Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations 9780520945395, 9780520257160

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Statement in Art News Annual (1944)
Statement in Twelve Americans (1956)
Notes on Bradley Walker Tomlin (1957)
Interview with Sam Hunter (1957)
From the Chicago Panel (1958)
Statement in Nature in Abstraction (1958)
Statement in It Is (1958)
Statement in The New American Painting (1957–58/1959)
Interview with David Sylvester (1960)
From Panel at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art (1960)
Conversation with Bill Berkson (1964)
Interview with Joseph S. Trovato (1965)
Piero della Francesca: The Impossibility of Painting (1965)
Philip Guston’s Object: Conversation with Harold Rosenberg (1965)
Faith, Hope, and Impossibility (1965/66)
Conversation with Joseph Ablow (1966)
Interview with Karl Fortess (1966)
On Morton Feldman (1967)
Conversation with Morton Feldman (1968)
The Image (1969)
On Piero della Francesca (1971)
Talk at Yale Summer School of Music and Art (1972)
Conversation with Louis Finkelstein (1972)
Conversation with Clark Coolidge (1972)
Talk at Yale Summer School of Music and Art (1973)
On the Nixon Drawings (1973)
Ten Drawings (1973)
On Survival (1974)
On Drawing (1974)
Conversation with Harold Rosenberg (1974)
Talk at “Art/Not Art?” Conference (1978)
From Panel at “Art/Not Art?” Conference (1978)
Interview with Jan Butterfield (1979)
Interview with Mark Stevens (1980)
Interview with Joanne Dickson (1980)
Studio Notes (1970–78)
Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Index

Citation preview

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P H I L I P G U S TO N C O L L E CT E D W R I T I N G S , L E CT U R E S , A N D C O N V E R S AT I O N S

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Philip Guston with students at Boston University, 1978.

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Philip Guston Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations E D I T E D B Y C L A R K CO O L I D G E W I T H A N I N T R O D U C T I O N B Y D O R E A S H TO N

U N I V E R S I T Y O F CA L I FO R N I A P R E S S BERKELEY

LOS ANGELES

LONDON

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University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2011 by The Regents of the University of California All writings and conversations by Philip Guston © The Estate of Philip Guston. All artworks by Philip Guston and photographs of him are © The Estate of Philip Guston; courtesy of the McKee Gallery, New York. Every effort has been made to identify the rightful copyright holders of material not specifically commissioned for use in this publication and to secure permission, where applicable, for reuse of all such material. Credit, if and as available, has been provided for all borrowed material either on-page, on the copyright page, or in an acknowledgment section of the book. Errors or omissions in credit citations or failure to obtain permission if required by copyright law have been either unavoidable or unintentional. The author and publisher welcome any information that would allow them to correct future reprints. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Guston, Philip, 1913–1980. Philip Guston : collected writings, lectures, and conversations / edited by Clark Coolidge ; with an introduction by Dore Ashton. p. cm.—(Documents of twentieth-century art) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-520-23509-0 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-520-25716-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Guston, Philip, 1913–1980—Written works. N6537.G87A35

I. Coolidge, Clark, 1939–

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THE DOCUMENTS OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY ART JAC K F L A M , G E N E R A L E D I TO R R O B E R T M OT H E R W E L L , FO U N D I N G E D I TO R Volumes available from University of California Press: Art as Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, edited by Barbara Rose Memoirs of a Dada Drummer by Richard Huelsenbeck, edited by Hans J. Kleinschmidt Matisse on Art, Revised Edition, edited by Jack Flam German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism, edited by Rose-Carol Washton Long Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, edited by Jack Flam Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary by Hugo Ball, edited by John Elderfield Pop Art: A Critical History, edited by Steven Henry Madoff The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, edited by Stephanie Terenzio Conversations with Cézanne, edited by Michael Doran Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations, edited by Alan Wilkinson Primitivism and Twentieth-Century Art: A Documentary History, edited by Jack Flam with Miriam Deutch The Cubist Painters, Guillaume Apollinaire, translated, with commentary, by Peter Read The Writings of Robert Motherwell, edited by Dore Ashton with Joan Banach Russian and Soviet Views of Modern Western Art: 1890s to Mid-1930s, edited by Ilia Dorontchenkov, translated by Charles Rougle Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations, edited by Clark Coolidge, with an introduction by Dore Ashton

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The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Richard and Harriett Gold Endowment Fund in Arts and Humanities of the University of California Press Foundation.

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CO N T E N T S Preface. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Acknowledgments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii Introduction by Dore Ashton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Statement in Art News Annual (1944) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Statement in Twelve Americans (1956) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Notes on Bradley Walker Tomlin (1957). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Interview with Sam Hunter (1957) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 From the Chicago Panel (1958). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Statement in Nature in Abstraction (1958) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Statement in It Is (1958). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Statement in The New American Painting (1957–58/1959) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Interview with David Sylvester (1960). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 From Panel at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art (1960) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Conversation with Bill Berkson (1964). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Interview with Joseph S. Trovato (1965). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Piero della Francesca: The Impossibility of Painting (1965) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Philip Guston’s Object: Conversation with Harold Rosenberg (1965) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Faith, Hope, and Impossibility (1965/66) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 Conversation with Joseph Ablow (1966) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 Interview with Karl Fortess (1966) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 On Morton Feldman (1967) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 Conversation with Morton Feldman (1968) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 The Image (1969) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 On Piero della Francesca (1971). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 Talk at Yale Summer School of Music and Art (1972) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150 Conversation with Louis Finkelstein (1972). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 Conversation with Clark Coolidge (1972). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184 Talk at Yale Summer School of Music and Art (1973) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212 On the Nixon Drawings (1973) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228 Ten Drawings (1973) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230 On Survival (1974) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231 On Drawing (1974) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253

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Conversation with Harold Rosenberg (1974) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269 Talk at “Art/Not Art?” Conference (1978). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278 From Panel at “Art/Not Art?” Conference (1978) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287 Interview with Jan Butterfield (1979) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 290 Interview with Mark Stevens (1980) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 298 Interview with Joanne Dickson (1980) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 304 Studio Notes (1970–78) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 308 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317 List of Illustrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321

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P R E FAC E Philip Guston was a talker, often an elaborate one, words being crucial to him. From big dinnertime storytelling hilarities to early-hour red-eyed assaults on the barricades of just what could be said about art, he was always the last one out of the conversation. He would talk not only of the impossibility of art but of the impossibility of talking about art at all. So, naturally, that’s just what we had to do, the talking leading us helplessly away and into a labyrinth of interesting complications/contradictions. But it all finally related to the pictures. Out there in the studio, where we knew we would end up late into the early hours, the long cement room eerily quiet for all that life on the canvas, stories would rise from the images, the lines of the forms opening cracks between our words to reveal unforeseen spaces full of stranger words, further pictures, bred out of our broodings so that finally there seemed no longer any words in the air, no more paint on the walls, and we could begin to glimpse those disembodied shapes that lurk behind all art. That parallel world where the momentarily impossible becomes normally present. Given his great respect for writers, Philip was a continual reader and rereader, a worrier of points, certain authors having made a great difference to him: Kafka, Babel, Beckett, the French surrealist poets, Eliot, Kierkegaard, even Henry Green. A line that was new to him would light him up, and he would later refer to it. He was a sometime writer as well, no less serious for that. Even though none have been found, I believe him when he says he wrote “hundreds of pages” on Piero one winter when he was not able to paint, finally whittling them down to the few paragraphs that were published. His letters also became occasions to further the investigation, to delve more deeply into the daily process. The one to Ross Feld included in the Minnesota talk is a fair example (see p. 280). He also possessed a workable understanding of the poet’s sense of words as material, allowing my conversations with him to probe further than they otherwise could have. The first time we met, in the roaring context of a crowded Studio School New Year’s party, he soon said to me, “But of course words are your métier.” From there on there was no gulf between us as poet and painter. Different materials, same project. I remember a time when Antonioni’s China documentary was shown on public television and Philip began to imagine life as a painter during the Cultural Revolution. He would have a simple room above a busy street, and whatever they told him to paint, agitprop poster or shoe shop sign, he would do it. It wouldn’t be a bad life, he thought. Also, what with the madness of our recent rulers, the following returns to mind. A Manhattan Project mathematician and chamber music string player he had not seen since his Midwest teaching days turned up in New York City with a tale. He had just been somewhere in the Southwest, where he had witnessed an underground city of Strangelovian proportions, hollowed out by fission bombs, to be populated by geneti-

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cally select humans, with an eye to surviving the coming nuclear conflict. And this was no spiraling wingnut, Philip said. He believed the man. The sources of his inspiration, the depths of his conversation, reach all the way down the line of succession to the beginnings of art. He speaks to the cave artist making his initial marks, the late Renaissance pioneers of the plane, the presences of Rembrandt’s actors, the wall creatures of Goya, El Greco’s prolonged saints and their cities, Manet’s trust in that final stroke, Cézanne’s nature in its manner of operations, Chirico’s shadowers of the arcades, the cubist etchers and the quickness of Picasso’s monumental volumes, Soutine’s gutsy rush, Beckmann’s masks, Mondrian’s holy erasures, and the nothing-for-granted questing of his New York comrades Kline and Pollock and de Kooning. Whatever the measure, his work is what painting (colored matter and line, eye and imagination) had become in all its spreadings and doubts, blind alleys and glories, by the late twentieth century. The very evolutionary size of it all. Maybe the reason he so influenced younger painters in his last phase was that he never ducked any of the problems of painting in his time, or any time. He only railed against, and tirelessly beat back, what he called the shibboleths, those journeyman limiters, the tighteners of the historical scope. He couldn’t conscience the “can-nolongers.” In his game you could never call for a new deck. He inhabited a Renaissance cave full of Bud Fisher furniture, animated by Picasso mothers and Fellini oddities (he told me he dreamed of directing his own company: a midget, an elephant . . .), which cast Chirico shadows on all our present-tense matters. As his friend Willem de Kooning once put it, “It’s never right, because it doesn’t have everything in it. So you keep going until you’ve put everything you can into it.” At the last, Guston does bring everything to bear, in an order of his own devising, ever strange and generative, generous as any Piero.

