horseshoe and then it became you again and a sun and a wheel and that's right exactly was there ever a painter who thought he could make a picture uh i'm not being vain but i mean i i was so amused in pain this it was going to be another leg picture you know you could tell because i painted out this the piece of legs and then i put a door in and then fanciful bugs parading below and they're stamping bugs well that's a human concern thing we always stamp bugs out right but it can become a painting so art can be anything right yeah that's right you talked earlier of muse's situation how did how did your own recent illness affect your work when i uh came home from the hospital i wanted to paint a man dying because that was what it happened to me i mean that was my own experience with this heart attack but i was reading the four quartets at the same time it's a late elliott work and i like i like the four quartets i was aware as i was doing it i didn't want to do it self-portrait too obvious and it wasn't right for me to do that and um i certainly in the middle of it became aware that this looked like elliott and the reason for the ear which is extended like a buddha here was because i just happen to know that eliot became very interested in his later years in in buddhism i mean that's the reason for it and this is this is you at work well more or less the artist yeah the artist at work that's right then the big fat brushes that are his tools his tools that's right a few piles of paint right that's right this is paint down here and the bugs yeah it's a discovered picture i mean it's one of those pictures that are found in the painting for me i don't know when i do things like that i'm aware that it's some kind of bug i mean the impulse is to make some kind of insect but i don't know what kind or i'm sure there isn't an insect that's formed like that i don't know or nor do i know what that is exactly i know this is a stone i meant it to be a stone and once i moved into here i just naturally wanted to have some kind of creature looking over you know man it was fun to paint huh you didn't feel compelled to complete the other side of the ravine there no you mean this part oh no that's open you got it it's amazing the the more picture paint itself in this case too but the more you're in it the more that simultaneity occurs and then of course i mean uh i mean i'm uh very aware that while the brushes are moving this way i wanted this to move this way you know i mean there's this impulses i don't like the word spontaneous but it is in a way your instinct in instinct that having things move opposite directions and up and down and so on i mean once the moon was here it would look terrible i mean it actually wrecked the just felt wrong and i put it very at the very end even cut off felt right i think once i said something to quote myself i made years ago i remember that i was talking to john cage actually those years i said well you go in the studio and everybody is in the studio your friends and the art writers and the museum you know they're all in the studio you're just there yeah painting and one by one they leave you see that's what i told john and one by one they leave until you're really alone and then that's when that's what painting is you wait and you prepare yourself to be there's nobody there and then ideally you leave i was just gonna ask you ideally you leave so then somebody stays behind and does the painting that's right a third hand does it yeah that's right but it's no different than uh i think stravinsky said that he didn't write rites of spring it wrote itself through him yeah well that's not a why statement it's a realistic conclusion in other words you feel as if you're not through until you feel as if you're a medium through which this rhythm is passed through you know otherwise you can't bear it's unbearable otherwise it's wax museum i was thinking about uh not legs i mean they're just the excuse oh well i was thinking about actually when when it came off you know i enjoyed the fact that the top becomes like a top you know like a table top you know a level and um oh i really enjoyed myself painting this with the openings you know where you opened it and where you jam it up and went i mean you're dealing with forces you know and suddenly this is these are charging and this is dangling like a pendulum you know and here it's gathering force like charging out the idea of yeah of a completely separate organism an organism like you'd find in life you know in nature which has its own energy energies of diverse diverse energies and i like the fact that it's um it's happening in front of you rather than i think in that case you feel as if you just can't come in on something that's already happened you know there's no more it's already happened but this is in the midst of happening which excites me it's got nothing to do with feet and shoes nothing nothing at all i'm glad you said that i've been hearing enough about from people who talk about feet and legs and intestinal shoes and now what the painting is all about it seems to me is right here you're very don't you think you're very savvy you know what really became that's what maya shapiro who's a close friend you know the artist durian yeah when he saw this picture he said philip i