I have found a chronological arrangement of these pieces to be unavoidable, though Guston’s thought continually proposes, reinvents, and revisits its own orders. He engages his faithful masters in the timeless arguments of painting, the unshakable trials that riddle these pages, and the reader will soon become familiar with these. But there are always the variations of a new try, another day’s fresh session of work and resultant reactions unforeseen. Other contexts, leaps, and shortcuts from “yes” to “but.” I have thought to delete only those occasions when he told the same stories nearly word for word, often because of nervousness and the need for a jump-start in front of yet another group. I have chosen not to include several whole pieces: the Guston-Rosenberg conversation “On Cave Art, Church Art, Ethnic Art and Art,” because it is mainly a lecture by Rosenberg with only a few brief comments by Guston; the transcript of the Michael Blackwood film Philip Guston: A Life Lived, because it repeats a great deal of what is said elsewhere, any fresh material suffering too much from the absence of visuals;

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and the talk “The Mirror,” given at Harvard in 1967, because it reproduces the aforementioned Ross Feld letter down to its very phrasing. Given the concerns of the present volume there are some unfortunate gaps. Nothing from the thirties, almost nothing from the forties—I understand that there are several extensive correspondences from that period, which I hope will be included in a future Selected Letters. There is not even enough from the fifties to fully satisfy. The intriguing Joan Pring “Interview with Philip Guston in His Studio at 113 East Eighteenth Street, NYC, June 25, 1957” could not be located, despite the efforts of many. Things do pick up in the sixties and seventies once portable tape recorders have become ubiquitous; the classes and slide talks begin to be available, and a retrospective atmosphere is noticeable. The slide talks posed a problem, as it was sometimes not possible to identify the painting or drawing being referred to. But I have included these, not wanting to lose any of Guston’s spontaneous and often fascinating reactions and elaborations. When possible I have indicated the title of the work. When not, I have trusted his comments, and the fact that he runs through the work chronologically, to set the context for at least the period of work being disucssed. Those wanting a parallel visual reference might wish to consult one of the large Guston show catalogs, such as The Drawings of Philip Guston, essay by Magdalena Dabrowski (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1988), or Philip Guston Retrospective, edited by Michael Auping (New York: Thames and Hudson with Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 2003). In the last three interviews, I have let some obvious repetitions stand to show what was still on his mind near the end. The unknowable, ineffable, irreducible, even unnamable (the Beckett novel rang for him), all possible handles for the enigmas of those masters he pondered continuously, part of the fascination being that they wore their masks so fittingly. Later on, he remarked, wonderfully, that he was “just beginning to get what it was those guys were doing.” Over the years since his passing, I have had many an occasion to wonder how Philip would react to some product of my current enthusiasms: Just exactly what would he say about that? In the process of transcribing the tapes for this book, I have been given the unexpected blessing of an immersion in many further hours of his voice, its passions and playfulness, that tireless dedication to the daily work. The conversation continues. C.C.

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AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S I must start by thanking Musa Mayer, Bill Berkson, and Dore Ashton for proposing me for this job. I hope the finished book comes close to what you all had in mind. Musa Mayer, again, for giving me access to her father’s estate and for so many kindnesses along the way. David McKee, Philip’s last dealer, for his generosity and some easements in the art world at large. Bill Berkson, again, for so much over a long friendship, and for never doubting that I could complete this project. At the Museum of Modern Art Archives: Janice Ecdahl, Mark Swartz, and Michelle Harvy. At the New York Studio School library: Fran O’Neil, Erin Koch, and especially Charlotte Priddle. At the Fort Worth Museum: Pam Hartley. At the Archives of American Art: Paul Karlstrom. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Twentieth Century Department: Magdalena Dabrowsky. Many thanks also to Larry Merrill, Barbara Monk Feldman, Damon Krukowski, B. H. Friedman, David Schapiro, Archie Rand, Bill Corbett, and Harry Cooper. Gratitude to Charlene Woodcock, my first editor at University of California Press, and to Stephanie Fay, my present one. Also to Sue Heinemann, copyeditor extraordinaire, for the final touches. Nearly last but not least, Larry Fagin for legwork in New York City beyond the call. And never last, Susan always.

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I N T R O D U CT I O N D O R E A S H TO N

“Create, artist! Don’t talk!” the aging Goethe counseled his contemporaries in 1815. The painter Degas seconded the old sage when he told the young poet Paul Valéry that when the muses finished their day’s work they didn’t talk, they danced. But then, as Valéry vividly recalled, Degas went on to talk of his own art for hours on end. Painters have always talked, and some, such as Delacroix, Mondrian, Kandinsky, Malevich, and Motherwell, also wrote. Certain painters, Goya, for example, also deftly used language to augment their imagery. Like Degas, who liked to talk with poets and even engaged the inscrutable Mallarmé, Guston liked talking with poets, and they with him. Among his most attentive listeners was his friend the poet Clark Coolidge, whose ear was well attuned to Guston’s sometimes arcane utterances and who has selected some of the painter’s most eloquent sessions of writing and talking, resulting in a mosaic of a lifetime of thought. I was also one of Guston’s interlocutors for almost thirty years. I recognize with pleasure Coolidge’s unfurling of Guston’s cycles of talk and non-talk; his amusing feints and dodges when confronted with obtuse questioners, his wondrous bursts of language when he felt inspired, his sometimes playful contrariness, his satisfaction in being a provocateur, and his consistent preoccupation with serious aesthetic questions throughout his working life as a painter. Above all, I recognize Guston’s fundamental rebelliousness, which manifested itself not only in his artistic preferences but in his politics, his choice of artistic battlefields, and his intimate studio life. His intensity was mesmerizing. I once heard someone ask Guston whom he had studied with—meaning, of course, which painters—and he shot back: with Dostoyevsky and Kafka. Guston was, proudly, an autodidact. His recital of his early experiences as a burgeoning artist and rebel always began with his life as a recalcitrant schoolboy in Los Angeles, where his parents had brought him from Canada at the age of six. By the time he was twelve he was already drawing obsessively, prompting his mother to give him a full year’s correspondence course from the Cleveland School of Cartooning for his thirteenth birthday. After about three lessons he found instructions about cross-hatching tedious and quit— one of his earliest acts of rebellion. He already craved broader horizons. He found them when he entered high school, where he and his eventually famous classmate Jackson Pollock found a sophisticated teacher who inducted them into the world of higher arts, both literary and painterly. But Guston’s inherent rebelliousness soon brought him into conflict with the school’s authorities, whom he and his willing partner in transgression, Pollock, had pilloried in a pamphlet. Both were expelled. Pollock eventually was readmitted, but Guston never went back.

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Guston was not quite sixteen when he was expelled from high school. Soon after, he won a year’s scholarship to the Otis Art Institute, where again he could tolerate formal education for only a few months. He dropped out and embarked on a hectic round of menial jobs, encounters with other nonconformists, and voracious reading. By that time, the Depression was upon the United States, inciting young intellectuals like Guston to ponder their social and political situation. Guston’s response was to turn his work toward a public idiom derived from his study of the Mexican muralists and his increasingly deep study of Renaissance painting, undertaken largely in the evenings at the public library. By the time he was eighteen, Guston had packed in many diversified experiences. He had also, precocious as always, had his first one-man exhibition in the only avant-garde bookshop and gallery in Los Angeles. He showed, among others, accomplished paintings depicting Ku Klux Klan conspirators in a style visibly influenced both by Renaissance painting and Giorgio de Chirico, the modern painter who most moved him. All his life he liked to quote Chirico’s motto inscribed in Latin on an early self-portrait: “What shall I love if not the enigma?” (p. 126). Enigma is a curious word apparently derived from ancient Greek, in which it meant “to speak darkly.” Those familiar with the arc of Guston’s life’s work will recognize that, despite moments of lyrical flight, especially in the delicate abstractions of the early 1950s, there was a consistent undertone of darkness. His shifts in idiom reflect not the mere enfant-terribilisme of the ostentatious rebel but a sense of tragedy sponsored by his keen observation of his life’s circumstances. Enigma was his true muse. Naturally, then, his inner dialogue often brought him to the enigmatic climate of thought he revered in the writing of Franz Kafka. In one of the earliest citations in this anthology (p. 13), he presents his interviewer with a quotation from Kafka’s notebooks: “The true way is along a rope that is not spanned high in the air, but only just above the ground. It seems intended more to cause stumbling than to be walked along.” (This calls to mind a disconcerting late etching by Goya, Bailando en una cuerda floja, circa 1824, depicting an equestrienne dancing on her white horse, who is balanced on a very low tightrope.) Since Goya was one of Guston’s important touchstones, I like to imagine that he knew this strange print, just as he knew almost by heart all of Kafka’s oeuvre that had been translated into English. Years later, toward the end of his life, Guston would again allude to Kafka, calling Kafka his greatest influence. He reiterated the gist of the early note: “Sometimes I think the greatest thing about Kafka was an achievement of a consciousness that he could hover above his own involvement.” Guston’s loyalty to his early reading of Kafka was buttressed by his concourse with other artists in New York, where he arrived in 1936 and remained during the turbulent years of the WPA, until 1941. On the project, as they used to call the immense adventure of the New Deal, which gathered and paid artists as respectable members of society for the first time in America, Guston met and engaged in talk with most of the painters who would later gain renown as abstract expressionists. By all counts there were furious discussions, as there would be again after the war when the Artists’ Club, a weekly talkfest sponsored by the artists who were rapidly becoming known as the New

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York School, got under way. It was during the early 1950s that Guston again met up with his old comrades from the project and with others, such as Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko. With them Guston could share his deep allegiances in poetry and literature during mutual studio visits and long nights of talk. With Motherwell and Rothko particularly, Guston could share his literary enthusiasms, above all his engagement with Kafka, who in turn led these painters to Kierkegaard—one of Kafka’s great enthusiasms. It became apparent to his friends that Guston had taken Kafka’s attitude toward himself for his own. How often Guston declared, as he did to the poet Bill Berkson in 1964, “The act of painting is like a trial where all the roles are lived by one person” (p. 35). And again, a year later: “The canvas is a court where the artist is prosecutor, defendant, jury, and judge” (p. 53). He said more than once that when he thought of his studio he thought of it as a court. In his conversation with Coolidge in 1972, he again brought up his analogy—“in painting, creating, it’s a court”—and he qualified it: “But unlike a court, you’re the plaintiff, the defendant, the lawyer, the judge, and the jury” (p. 210). This aesthetic judiciary, concocted by Kafka and taken over by Guston, was already apparent in one of Guston’s early public statements in which he adopted legal diction: “What is seen and called the picture is what remains—an evidence” (p. 10). Guston often said his movement as a painter was like that of an inchworm, so that these intermittent reiterations of the deepest preoccupations of his adult life must be taken as the authentic scaffolding of his creative life. The full range of Guston’s culture is amply illustrated in his talks over the years in which he referred not only to his comrades-in-arms among painters but also to artists working in every medium—poets, novelists, composers, and essayists. His concourse with other painters had intensified during the years between his return to New York, in 1950, and his permanent removal to Woodstock, New York, in 1967. By the mid-1950s, he and his closest allies had been identified, and to some extent celebrated, by the rapidly expanding art world. In 1955, when Guston joined the Sidney Janis Gallery, his fellow artists included close friends such as Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Robert Motherwell. Between exhibitions they would meet in each other’s studios, respond to each other’s work, and indulge in frequent nightlong conversations at the Cedar Tavern. Guston, whose youth in Los Angeles had brought him into close proximity with the movie industry (he had even earned money as an extra on several occasions) added long excursions to Forty-second Street to his studio routine. I can remember going with him to the theaters there specializing in foreign films, sitting through one double feature, going out for a hotdog, and returning for another double feature. Guston never did anything by halves. Among Guston’s most significant interlocutors was the composer Morton Feldman. Guston, in his previous wanderings as a teacher in universities in Iowa and St. Louis, had exposed himself to classical music and learned something of its history. He especially valued an introduction to late Beethoven quartets. His wide-ranging acquaintances in New York had, early on, included the composer John Cage, who had introduced him to Feldman. During the early 1950s, Feldman was rapidly gaining a reputation as a unique

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and daring composer. He, like Guston, was an agile conversationalist. The two formed a very close friendship—so close that Feldman was among the few who were welcome to hover in the studio as Guston worked. It is not surprising that when Feldman later wrote about Guston’s work of the 1950s he would implicitly compare him to Beethoven, noting that his brief motifs “disappear almost immediately into the larger idea” (Morton Feldman, “After Modernism,” Art in America, November–December 1971). The camaraderie among painters and composers was rather unusual in New York during the 1950s and 1960s, creating a robust cultural situation of mutual aid. I can remember concerts of John Cage, Stefan Wolpe (one of Feldman’s teachers), and Feldman himself, in which most of the audience consisted of painters and their wives or girlfriends. The coming together of kindred spirits led to an audacious attempt to counter the increasingly academic vanguardism burgeoning in universities after the war. The painter Mercedes Matter, one of Guston’s closest allies, and a few other artists decided to create a new art school that would be pure, uncorrupted by grades and degrees. Both Guston and Feldman were active supporters when the New York Studio School opened in 1964, and Feldman later even did a stint as director. Many of the public events—usually informal conversations modeled on the debates at the earlier Artists’ Club—were, and still are, magnets for serious practitioners in the arts. Fortunately, these sessions were sometimes recorded; they became key documents in the history of American art. Coolidge includes several of them in this anthology. In their spontaneous colloquies, an attentive reader can discern the rich compost from which these artists—now mature and well established—had grown. Often the talk went around and around, and in the circuitry ideas were freely borrowed or elaborated. One instance: in a symposium moderated by the distinguished critic Harold Rosenberg—another of Guston’s important conversational intimates—Guston said: “I believe it was John Cage who once told me, ‘When you start working, everybody is in your studio—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 you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave’ ” (p. 30). Perhaps it was indeed Cage who told Guston the story, but Cage himself very probably found the image in a note of Wallace Stevens, one of Guston’s favored poets, intended for a lecture on Picasso. Stevens has Picasso sitting with several men before beginning a painting; one by one the others leave, and Picasso picks up his brush and begins painting. In the end, then, even the circularity of these public discussions, particularly at the Studio School, always served to expand the range of references that, in turn, exposed the deepest preoccupations of these singular artists. How Guston coveted significant allusions is evident in the frequency with which he mentions a conversation with Rosenberg in 1965, in which the critic offered him what would become for Guston a key concept: “You know Mallarmé’s formula for the poet? He calls him ‘un civilisé édénique,’ a civilized first man” (p. 48). Guston thought that was “marvelous”—one of his favorite exclamations—and pulled it into his own interior thought, to be retrieved frequently thereafter. His foraging in literary sources was ex-

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tensive. Everyone who spent any time with Guston soon discovered his familiarity with all the original sources of modernism, among them Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, and T. S. Eliot. He could cite them unforgettably, as when he explained Baudelaire’s idea of modernism. The poet commanded, “Be modern at all costs,” Guston said, and then, with his own unusual capacity for heightened metaphor, explained: “And he meant modern like a sardine can in a poem.” During the war in Vietnam, Guston’s ruminations became more somber, especially after the ruthless suppression of protesters at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, which he had watched on television. He turned more frequently to satire and caricature, as in his fierce skewering of Nixon in 1971. As I recall from my frequent conversations and correspondence with him, he thought more often about precursors in painting who had expressed pessimism in their work, Goya above all. As he said in 1974, he was impressed by Goya’s late so-called black paintings in the Prado, and he spoke of “the monstrosity of humanity, the distortion of their faces, and the way he piled them all up in these pyramids, in these hills, these big black shapes and threatening clouds” (p. 235). Shades of Goyesque darkness began to appear in Guston’s own paintings in the mid-1960s. In a large one-man exhibition at the Jewish Museum in 1966, he had shown canvases of turbid grays and blacks with strange masses suggesting human heads. The show was greeted with scorn by much of the press and even by some younger painters who had rejected the moody psychological climate found in many paintings of the abstract expressionists and had turned to the sunnier vistas of so-called pop artists and the surface enchantments of the op artists. It was around this troubled time Guston turned his thoughts more often to the late work of Rembrandt, whose world was the very opposite of the bright-colored world of the pop artists. Guston’s musings about Rembrandt always emphasized the mystery inherent in the master’s use of impasto. In the 1960s, for example, he told David Sylvester, a British critic of keen sensibility, that in Rembrandt “there’s an ambiguity of paint being image and image being paint which is very mysterious” (p. 26). More than a decade later, he again considered Rembrandt’s late work and tried to describe its effect: “What he’s done is to eliminate any plane, anything between that image and you.” Guston’s allusion to the plane, sometimes called the picture plane, is extremely important in his aesthetic evolution. He sustained a prolonged quarrel with what he called the shibboleths of modern art, above all the demand that artists respect the plane. His dissent is one of the most important leitmotifs in his writing and talking. His attentive study of cubism while still a very young painter had given him the tools he needed to dismantle the modern tradition of flatness and to retrieve older conventions for indicating depth. In the 1960 interview with Sylvester, he insisted on the “imaginary” plane and the “metaphysical plane that painting exists on” (p. 21). Almost twenty years later, he reacted to a young painter’s statement, “What you see is what you see,” by calling it a popular and “melancholy” cliché, remote from his own concerns. He declared: “The painting is not on a surface, but on a plane which is imagined” (p. 278). Despite his disdain for the clichés of modernism and its stultifying obedience to the

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law of the picture plane, Guston could always respond to the modern giants who were at the origin of planar painting, most especially to Mondrian, who, for Guston, in one of his public discourses, was “that magnificent crank” (p. 119). I’ve always thought that Guston was concerned with Mondrian because he himself was engaged with certain propositions that considered the cosmic aspect of painting, or the quest for an imaginary wholeness. Mondrian, Guston remarked, “had the ability to seize the total” (p. 35). Guston tried to describe Mondrian’s strength on many occasions. A few months before his death, Guston again delved into the strange power of Mondrian’s paintings. He attributed Mondrian’s pictorial prowess wholly to his “passion.” As a man of passion himself, Guston had no trouble recognizing it in others. Also, he was no stranger to the desire to encompass the many in the one. “Reality is one,” he told Feldman (p. 103), and guardedly described his own departure from abstraction, in which frequently the “multitudinous” resigned. “There’s no other way but then to get involved in the many . . . in order again to arrive at the one. Because one’s total hunger is always for the one” (pp. 103–4). During the late 1960s, outward events had made deep incursions in Guston’s thought. They had much to do with the renunciation he announced in the shocking and now legendary exhibition of 1970. Immured in his Woodstock studio, Guston had begun to draw and paint grotesques, recognizable things—shoes, cars, junk (which he called “crappola”), and, as he always said, anything at all he saw around. Sometimes they were single images presented with deliberate, primitive-looking simplicity, such as a single lightbulb or an open book. As he said to me in 1958, he did not want “emotion or ambiguity to stick with me like seaweed.” It was around that time that old figures in his repertory began to reappear—hooded Ku Kluxers, now seen riding around in comic-strip cars, or, equally comical, showing up in Guston’s own studio, sometimes painting. The clock, reminiscent of Chirico, became an ominous avatar, as it had been metaphorically long before: “Painting is a clock that sees each end of the street as the edge of the world,” he said around 1957–58 (p. 19), painting at the same time an abstraction that he titled The Clock. During the late 1960s he repeatedly talked of his compelling need to cope with “tangible things.” And on various occasions he referred to “the thickness of things” that he now craved to portray. Probably he had read in one of the journals he regularly perused, particularly Partisan Review, of the French poet Francis Ponge, whose mantra was that he was exclusively interested in the thickness of things. Or perhaps he remembered William Carlos Williams’s famous dictum, “No reality but in things.” In the new paintings and drawings he showed in 1970, Guston took back the prerogative of past painters and openly declared his will to be a storyteller or, better, a movie director. On the day the exhibition opened—clearly the bombshell he had intended—his stunned viewers were properly appalled. The critic of the New York Times wrote in a rage, under a headline that declared Guston a mandarin pretending to be a stumblebum. There were a few, however, who recognized the seriousness of Guston’s volte-face.

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His intimates at the time, including the writer Philip Roth, were also deeply alarmed by the exceedingly violent turn of events in the world. To them, Guston’s new work was absolutely appropriate. For Guston himself—observing from the fastness of his remote studio—the war in Vietnam and the riot in Chicago called up the most horrifying events of his own lifetime, particularly the Holocaust. In the 1968 conversation with Morton Feldman recorded at the Studio School, Guston opened with a long description of what was on his mind—a book he had been reading about the concentration camp Treblinka. It was one of the few camps, he said, where there had been a successful escape. He described the inmates arguing interminably about the meaning of an escape and then spoke especially of a doctor “who makes this magnificent exegesis about why do it, trying to convince this small band of the others.” The doctor put forward that the only reason to escape, Guston said, “is to bear witness,” to which Guston himself added, “Well, that’s the only reason to be an artist: to escape, to bear witness” (p. 81). From then on, Guston’s work can be seen as an extended act of bearing witness, not only to the horrors of the world but also to its occasional ridiculous or risible turning, its moments of pleasure, and above all its diversity. Hidden behind his continual probing of the world is his primary question: What has it to do with the act of creation? Guston never forgot his urgent need to question the act of painting and what might be called a philosophical inquiry into its origins. In his more rhapsodic commentaries he declares that art is magic. Sometimes he used to call the painter an alchemist. Sometimes he would tread on dangerous ground (at least he thought so) and announce: “But I do have a faith that it is possible to make a living thing, not a diagram of what I have been thinking: to posit with paint something living, something that changes each day” (p. 54). But if he thought that he could make a living thing, he quickly challenged himself, and all artists, by bringing up the conundrum: Who has the right to make a living thing? In this question, which can be traced back to ancient sources, Guston revealed his philosophical bent. In my experience, very few painters have gone so far in their selfquestioning as Guston, and I believe he was unique in worrying so seriously about that Greek curse, hubris. The dialectical nature of his inner thought, his concern with the exposed and the hidden, which he discussed at length with Clark Coolidge, prodded him to ponder the notion of the demiurge. He had long before acquired the habit of seeing something diabolical in the painter’s quest. He often remarked, as any reader of this anthology will find, that painting was “the devil’s work.” But at the end of his life he thought concertedly about the myth of the demiurge. Since in biblical sources the demiurge was identified as a workman god (God himself was too lofty to dirty his hands making things or beings), Guston could easily play with the notion that the working artist aspired to be a demigod and, as such, would have to experience a peculiar kind of hubris—Guston’s own idiosyncratic hubris. This was one of his most distinctive leitmotifs, expressed in another way when he spoke of “a third hand” doing the work. That metaphorical hand becomes shorthand for describing an experience every true painter knows—that of transcending himself and his

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tools, as if following some ancient imperative. Sometimes Guston couched these thoughts in terms of the Sung painters, whom he deeply admired. He thought they did “something thousands and thousands of times . . . until someone else does it, not you, and the rhythm moves through you” (pp. 284–85). Picasso knew the experience and late in his life declared: Painting is stronger than I am, it makes me do what it wants. Guston says very much the same thing when he repeatedly refers to the “third hand” that usually takes over when the painting is nearing completion. In his very last interview, Guston again brought up the issue of hubris: “We’re not supposed to meddle with the forces—God takes care of that,” but “the hubris in you has to deal with a very strong compulsion ‘to make’ ” (p. 307). Many saw Guston’s last works as fundamentally tragic. Gone were the comic slapstick scenes that evoked a smile, albeit a wry smile. Now his own baleful eye, which had appeared in his paintings even in his youth (for instance, in the important work If This Be Not I, where it can be seen peering above a mask in the middle ground), is everywhere, surveying scenes of desolation. The painter, his paintings, his wife, and his friends were often depicted as a seething mass of heads, drowning. Always the rebel, Guston, in his quest to test the limits of art, wound up deeply distrusting the art of his time. As he said to Coolidge in 1972, during their penetrating discussion of Melville, whom they both felt had blasted many literary taboos, Melville was “somewhere else.” For Guston, that somewhere else was, he suspected, beyond art. His paradoxical view of the artist is made clear in the same dialogue when he alludes to one of his literary heroes, Samuel Beckett: “I think the greatness of Beckett, really, is that deep and lifelong profound disgust with art. And, paradoxically, that’s why he became a great artist” (p. 209). But as Guston well knew, he was himself an artist and would die an artist, one who perfectly understood Unamuno’s tragic sense of life. But he also knew the “self-trust” that he said Picasso had taught him. In the late notes in the last pages of this book, we find his acknowledgment of the great twentieth-century master: “Picasso, the builder, re-peopled the earth—inventing new beings. We believe his will” (p. 313). And I can believe Guston’s will. I am gratified to see that the last entry in this book is an undisguised testament to his all-consuming love of painting, of art: “Thank God for yellow ochre, cadmium red medium, and permanent green light” (p. 316).