said absolutely meyer those little openings yes otherwise without you couldn't breathe you would be unbearable when you said that's it you bet when i started this painting a few days ago it went all right it was almost finished in i don't know a day but i came in later that night and well i liked the left part didn't like the right part so i started changing the right part something happened which felt better to me than the left part so then i changed the left part before i knew it the whole painting vanished the painting that was almost finished here didn't look bad it looked alright but it looked almost too good it's as if i hadn't experienced anything with it it was too much of a painting i hadn't experienced enough on it i don't mean that i need to struggle always with it i don't mean that exactly but uh it looked too pat if you know what i mean it it looked too much like uh it felt to me as if it were additions this and that and that and that whereas what i'm always seeking is some great simplicity where the whole thing is just there and can't be this and that and that and that there's something a painting philly there's something death-like about a painting finished a kind of death happens and [Music] i then am inclined to destroy it destruction of paintings is very interesting to me and almost crucial sometimes i find that what i've destroyed five years ago i'll paint now as if when the thing first appears you're not ready to accept it either you know there's some mysterious process at work here which i don't even want to understand i know that if i stopped painting and became a psychologist of the process of making i would probably understand it more but it wouldn't do me any good i don't want to understand it like that analytically but i i know that there's some working out that takes place in time but it's not given to me to completely understand it it's illegal one could argue that a picture where you pause and say well that's my conviction at this time is a compromise because you because then you go on to future pauses that's when you stop that's when pick is finished so in other words all your work is one picture but then it has to do with uh with continuity i mean it was life in other words continuing because if you stop your wax museum i mean i mean if you say well that's it then that's the wax museum their idea so i think it has to do with the gas not running out or might have to do with fear of death i don't know or you know wanting to continue and i realized in looking the show muse and i were talking about it tell this morning because we saw yesterday that that's why i said it's a lie it's not so much a painting well it's a painting show but it's a life you know it's like a life lived i'm curious about what i'm going to do always i'm just curious and curious about failures curious about non-failures or less failures i feel i've opened up a pandora's box of imagery and structures and so on i'm still dreaming about pictures that i want to paint going to paint i do a lot of sketching and it feels endless 500 years from now in the history of art if you could be remembered for just one thing what would you like it to be what would i like it to be what do you hope you mean as a painter i've never thought of that but um i want to be in the same place that goya went to that manet went to that suzanne went to and i wouldn't mind a pat on the back by them saying not bad sonny that's about all pomo now what you can do is try and i don't think it's courage and all those nice words in fact one could make a list of all the negative things that would be more true to say about being compelled to continue painting and they would include things like boredom disgust all the things you're not supposed to think about it's not inspiration it's not inspiration is like for a minute but anger i mean lots of things that you're not supposed to feel uh the best thing i can say about my about summing up about summing i don't like that word summing up uh summing things are constantly opening up for me all these pictures to me are still open i mean they might develop you know one thing is true which it will illustrate uh perhaps a little more clearly i'm talking about is that um when you've had your run in the painting and you feel okay about it it's both your friend and enemy by enemy i mean you want to do it again i've been more productive these last 10 years than i've ever been in my painting life i don't feel finished so it's hard for me to sum up except to say that i wish i were painting what i'm painting now being 30 years old i love painting i mean painting is my life painting is what i live for you

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Keywords: art, kunst, philip guston, philip, guston, diebenkorn, de kooning, basquiat, warhol, morandi, van gogh, abstract expressionism, neo expressionism, montreal, new york, art world, michael blackwood productions, jeff koons, art movie, kunstfilme, mark rothko, jackson pollock, franz kline, cy twombly, joan mitchell, agnes martin, clyfford still, francis bacon, sam francis, julian schnabel, zio ziegler, art scene, hauser & wirth, david zwirner, gagosian, guggenheim, damien hirst, serra

Id: h8eczPx7OZo

Length: 58min 51sec (3531 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 15 2021