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S TAT E M E N T I N A R T N E W S A N N U A L 1944

In an article titled “Types—By American Artists,” the 1944 Art News Annual asks sixteen artists (including Isaac Soyer, William Zorach, Isabel Bishop, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi) what sort of models, or “types,” they prefer for the figures in their work. Do they tend to use themselves? Guston’s reply:

ere isn’t much I can say about the tendency to paint myself. I’ve always thought this characteristic to be natural in a painter.

Philip Guston, Self-Portrait, 1944. Oil on canvas, 30 × 24 inches. First published in “Types—By American Artists,” Art News Annual 43 (1944): 88. © 1944, ARTnews, LLC.

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S TAT E M E N T I N T W E L V E A M E R I C A N S 1956

In the catalogue for the exhibition Twelve Americans, the curator Dorothy C. Miller explained that it was “another in a series of exhibitions held periodically at the Museum of Modern Art since the first year of its existence. These exhibitions devoted to contemporary American art, were designed to contrast with the usual large American group show representing a hundred or more artists by one work each. From the many distinguished artists who might have been included in this exhibition, an arbitrarily limited number was chosen, so that each might have a separate gallery for his work. The character and quality of individual achievement can more readily be grasped under these circumstances.”

What is seen and called the picture is what remains—an evidence. Even as one travels in painting towards a state of “unfreedom” where only certain things can happen, unaccountably the unknown and free must appear. Usually I am on a work for a long stretch, until a moment arrives when the air of the arbitrary vanishes, and the paint falls into positions that feel destined. e very matter of painting—its pigment and spaces—is so resistant to the will, so disinclined to assert its plane and remain still. Painting seems like an impossibility, with only a sign now and then of its own light. Which must be because of the narrow passage from a diagramming to that other state— a corporeality. In this sense, to paint is a possessing rather than a picturing.

First published in Twelve Americans, edited by Dorothy C. Miller, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1956), 36.

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N OT E S O N B R A D L E Y WA L K E R TO M L I N 1957

Bradley Tomlin, like his paintings, possessed a tensile—and at times precarious— balance that covered an anguished sense of alternatives. His tone, muted, graded, could change to caprice. Wearied by the already experienced and the flaccid, yet bound by a gi of proportion, his spontaneity was earned. e reworked and scored painting surface gradually exposed vein and nerve, and this was the cost. e stroke, which tends to leap, is nevertheless held on the plane—like the seal on a letter. Since his temperament insisted on the impossible pleasure of controlling and being free at the same moment, his plasticity and its demands are quickening. Tomlin’s passion did not distort the surface: an innate feeling for amounts prevented him from becoming an “expressionist.” Oen wry, he never lost his fineness of edge. In the more “intimate” or “written” paintings, thought became the hand, releasing lean rhythms that did not forget the resistance of an earlier cubist space. By choice denying himself certain luxuries of color, he would use, perhaps, a drab olive, a mustard, an old white. An heraldic elegy is his form, and this elegance is as nimble as it is grave.

First published in John I. H. Bauer, Bradley Walker Tomlin, exh. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1957), 9.

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INTERVIEW WITH SAM HUNTER 1957

Sam Hunter often interviewed artists for his column “Art in New York,” a regular inclusion in Playbill, a small magazine available at Broadway theaters.

A striking feature of the New York avant-garde is its staggering capacity for talk, invariably about itself and its own productions. It is in progress at all hours of the day and night in the studios, at parties, at the Village bars where the vanguard collects, the effervescent verbal overflow of a period of significant artistic realization, and widening recognition. One of the eloquent voices in the chorus of enlightened discourse is Philip Guston, a painter whom I recently visited in his New York studio. If it once seemed plausible to speak of Guston’s paintings in terms of late Monet, the comparison is no longer relevant. An earlier lyricism of refined accents has given way to explicit shapes, massive structure, and more bite in color. His paintings now embody a primitively direct sense of creation itself, giving me an impression of the unities of mind in naked and luminous contact with the discontinuities of the unformed paint matter. Artistic form is revealed at the source, in the very process of achieving existence and order. “When I work,” Guston told me, “I am not concerned with making pictures, or with what the work will look like, but only with the process of creation.” Guston pointed out that since Cézanne and the cubists, a first principle of the modern aesthetic has been “to give existence to the plane,” to the picture plane, that is, and to the internal structure of the painting, independently of representational aims. But the emphasis on the aesthetic autonomy of the work of art does not mean that it has no human reality. On the contrary, the “plane” also takes on a subjective aspect, becoming “a mirror of the self,” and it functions finally as a symbol of lived experience as well as a set of plastic signs. “When the unities I seek are achieved,” Guston continued, “I am aware of something like surprise, since the picture looks both familiar and new. I feel that I have not invented so much as revealed, in a coded way, something that already existed. Now, while I am talking about form, I am also talking about myself. As an artist I have no way of finding my identity except through such highly formalized experience.” is reiteration of self, and of the human condition, in and through the act of painting comprises, to Guston’s mind, the only “true painting.” e rest he describes as facile “gesture,” which has to do with “too quick a summation of how you would like to appear in the world. In the kind of painting I am talking about,” he declared, “you don’t care how you appear; you have First published as Sam Hunter, “Art in New York,” Playbill 1, no. 8 (November 25, 1957). Used by permission. All rights reserved, Playbill, Inc.

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given that up.” Guston conceded that the phrase “true painting” had the ring of modern religious utterance, with its renunciations, sense of obstacle, and anguished sense of individual responsibility. He found for me a quotation from Kaa’s notebooks that seemed to illuminate his own objectives: “e true way is along a rope that is not spanned high in the air, but only just above the ground. It seems intended more to cause stumbling than to be walked along.”* If there is a certain grim, the-chips-are-down atmosphere in these remarks, there is also that same tension of belief which informs the best New York abstract painting, and distinguishes it from European production comparable in style. I must add regretfully that I have scarcely been able, within this small space, to recapture the current of excitement, and the profound sense of commitment which underlay Guston’s spoken words. e reader must experience for himself, by looking, the visible elation of the artist’s execution when he actually gets down to the wholly mysterious business of “giving existence to the plane.”

* Franz Kafka, “Reflections on Sin, Suffering, Hope and the True Way,” in Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings (New York: Schocken Books, 1954).

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F R O M T H E C H I CAG O PA N E L 1958

The following is transcribed from a barely labeled tape of what sounds like a crowded room space, probably a gallery (the Goldowksy Gallery?), as paintings on the walls are mentioned. The audience is a constant close-up and participatory presence. Most of the time is occupied by a belligerent and probably drunken Franz Kline taking on the moderator at every turn. Questions are addressed to Guston, but he usually defers to Kline (“You want to take that one, Franz?”). I have included here the only extensive talking by Guston. There is an amazing, by today’s standards, amount of coughing on the tape, often obscuring important syllables. You can almost see the smoke. Though the date is a few months off, this sounds like the occasion described by Harry F. Gaugh: “Kline is a juror for the ‘Exhibition Momentum 57’ in Chicago, Nov. 6–Dec. 10. Other jury members are Sam Hunter and Philip Guston. (De Kooning is announced as a juror but withdraws. Sponsored annually since 1948 by a group of artists, the show is open to artists living within 100 miles of the city.) At the opening Kline is on a panel with Hunter, Guston, and Joshua Taylor, moderator. Hunter recalls: ‘Kline was hilarious, once he was recovered from a neighborhood tavern and positioned upright on stage. He was also very keen and inspired at moments.’ While in Chicago, Kline, Guston, and Aaron Siskind visit Calumet City ‘for an all-night spree,’ in Guston’s words. They get about $200 from Noah Goldowsky to finance their adventure and upon returning to New York they each send Goldowsky a drawing as ‘repayment.’ Siskind recalls: ‘What a night that was in Cal City!’”*

Moderator: Mr. Hunter suggested that what happened is, there was initially really a gradual change that eventually became not just a difference within a kind but actually a change in kind. e initial freedom that began around 1945, by 1948 or so had really changed to become something quite new, quite fresh, and much more peculiar to America, and much freer from the European impulse that had gotten it started. Philip Guston: I don’t know what I can honestly say to that. I mean, on one level I’m aware of—all these years I see pictures, fellow painters and what they paint. I think what I mean to say is, at the risk of sounding very egotistical, I’m really concerned with my own history, for the most part. In other words, I’m still involved in trying to understand, and through the painting is the way I can get to understand it,

Not previously published. According to the label on the tape, the panel was held in Chicago in March 1958, but it may have been earlier, as described in the headnote. * Harry F. Gaugh, in Franz Kline: The Color Abstractions, exh. cat. (Washington, DC: Phillips Collection, 1979), 36.

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what’s happening to me, you know? I mean, I’m aware of painters . . . I don’t know how I can say that, honestly. Mod: In your own work, in your approach to your own work, do you note any change in approach? PG: I don’t know what you mean by that, exactly. Mod: I thought I was quoting you. PG: No. What I mean to say is, that being a painter means that you’re involved with your life. Actually. I mean, there’s no other way. So that I don’t feel . . . Time shrinks, you know? 1948, ten years ago, seems a very short time ago. I take out a picture I did in 1947, 1948, the thing I feel in it is still me. It’s not a calendar. You have to be not involved in it in this way in order to see it some other way. I honestly can’t change it. First of all, I don’t think there is such a thing as change in art. I really don’t believe in change. It’s impossible. Any more than there is progress. I think there are sometimes differences in intensity, maybe. But I don’t believe in change really. Mod: Mr. Guston, how do you remember this period of surrealist influence in American painting? PG: Well, I think Mr. Hunter drew the picture very aptly. But I don’t think of it exactly that way. Mod: How about this word surrealism, does that fall easily on your ear? PG: Very easily, if we make sure of what we mean by surrealism. at is, it’s not Dalí. As a matter of fact, the only so-called surrealists that I like never considered themselves surrealist. And incidentally, I think that’s absolutely true. Sam and I have talked endlessly about this. Well, all of us in New York have talked about it. In the same sense we’re all called abstract expressionists. And abstract impressionists, the label that was tacked onto me some years ago. I think that has nothing to do with it at all. At dinner tonight, I was saying to Sam that I think that every real painter wants to be, and his greatest desire is to be, a realist. ere’s no other way out. I mean, you can’t begin painting an “abstract” picture. You can’t begin painting a “surrealist” picture. It’s impossible. You have to be a realist in the sense that you want to make concrete, with your material, with your matter, with your form, how you feel. Now, of course, that’s a very vague word, but . . . I mean, how you feel in your picture. But I think all I mean to say is, I don’t think exactly in those terms. I never have. And then I don’t think that a lot of painters that I know think that way. Mod: But surrealism did contribute something, I mean, ideal surrealism, I suppose. Didn’t it? PG: e spirit. Mod: e spirit, yes. at reality isn’t necessarily something you can trust. PG: Sure. But then, surrealism always existed. Uccello is a tremendous surrealist. And I don’t mean Bosch, either. I mean Uccello. So, where are we there? See, I’m not a his-

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torian. It’s not always given to a painter to know what his work looks like, in those terms. So I can see that these things have happened, and I read that such and such has happened and I can see it. But I really don’t think about it too much, really. Mod: Well, isn’t that a good idea? e terms come aer the painting, instead of before the painting. PG: Well, I wish they didn’t have to come at all. For example, I’ve seen lectures where teachers of art will say: And this is another example of fine baroque art. Well, what if you made it a penalty to use the term baroque? en he’d have to talk about the painting. Mod: Excellent idea. PG: And I think the same thing is true about modern painting. Say, if you eliminated the word abstract, made it illegal, like a penalty, you know, to use the word abstract, nonobjective, nonfigurative, then of course you’d have to really . . . For instance, it doesn’t mean anything to say that Mondrian and van Doesberg are neoplasticists, because the real point is that they’re vastly different. And if you want to talk about them, you have to talk about how different they are. Or else not talk about them but feel the difference. Mod: You can come teach my courses anytime. PG: But I’m eliminating your job, though! [laughter] Mod: No, you’re not. PG: Well, I didn’t answer your question. But I think Mr. Hunter gave a marvelous sketch of the period. Mod: I’m afraid I was baiting you with the word surrealism, exactly for this reason. I think that it does suggest a very special movement, with all kinds of doctrine. PG: But you don’t mean that. Mod: And I’m sure that what Mr. Hunter was getting at was not that at all. sam hunter: I meant it as a view of the world, rather in the terms of Dalí or Tanguy. I meant it as a way of seeing reality, that the given reality is not everything. PG: Yeah, I agree. And that’s one point I want to make here, that my attraction to surrealism, whatever form, poetry or painting, was always in the sense that its anti-art form was very significant because it insisted on changing man. Not changing painting, but changing man. And that was, to me, the exciting part of it. Much more exciting than, let’s say, the Platonic or idealist point of view of the neoplasticists, for example. I mean I was attracted to surrealism but only in that sense. As I say, the painters I liked were only later called surrealist, namely Chirico and Miró. ough I do like Magritte to some extent. Mod: Well, because they don’t work from the form but from a feeling. PG: Sure, but that’s what artists always do anyway. And incidentally, just speaking for

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myself, the surrealist poets excited me much more that a lot of the painters. Some of the films too. Mod: Well, if the artist is free, that’s one thing. But they have to be free to do something. And there are lots of directions that this can take, that this freed form can take. Freed form I’m using, not ee-form, because free-form always turns out to be a kidney-shaped table. But it seems that the form, the general form, can take many forms. But the general direction has been more or less consistent since the war, hasn’t it? PG: Well, of course, the whole thing is really about freedom. Once someone said to me, looking at some of my paintings, he said: “Gee, it must be marvelous to be free.” And this was a shock. It was like a slap in the face. And I said: “Free!? Who’s free?” You know? It’s hard to talk about but there’s a kind of freedom in unfreedom, if you know what I mean. at is, I know that the only thing I can really talk about is what happens or some feelings I have about what happens. In the beginning you’re free, when you face the white canvas you’re free, and it’s the most anguishing state. But you can go to sleep too, you’re so free. You see? I mean, you’re just free and it’s very dull. Every painter experiences this. It’s very uninteresting, really. You go on and on, and the feeling you have is that you painted yourself into a corner. And then when something really can happen, that’s the freedom I mean. Because, you see, how can you be free when you don’t know, let’s say, who you are when you first begin? You know what you feel. How can you be free?

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S TAT E M E N T I N N A T U R E I N A B S T R A C T I O N 1958

Guston’s work was included in the exhibition Nature in Abstraction at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and his statement was quoted in the catalogue essay by John I. H. Bauer.

I do not see why the loss of faith in the known image and symbol in our time should be celebrated as a freedom. It is a loss from which we suffer, and this pathos motivates modern painting and poetry at its heart. I think the only pressing question in painting is: When are you through? For my own part it is when I know I’ve “come out the other side.” is occasional and sudden awareness is the truest image for me. e clocklike path of this recognition suppresses a sense of victory; it is an ironic encounter and more of a mirror than a picture.

Quoted by John I. H. Bauer, Nature in Abstraction: The Relation of Abstract Painting and Sculpture to Nature in Twentieth-Century American Art, exh. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1958).

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S TAT E M E N T I N I T I S 1958

Painting permits, ultimately, the joys of the possible, but the narrow passage to this domain of the possible suppresses any illusion of mastery. Only our surprise that the unforeseen was fated allows the arbitrary to disappear. e delights and anguish of the paradoxes on this imagined plane resist the threat of painting’s reducibility. e poise, the isolation, of the image containing the memory of its past and promise of change is neither a possession nor is it frustrating, e forms, having known each other differently before, advance yet again, their gravity marked by their escape from inertia. Painting is a clock that sees each end of the street as the edge of the world.

First published in It Is, no. 1 (Spring 1958), 44.

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S TAT E M E N T I N T H E N E W A M E R I C A N P A I N T I N G 1957–58/1959

It is not always given to me to know what my pictures “look like.” I know that I work in a tension provoked by the contradictions I find in painting. I stay on a picture until a time is reached when these paradoxes vanish and conscious choice doesn’t exist. I think of painting more in terms of the drama of this process than I do of “natural” forces. e ethics involved in “seeing” as one is painting—the purity of the act, so to speak— is more actual to me than pre-assumed images or ideas of picture structure. But this is half the story: I doubt if this ethic would be real enough without the “pull” of the known image for its own “light,” its sense of “place.” It is like the impossibility of living entirely in the moment without the tug of memory. e resistance of forms against losing their identities, with, however, their desire to partake of each other, leads finally to a showdown, as they shed their minor relations and confront each other more nakedly. It is almost a state of inertia—these forms, having lived, possess a past, and their poise in the visible present on the picture plane must contain the promise of change. Painting then, for me, is a kind of nagging honesty with no escape from the repetitious tug-of-war at this intersection.

First published in The New American Painting, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1959), 40. From a letter to John I. H. Bauer, curator, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in reply to a questionnaire on the role of nature in abstract art, 1957–58.

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I N T E R V I E W W I T H DAV I D SY LV E S T E R 1960

Philip Guston: We were talking yesterday at the studio about the picture plane, and to me there’s some mysterious element about the plane. I can’t rationalize it, I can’t talk about it, but I know there’s an existence on this imaginary plane which holds almost all the fascination of painting for me. As a matter of fact, I think the true image only comes out when it exists on this imaginary plane. But in schools you hear everyone talk about the picture plane as a first principle. And in beginning design class, it’s still labored to death. Yet I think it’s one of the most mysterious and complex things to understand. I’m convinced that it’s almost a key, and yet I can’t talk about it; nor do I think it can be talked about. ere’s something very frustrating, necessary, and puzzling about this metaphysical plane that painting exists on. And I think that, when it’s either eliminated or not maintained intensely, I get lost in it. is plane exists in the other arts, anyway. ink of the poetic plane and the theater plane. And it has to do with matter. It has to do with the very matter that the thing is done in. David Sylvester: e matter giving a certain resistance so that we don’t go straight through it to the idea? PG: Exactly. In other words, without this resistance you would just vanish into either meaning or clarity, and who wants to vanish into clarity or meaning? DS: But apart from this thing of the picture plane, most great paintings have this duality between the forms of the surface and the forms in depth. PG: Exactly. DS: ere’s a tendency in a lot of recent American paintings not to want to get this depth. PG: I think that de Kooning works in depth, and it might be one reason why he’s never felt the need to enlarge. DS: I was going to say that you and de Kooning both seem to work in depth while preserving the plane. PG: I would say so, I would say so. DS: And is this a matter of instinct or a matter of wanting to? Well, that’s a silly question . . . PG: But, of course, you know, it’s terrible to rationalize about painting because you know that, while you’re creating it, you can have all sorts of things in your mind consciously First published in Interviews with American Artists, edited by David Sylvester (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 85–98; copyright © 2001 The David Sylvester Literary Trust. The interview was recorded in March 1960 for broadcast by the BBC.

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that you want to do and that really won’t be done. You won’t be finished until the most unexpected and surprising things happen. I find I can’t compose a picture anymore. I suppose I’ve been thinking about painting structures for many years, but I find that I know less and less about composing and yet, when the thing comes off in this old and new way at the same time, weeks later, I get it, and it arrives at a unity that I never could have predicted and foreseen or planned. And yet this is a problem that we all have dealt with. DS: How much of a developed idea do you begin a picture with? PG: Well, I always begin with some kind of . . . Well, I work on only one painting at a time. It goes on for weeks, sometimes months, and scraping and putting it on and scraping, as you know, and it’s as if I have to save myself on that one work. And then, when it’s done, God knows how, it always seems impossible to paint another picture. Utterly impossible. And when it’s done, life seems wonderful again and you feel marvelous. DS: How long does this last? PG: It lasts about a week—two weeks would be the limit. I start paying attention to my family and go to parties, and I think life is terrific. And then this thing starts again, and when I start again I think I have found a way, and I really like that last picture, which has become such a friend. But later it becomes a terrifying enemy because I really want to do it again. I think, “Well, I’m a painter, I can certainly make a picture now and . . .” is has been going on for years with me and I . . . I’ll start with the same elements, and why not? Other painters have made variations on paintings. It goes on like that, optimistically, for a week, and then it starts to break down again. And I always start with a kind of ideal picture in mind. DS: Has it got a color, this ideal picture? PG: Oh, it has some kind of a marvelous structure. It has to do with a dream about painting—you know, I’d really like to make a real great painting and I just can’t do it. It really breaks down aer a while and I find bit by bit, you know, I find myself getting dumber. Really, I don’t know. Perhaps it’s all these parties I’ve been going to recently, but right now I don’t know what to say about painting. It always remains the most puzzling, enigmatic thing. But when this thing happens, this very peculiar and particular thing does finally happen, in other words, when you have these few lucid moments . . . I mean you could be a carpenter, I’d say that in a month I’m a carpenter for almost thirty days and then I have three hours, four hours, when the thing happens and I wish I didn’t have to be putting those planks together—putting this color on top of that color and structuring to my own increasing boredom. DS: Do you find that the conclusion of the pictures oen comes quite quickly? PG: Yes, the last stages, very certainly. I always know when it’s going to happen too. I know the day, the day you take the phone off the hook. It’s when you’ve played all your cards, all your dice, clever tricks.

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DS: When you get towards the end, do you actually foresee what it’s going to look like? PG: No. DS: You still have to find out? PG: I still have to find out. But I know when this happens. I mean, it’s when I don’t back up anymore to look; I don’t put something down and pull out a cigarette and look. Someone said to me the other night something interesting. I was talking to a foreign painter I know and we were talking about “How do you know when you’ve finished?”— which is a very interesting problem. Actually it is the key to all things. When is a painting finished? And last week I had finished a painting; you saw it yesterday. I had worked around the clock for three or four days and nights; I think I got one night’s sleep. I kept on and on and on. at’s how I usually work, and this friend said that she’d read somewhere that Hemingway had said that he leaves his workshop when something has happened in his work that promises him something to do the next day. And I thought, “Oh, my God, I feel just the opposite.” And yet I know that feeling. In the past I would stop when something happened on the canvas and I would think, “Oh, yeah, tomorrow I’ll work on that.” But that’s like promising yourself a goodie for the next day. I think it’s very adolescent. I like the early Hemingway books, but I find I can’t do that. It’s an immediate thing, it’s a crucial moment. It’s somehow a feeling of all your forces, all your feelings, somehow come together and it’s got to be unloaded right then. I mean, there’re no cookies for the next day at all. ere is no next day. DS: And when it’s going, you really can stay there? You don’t have to get away from the canvas and see how the picture looks? PG: I don’t even know that I’m doing it at that time. It’s a peculiar moment to talk about. e mind being as devious as it is, you could see the whole thing as a kind of moral test, I think. And you know exactly and precisely when you’re kidding yourself. It’s a thirty-secondth of an inch, but, you know, the narrower it gets, the more devious it gets. We all know that. I mean, writers are like that. Actually, painting is exactly parallel to life. I mean, you know when you’re really making love and when you’re not really making love, or any emotional involvement. Did you ever listen to someone talk on a platform or in conversation when you knew he was only telling you a story and your mind wandered? But when you always really listen is when they are not hearing themselves tell the story. Well, that’s creation. at’s all it’s about. And anyone who can see can see it in a painting. Don’t you think so? It’s only the very object of painting to get to that point, and I don’t think it has anything to do with spontaneity either. And if it is freedom, it’s a very peculiar kind of freedom. It’s the kind of freedom that’s weighed down with a lot of baggage, but it’s a very necessary kind of freedom because . . . DS: . . . it must be achieved. PG: It must be achieved. Yes, but only under certain conditions.

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DS: Well, I mean, the carpentry, as you call it, is the necessary preparation to—to put it rather pretentiously—the dark night of the soul. PG: I know I’ve thought so too. I think that’s a kind of necessary rationalization. Would you be as interested in seeing men fly, unattached and free, as you would be in seeing a man with, I don’t know, two hundred pounds of cement strapped onto him and let’s see him get two inches off the ground. I think creation is something like that. It’s not imagination and it’s not freedom and it’s not spontaneity. I think it’s a more human experience than that. I mean it can be tragic; it can be joyful; it’s compounded of so many elements and increasingly I almost think I don’t want to analyze it anymore, think about it. And yet, when this thing has happened . . . Right now, for the last few days, I’ve been thinking: Now what in the hell happened those three days and nights I worked around the clock? What pictures did I scrape out? And then I remember the pictures I scraped out. So that I keep tracing what it is that happened. You somehow propel yourself or are propelled into a kind of open-eyed sleep or a sleep where you are acting. I don’t think you can worry yourself into this state. I think you just become that. Perhaps that’s what the painting represents. Actually, one of the real problems that always bothers me is sustaining a feeling. I mean, when I look at Poussin now, well, I think that’s the most incredible thing to maintain the feeling for a year, however long it took Poussin, I’m telling you, to paint this vast structure. But perhaps that is not given to us now. I don’t know. DS: Perhaps we can only make sort of fragmentary statements? PG: I don’t know. Actually, all modern art puzzles me. I don’t understand it. I really don’t. I don’t know whether it’s fragmentary. I have a sickening nostalgia for this other state of sustaining a feeling for months, being able to construct and build a picture. Well, Mondrian, I think, did that, of course. He was almost one of the last artists to do that. I wish I could get there. DS: Going back to this other thing of creating depth in a painting. Now, when you convey a sense of space, there tends to be, whether you like it or not, a tendency for figuration to come in. I mean, the creation of depth is very much involved with the whole concept of figurative painting. PG: Of course. DS: I’d like to know what you feel about this whole problem of figuration. Do you want your painting to have references? PG: Absolutely. You know in the forties I was very involved with figuration. I painted a whole series of children’s pictures, all sorts of props and so on; they were always imaginary. I don’t think I ever really painted much from life, although I have done several portraits. But these pictures were imaginary, and even though I used scenes, houses and figures and tables, chairs, wooden floors, things, instruments, there too I wanted to get to a point where the burden of things didn’t exist and something else came through. You use things; the idea is, of course, to eliminate things. And just as,

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fieen or eighteen years ago, I stretched out to get that—put it in and took it out— to get that look in that kid’s eye and the way his mouth was open or wasn’t—I mean a very particular kind of look—I’d do the same now. In other words, I can’t find any freedom in abstract painting. I’m just as stuck with locations, a few areas of color in relation to some kind of totality that I want, as I was before. And so the problem of figuration is somehow irrelevant to me. I think some of the best painting done in New York today is figuration but it’s not recognized as such. DS: Could you give an example? PG: Well, I think of my pictures as a kind of figuration. Obviously they don’t look like people sitting in chairs or walking down streets, but I think that they are saturated with . . . I think every good painter here in New York really paints a self-portrait. I think a painter has two choices: he paints the world or himself. And I think the best painting that’s done here is when he paints himself, and by himself I mean himself in this environment, in this total situation. DS: What about figuration in a more literal sense? PG: I try. DS: You do? PG: Yes, and I think there’s a psychological problem involved here. I’ve tried and I really want to, but I don’t think it’s possible. I can’t. Perhaps another generation can. DS: When you say you tried . . . PG: By that I mean the isolation of the single image, which is what figuration means. Is that what you’re talking about? DS: Yes. PG: You mean like a Rembrandt? DS: Yes. PG: e self-portraits of Rembrandt? DS: Or de Kooning’s women. PG: Yes, but when you look at . . . I was in Washington the other day and looked at that late self-portrait by Rembrandt. Honest to God, I didn’t know what I kept looking at; finally, I didn’t know what it was. I mean, next to it was a Van Dyck, and you said: “Yes, there’s a portrait; but, if the Van Dyck is a figure, well, what is the Rembrandt?” Actually something very peculiar goes on there. ere’s an El Greco head which is reputed to be a self-portrait. I don’t know whether it is or not, but it’s a terrific head: the beard and collar, the flesh and the bone, seem to be in some kind of constant movement. Whereas the Rembrandt seems to be so dense; you feel that if you peeled off a piece of forehead or eye, you know, as if you’d opened up this little trapdoor, there’d be a millennium of teeming stuff going on. I don’t know what it is, finally. You know, Van Dyck gives some idea of a man, some idea of a portrait. You know, the more you think about these things, the less the things appear as they are supposed to appear.

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In those great Rembrandts there’s an ambiguity of paint being image and image being paint, which is very mysterious. DS: Do you ever get a simple desire to paint an apple? PG: Oh sure. Certainly. DS: And what happens? PG: I do it too. DS: With the apple in front of you or from memory of an apple? PG: Memory of an apple. What’s interesting is that a couple of years ago a group of younger painters started to paint figures and still lifes—and I think you had something like that going on in England. And a lot of reviewers talked about going back to nature and all kind of business, but, of course, it really meant going back to Cézanne and early Matisse and Corot. In other words, it’s almost as if there were no innocence about their work at all. If they paint an apple from an apple, why not paint the Crucifixion? DS: What happens if you try to paint an apple? PG: Well, you’ve got Chardin, you’ve got Cézanne on your mind, and you’ve got everybody else on your mind. DS: ese get in the way? ey come between you and the apple? PG: I’m interrupting here, but I wouldn’t paint an apple. What I really would like to do would be to paint a face. DS: Do you ever start with a face? PG: Oh yes. DS: And what happens? PG: Well, it’s very hard to contain it. Now, these are dangerous waters. Because actually I hope sometime to get to the point where I’ll have the courage to paint my face. But it is very confusing because sometimes I think that’s really what I am doing, in a more total way. And at other times I doubt that. I am in constant doubt about this whole thing. We’re talking about something which I wake up with and go to bed with every day, and I don’t know exactly how to talk about it. What I really want to do, it seems, is to paint a single form in the middle of the canvas. I mean, one of the most powerful impulses is simply to make . . . at’s all a painter is, an image maker, is he not? And one would be a fool, some kind of fool, to want to paint a picture. e most powerful instinct is to paint a single form in its continuity, which is aer all what a face is. is happens constantly on a picture. I remember last year I became so nervous about what I was doing that I finally reduced it down to the can on the palette with brushes in it. Well, that’s real, that can with brushes. And I painted the can with brushes sticking in it, and I couldn’t tolerate it. I couldn’t face it. It was as if it didn’t contain enough of my thoughts or feelings about it.

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DS: Was this because it became other people’s clichés? Or something different? PG: Something different. I don’t know what the something different was. DS: Was it that the form on the canvas wasn’t the outcome of your experience of working on the canvas but only some kind of sign? PG: Something like that. at’s right. It became signs. Exactly. Now, I think you’ve hit it. It seemed to become signs and symbols, and I don’t like signs. DS: You wanted the actual experience of the thing? PG: at’s right. Yes. erefore the whole thing got broken up, and finally I got involved in a more expansive, extended experience there, as far as I can figure out. DS: Did anything come of the picture? Or did you destroy it? PG: I destroyed it. DS: But is it conceivable that a picture which might begin like this and might go through this process nevertheless was a picture you completed? PG: Yes. But it wouldn’t hold. DS: All the same, might all this experience go into a picture that you preserved? PG: And still have that single object, you mean? Yes, well, of course I see it that way. I see later that, as I look at my own pictures, they are to me—I don’t know what they can be to anyone else—a kind of record of this journey. So that I see where I started with certain things—you might say objects—and then they became dissolved and then somehow the whole field becomes the reality. ere’s something very fascinating to me about the idea of painting a single object because it . . . I mean, why won’t it hold? I’ve got about twenty thoughts mixing and merging in my head. Just give me a moment. Well, I’ll put it this way, I remember once, years ago in London at the waxworks— I’ve always been fascinated by waxworks, like everyone else . . . But, you know, there’s something of waxworks in art; you know what I mean? It’s a very valuable ingredient there. In Madame Tussaud’s museum, with these life-size portraits of Gandhi and President Roosevelt and so on, you are in a state of ambivalence there. at is, if you regard it as art, they are too much like real life. If you regard them as real life, they’re, aer all, an effigy, an art. You don’t know where you are. Of course, the frustration is that I would really like to go up and shake hands with Gandhi and feel his warm hand and talk to him, but, you see, he won’t talk, his heart doesn’t beat. And yet I’m convinced that part of the fascination in visual art and visual representation is its impurity. I think that part of the strange fascination about a Raphael, for example, or a Piero, is the kind of frozen . . . It’s not aesthetic, you know. I mean, we’ve all been mistrained: aesthetics, composition, and all that stuff. But if one really keeps looking at this effigy, which is, of course, highly formalized and schematized, it involves the erotic very much. It’s almost real but it isn’t. Of course, a lot of lousy art is built on this premise. I mean, a lot of lousy art is waxworks, of course.

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DS: So there’s the frustrating ambiguity of the waxworks and the frustrating ambiguity of the Rembrandt. PG: Believe me, you’ve got me a little wrong. I maintain that the frustration is an important, almost crucial, ingredient. I think that the best painting involves frustration. e point about the late Rembrandt is not that it’s satisfying but on the contrary that it is disturbing and frustrating. Because really what he’s done is to eliminate any plane, anything between that image and you. e Van Dyck hasn’t. It says: “I’m a painting.” e Rembrandt says: “I am not a painting, I am a real man.” But he is not a real man either. What is it, then, that you’re looking at?

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F R O M PA N E L AT T H E P H I L A D E L P H I A M U S E U M S C H O O L O F A R T 1960

Participants at this panel held in March 1960 at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art were Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt, and Jack Tworkov, with Harold Rosenberg moderating. The panel was transcribed and then edited by P. G. Pavia and Irving Sandler, with revisions made by the speakers before publication.

Philip Guston: I find it difficult to take a large view of things. e pressing thing for me in painting is “When are you through?” I would like to think a picture is finished when it feels not new but old. As if its forms had lived a long time in you, even though until it appears you did not know what it would look like. It is the looker, not the maker, who is so hungry for the new. e new can take care of itself. Every new idea that I have now or get about painting seems to follow from the daily work: from an infighting in painting itself, in the confusion of painting. What can be talked about? It seems that the possible subject is in fact impossible to discuss. As you paint, changing and destroying, nothing can be assumed. You remove continually what you cannot vouch for or are not yet ready to accept. Until a certain moment. I feel like insisting on this one point. e only morality in painting revolves around the moment when you are permitted to “see” and the painting takes over. You can’t jump the gun. You can’t put yourself into this state by merely wanting to see, but the painter knows when that time comes. Which is why there is only realism in painting. And unless you keep going through up to that time, no matter what in particular the picture looks like—as a matter of fact, you don’t know what it’s looking like— but unless you work up until that point when you don’t even know that you’re “seeing” but suddenly make a vault and “see,” you are not finished, no matter how great and reasonable your ideas or intentions are. is sounds nagging and tedious, but that’s the way it is. e reasons for this condition are plaguing and not easily understood. When you do not paint from things or ideas—when there is no model, in other words—certainly something else is happening, and that is the constant question, “What is happening?” It makes me too nervous to talk about this. It’s a daily concern with me, and I don’t think it’s anything new or old. at’s all I have to say for the moment.

First published in It Is, no. 5 (Spring 1960): 34–38.

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Ad Reinhardt: I have a few things written here about what’s right and what’s wrong for artists that I wanted to read before, but it didn’t seem the right time. Some other time I’ll raise the problem of whether we have a history of art morality or a moral art history, or if there is a code of art ethics. Perhaps this is a rough dra of something in that direction. [He reads om an early dra of “e Artist in Search of a Code of Ethics,”* a list of artistic “don’ts”—for example: “It’s not right for artists to encourage critics to think that sloppy impasto is Dionysian and that neat scumbling is Apollonian. Or that wiggly lines represent emotions, etc.”] Harold Rosenberg: Do you want to comment on Ad’s “ou shalt not’s”? PG: Well, only that Ad wants to be right. HR: Would you make that an additional “ou shalt not”? PG: e artist should not want to be right.

PG: Jack [Tworkov] said that when he paints he doesn’t think. I believe it was John Cage who once told me, “When you start working, everybody is in your studio—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 you are le completely alone. en, if you’re lucky, even you leave.” HR: ere used to be a popular phrase in the art world: painters said they painted themselves out of the canvas. But this is the first I have heard of painting a lot of other people out of the canvas. PG: at’s right. I think that’s painting ideas, not people. People represent ideas. And so all the new commandments exist as is. But you have to paint them out. You know, “Get out.”

PG: I just want to know: Who sees wiggly lines and who makes them? ere is always a strange assumption behind panels or discussions on art: that it should be understood. HR: e panel should be understood. PG: No. I mean the assumption that art should be made clear. For whom? Someone once said, speaking about the public, that if a violinist came on the concert stage and played his violin as if to imitate the sound of a train coming into the station, everyone would applaud. But if he played a sonata, only the initiated would applaud. What a miser* Ad Reinhardt, Art as Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 160–64.

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able alternative. e implication is that in the first case the medium is used to imitate something else, and in the latter, as they say, it’s pure or abstract. But isn’t it so that the sonata is above all an image? An image of what? We don’t know, which is why we continue listening to it. ere is something ridiculous and miserly in the myth that we inherit from abstract art: at painting is autonomous, pure and for itself, and therefore we habitually analyze its ingredients and define its limits. But painting is “impure.” It is the adjustment of “impurities” which forces painting’s continuity. We are image makers and image-ridden. ere are no “wiggly or straight lines” or any other elements. You work until they vanish. e picture isn’t finished if they are seen.

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CO N V E R S AT I O N W I T H B I L L B E R K S O N 1964

Bill Berkson: Yesterday, when we were looking at your new paintings, you said you thought color to be irrelevant in them. Blacks and grays predominate. But what about the brighter hues—magentas, pinks, alizarins—that show up underneath or at the top and bottom? Philip Guston: As I work I find I get involved with an image—and I begin to concentrate on that in a way I didn’t before. It’s there the color disappears. It’s got to the point where I don’t think of the color of those images as black. I use white pigment and black pigment; the white pigment is used to erase the black I don’t want and so becomes gray. BB: e surface glow is sometimes like that of a black-and-white movie. e pigments are just part of a symbolic process. It’s as if you were willfully giving up the “joys of color.” PG: Something else takes place. Working within these restricted means, as I seem to do now, other things open up which are unpredictable, such as atmosphere, light, illusion— elements which do seem relevant to the image but have nothing to do with colors. BB: It’s not impressionist light. PG: No. BB: Not memory. PG: Well, you said something yesterday: that those images seem to disappear and then appear and disappear again. When I’m through with the picture, I no longer feel burdened with anything, with any willful gesture on my part. Painting has to do with how much you can tolerate. BB: But your hand is in it. PG: I feel responsible for it and all that. But I didn’t think it out first, will it, and put it on. BB: So it’s a collaboration. You believe, like Picasso, in the “other.” PG: Yes. Otherwise, painting becomes a series of habitual responses. You do one thing and follow that up. is and then this. You sit back and look—at what? All you’ve done is illustrate what you were thinking about. You can keep working like that to

First published in Art and Literature, no. 7 (Winter 1965): 56–69. © Bill Berkson, 1965, 2010. The conversation took place on November 1, 1964.

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Philip Guston, Head I, 1965. Oil on canvas, 72 × 78 inches. Tate, London. Photo: Sarah Wells.

the point of exasperation—and then perhaps something else will come along. Outside of your control. en you’re in unknown territory and begin to lose “I-thoughtthis-and-did-it.” I’m not finished if I’m still burdened with the evidences of my will, hopes, or desires. All of that is a preparation for that moment when my thinking is simultaneous with what I’m doing—but under very particular conditions, difficult to talk about. BB: You’ve criticized other painters for “not telling the whole story,” which suggests an intention to include but go beyond irony—to get everything in and yet end up with a singular work. PG: Yes, and at that point that I mentioned, the paint gives me the feeling that I can’t peel it off, it won’t fall off, and there’s nothing I can do to it. at also has to do with the light and placement of it. BB: e gray mass that you end up with in erasing the black usually becomes quite lush. It’s actually what’s le of the process, but it becomes atmosphere. It extends the identities of the images. PG: As I’m working and using the white, I keep thinking of the white as background for a form I want to make. It’s very hard to make that form. Eventually, the erasure itself becomes very actual to me, very much on the surface. It can even be the decid-

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ing element. In some pictures, I think the whole thing came off because I got more interested in the erasure element, in the white, and the form seemed to get born out of my feeling of the reality of the erasure. e gray is suddenly real. BB: What are those forms to you? Self-portraits? Personae? Monologues? Dialogues? PG: Sometimes I know what they are. But if I think “head” while I’m doing it, it becomes a mess. at’s an impossibility. I want to end with something that will baffle me for some time. BB: You’ve mentioned that many painters “throw away too much.” What do you keep? PG: For example, the flat surface of the painting is too readily accepted now. I think painting is full of illusions and contradictions. One line following another is a contradiction. e plane of a painting is a paradox, and maintaining this paradox is a necessity with me. BB: You’re against “purity.” PG: e canvas is flat, but it’s fantasy. And I have to prove that it is. It leads to certain troubles . . . BB: Your early pictures contained overlappings in shallow space, but you seem never to have been inhibited by conceptions of cubist space. PG: At first my experience was with the fieenth-century Italians, particularly Piero della Francesca and Uccello. When I saw Picasso’s cubist paintings I thought—well, cubism is Renaissance painting to me. I think I was trying to make some kind of reconciliation. I studied cubism. I never painted complete cubist pictures, but those paintings of children in the forties have something to do with that. It’s as if cubism made me more aware of Piero and Uccello and their use of overlapping forms and the rhythms of these on the plane, the intervals. BB: But originally you were interested in monumental volumes, Picasso’s “Roman” figures, de Chirico . . . PG: Michelangelo. I did a Mother and Child that came out of Picasso’s Roman period, also influenced by a Max Ernst painting of a woman spanking a child. BB: You went to Italy in 1948 . . . PG: I had painted pictures like the Tormentors, from which the descriptive elements of earlier pictures had been stripped away. I went around Italy looking at what I felt was painting for me. Renaissance painting. And then the Venetians. I did a series of landscape and architectural drawings in hilltowns. And I went to Paris and nineteenthcentury French paintings for the first time. BB: Monet? PG: I saw the Monets, but I didn’t care for them. I was thrilled by Courbet and Manet. Particularly, the still-life and flower pieces of Manet. BB: Cézanne?

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PG: I swing back and forth about Cézanne. I mean the different periods. Recently, I like his early work, his “Courbet period,” and the early, heavily plastered portraits. BB: Manet and Cézanne are masters of placement in your terms. PG: And Mondrian. He had the ability to seize the total. I was once in a gallery and saw one of Mondrian’s diamond pictures and across from it was a Kandinsky. e Kandinsky looked full of notions, no seizure. A lot of toys, some bead work. I looked back at the Mondrian . . . A great deal of painting does what it sets out to do, and I lose interest more or less. But that Piero della Francesca [a pinup in Guston’s kitchen of e Flagellation of Christ; see p. 66] continues to provoke infinite questions of what it is that is being seen. You can spend your life puzzling out what the actual intentions of a picture like that are. We are always at the beginning of seeing. BB: What about the emotional characteristics of your paintings? Words like tortured, tragic, Sisyphian . . . PG: Mostly, I’m involved with what is where. I am aware of moods, feelings, and so forth, but I really just want to nail something down so that it will stay still for a while. I have no control over what other people get out of these paintings. BB: You keep your Watteaus as underpaintings. e pinks that show up here and there at the edges. Auden once said of the ironist: “e limitations of a situation loom larger to him than the situation itself.” In art, irony denies redundancy. You’re concerned with those moments when things start to go wrong. But you avoid pathos and nostalgia and refuse to let the irony of a situation buffalo you into perversity. PG: Sometimes I think it’s not irony but a kind of mortification. BB: Of the flesh? PG: No. Of art, of painting. e actual impossibility of creating anything. BB: In a social sense? PG: No. I think I’m beginning to feel that there shouldn’t be any painting. I see the studio as a court—I mean a court of law, not Versailles. BB: But that too . . . PG: You hope! e act of painting is like a trial where all the roles are lived by one person. It’s as if the painting has to prove its right to exist. ere are enough paintings in the world. Life and art have a mutual contempt and necessity for each other. BB: Much modern painting has denied that the “eye” is the receiver and judge of painting. Delectation is an aerthought. Paintings as realized thought . . . ey are perceived intellectually. PG: It seems to me the only thing you can ask is: “What are you doing?” “What is it?” and “When are you finished?” To find out “what” is the only thing you can do. BB: You sound like Wittgenstein criticizing an idea. Not “Is that idea right or wrong?”

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but “Are you entitled to that idea?” It’s a question of an authentic process of thought— has so-and-so gone through enough muck to come up with that little gem? PG: In that sense, a painting that hasn’t gone through this process vanishes for me. You can’t just decide to settle somewhere. Self-induced irony is a way of settling out of court too. BB: Settling for ambience rather than making clear certain actual intentions. Some painters retain the nice effects of an instant. Pinups. Arch-ironists count on the titillations their choices provoke. ey begin and end with a tease. ey need their audiences. PG: I think we’re talking about the arbitrary. To have the pretense of acting in this symbolic way, putting paint on canvas, is arbitrary. Why do it? e process of painting, however, is to eliminate that question and to eliminate the air of the arbitrary as completely as possible. BB: You keep many paintings which you think of as mistakes. In a sense you’re titillated by error. PG: I permit myself the illusion of freedom, when in another sense I don’t think anybody has any freedom at all. e paintings I’ve scraped out are very strong in my mind. Maybe they’ll happen next week or next year, yet in another way. Kaa wrote to Oskar Pollak: “e books we need are of the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, that make us feel as if we were on the verge of suicide or lost in a forest remote from all human adaptation. A book should serve as the axe for the frozen sea within us.”* BB: What is frozen is our inattention to life. Art is a sign of attention and activity which contradicts death. What about drawing? You draw constantly, many drawings at a session. PG: In drawing everything surfaces more quickly than in painting. BB: Your drawings define delicately certain volumes. ere are no erasures, no illusions of weight as there are in the paintings. PG: e discards are the erasures. At one time, I wanted to make drawing more like painting—no contour. ose were drawings with masses, accumulated strokes. But lately, I’ve made drawings with line. Painting simulates realness, drawing suggests. BB: And suggests only one situation. In drawing you can only see one thing. In painting you can see a process. Layers. PG: More involving, more obstinate. Near the end of a painting I’ll put paint on, take it off, put it on, without even looking. Whereas earlier—when I’m still in trouble—

* Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors (New York: Schocken Books, 1977), 16.

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I’ll look: “Maybe here, maybe there.” In the later stage, I know immediately when something I’ve done isn’t right. BB: You leave bare canvas showing at the edges. PG: Part of that is practical; I paint on unstretched canvas. BB: Many painters fret a great deal about the edges . . . PG: I don’t believe in packing it in. I say leave it. ere’s a split second when you’re almost immobilized by a dilemma, and that interests me more. I want to give form or shape to inaction . . . To see what could happen, you can act impulsively. But I want to find out what happens when you can either not act or not not act. Doubt itself becomes a form. You work to divest yourself of what you know.

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I N T E R V I E W W I T H J O S E P H S . T R OVATO 1965

Joseph Trovato: It was very good of you to postpone your trip to New York by a couple of hours in order to have us do this interview. Since I do not take shorthand, I’ll make my questions as brief as possible. Where were you born? Philip Guston: Montreal, Canada, 1913. JT: How did you start painting? PG: I began painting when I was about fourteen years old. JT: Where were you trained? PG: I am mostly self-taught with the exception of a year’s scholarship at the Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles. JT: Our main subject is “e New Deal and the Arts,” so let me ask you: When did you go on the projects? PG: I was assistant on a mural project [Public Works of Art Project, or PWAP] in Los Angeles for about a year, where I worked under Lorser Feitelson. I was also on the easel project there. JT: When did you go to New York? PG: I went to New York in 1936, where I first worked as an assistant to Reginald Marsh as a non-relief artist since I had to await my residency requirement. is was the mural for the Customs House building in New York City. I didn’t actually paint on this mural, but Marsh asked me to design some lunettes between his panels. Next I went on the WPA mural division. I worked under Burgoyne Diller, who was my supervisor. He was, I think, the supervisor of the New York City mural division. JT: I think that is correct. What did you do? PG: e first thing I did was an assignment to do murals for the Penn Station subways. I designed studies for this project, but it didn’t materialize. is project was headed by Yuchenko. Aer this I was given a wall in the nurses’ building at Kings County Hospital, Brooklyn. I worked on sketches and cartoons for this project for at least a year. ese were approved by all concerned, and I was about to begin painting on the wall. However, when the head of the hospital saw the sketches, he immediately used his influence to prevent the execution of the mural. He had not been consulted regarding the designs, and he expressed disapproval of them. is head of the hos-

Not previously published. Oral history interview recorded for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, on January 29, 1965, in Woodstock, New York.

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pital actually had no background to judge the work, and it was unfortunate that his word and judgment carried so much weight to bring the mural to a halt. It was too bad that the supervisor of this project failed to get the approval of the hospital head before I was asked to expend so much effort on my final designs. Incidentally, the designs in color and the cartoons for this mural were exhibited in a show of the murals done under the WPA. JT: Do you know where the sketches are now? PG: I don’t know. However, some time ago someone told me that one of these sketches was seen in a houseboat on the Seine. JT: All this must have been frustrating. But when did you finally come to do a mural? PG: While I was still on the WPA I was submitting designs for the Section of Fine Arts competitions, which I did on my own time. Burgoyne Diller gave me a mural to do in the Community Building of the Queensbridge Housing Project on Long Island. I worked on the design and the cartoons for about a year. Everything was approved and the walls prepared—casein tempera painted on the wall. JT: When was this? PG: About 1938. Holger Cahill asked me, through Diller, to do the outdoor façade of the WPA Building at the World’s Fair. I stopped work on the Queens mural and began working on the Fair mural, which was finished on schedule in time for the opening of the Fair. JT: How long did this job take? What was the medium? PG: It took about four or five months, which was due to the very valuable assistants I was given and also the wonderful cooperation I received in the way of providing materials and scaffolding and so forth. e medium was a new material just developed for outdoor work: chlorinated rubber-base paint used directly on the cement wall. JT: Did you go back then to the Queens mural? PG: Yes, and I completed it, a forty-foot wall, in 1940. JT: How does the mural look to you today? PG: Terrible! It has been repainted completely by some commercial artist. I am attempting to either have my name removed or the repainting removed if that is possible. And if this is not possible, I want the whole thing obliterated, since in its present state it is not my work. is matter is still pending. With the completion of this mural, I got off the project because I had won some competitions in the Section of Fine Arts—quite a number of murals. JT: What are they? PG: e Commerce, Georgia, Post Office; the Laconia, New Hampshire, Forestry Building. is latter project consisted of two panels—one was designed and executed by my wife, Musa McKim, and the other by myself. My wife, on her own, did several other murals for the Section of Fine Arts. en in 1940 and 1941 we moved

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out of New York City and came to Woodstock, where we did the Laconia murals and several murals for the Presidents Lines, which were later turned into troop ships. I then went to teach at the University of Iowa, where I finished the mural for the Social Security Building in Washington, D.C., in 1942 or 1943, I’m not sure which. With the exception of some visual aid material for the navy flight program in Iowa— navigational maps, etc.—this marks the end of the mural period. JT: What was your main stylistic influence up to this time? PG: e Renaissance chiefly—Piero, Mantegna, Uccello—but I was attracted also by the modern idioms—Léger, Picasso—and was close to the abstract painters on the project, such as Stuart Davis, Burgoyne Diller, Arshile Gorky, Balcomb Greene, etc. At the time I did the Queens project, there was already a marked change in my work— it was becoming more concerned with cubist concepts of treating space. JT: How would you evaluate this whole experience of the Federal Art Project? First, in relation to your own development, and second, in relation to the development of American art? PG: To answer your first question—most significantly the project was my training ground in the real sense of the word. I feel very strongly about this. We were all poor, or most of us, and to have the time and opportunity to continue working—I was in my twenties, which is the important period, the crucial period for the young painter—this was most important and figures significantly in my own development. Although I feel that my personal image as a painter did not come about until I began my easel painting with personal imagery, which was about 1941, the project kept me alive and working—it was my education. JT: Were the projects a good thing for American art? PG: I have two thoughts. at practically all of the best painters of my generation developed on the projects, such as Pollock, de Kooning, [ James] Brooks, [Raoul] Hague, [Balcomb] Greene, and [William] Baziotes. I could go on and on. My second thought is that the reason it was good is that it had a broad base due to the economic situation we were in—the Depression—and all kinds of art and styles, plus all degrees of talent, were employed. Everybody was given an opportunity to prove himself. e many painters I mentioned above, who have come such a long way, are proof of this. JT: Would you favor government sponsorship of art today? PG: at’s all right with me. But it couldn’t be the same thing, because it would not have the broad base for the young and unknown talent to come up. e Federal Art Project was a wonderful thing for that period.

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P I E R O D E L L A F R A N C E S CA : T H E I M P O S S I B I L I T Y O F PA I N T I N G 1965

A certain anxiety persists in the paintings of Piero della Francesca. What we see is the wonder of what it is that is being seen. Perhaps it is the anxiety of painting itself. Where can everything be located, and in what condition can everything exist? In e Baptism of Christ, we are suspended between the order we see and an apprehension that everything may again move. And yet not. It is an extreme point of the “impossibility” of painting. Or its possibility. Its frustration. Its continuity. He is so remote from other masters—without their “completeness” of personality. A different fervor, grave and delicate, moves in the daylight of his pictures. Without our familiar passions, he is like a visitor to earth, reflecting on distances, gravity, and positions of essential forms. In e Baptism, as though opening his eyes for the first time, trees, bodies, sky, and water are represented without manner. e painting is nowhere a fraction more than the balance of his thought. His eye. One cannot determine if the rhythms of his spaces substitute themselves as forms, or the forms as rhythms. In e Flagellation, his thought is diffuse. Everything is fully exposed. e play has been set in motion. e architectural box is opened by the large block of the discoursers to the right, as if a door were slid aside to reveal its contents: the flagellation of Christ, the only “disturbance” in the painting, but placed in the rear, as if in memory. e picture is sliced almost in half, yet both parts act on each other, repel and attract, absorb and enlarge, one another. At times, there seems to be no structure at all. No direction. We can move spatially everywhere, as in life. Possibly it is not a “picture” we see, but the presence of a necessary and generous law. Is the painting a vast precaution to avoid total immobility, a wisdom which can include the partial doubt of the final destiny of its forms? It may be this doubt which moves and locates everything.

First published in Art News, May 1965, 38–39. © 1965 ARTnews, LLC. Guston described the writing of this piece in his talk “The Image” (pp. 116–17), as well as his interviews with Joseph Ablow (p. 56) and Jan Butterfield (p. 290).

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P H I L I P G U S TO N ’ S O BJ E CT : CO N V E R S AT I O N W I T H H A R O L D R O S E N B E R G 1965

Harold Rosenberg: You talk of having an object in the picture—it is in that sense that you consider yourself a traditionalist? Philip Guston: Precisely. HR: Well, there are many artists today who, tired of the dogmas of abstract art, have, as it is said, “returned to the object,” that is, to images with counterparts in nature. Yet creating equivalents to appearances is what I have understood you to be particularly against, and certainly there are few indications in your paintings of trees, furniture, people. On the one hand, you affirm the importance of the object in painting; on the other, you assert an absolute lack of interest in any existing object or image. PG: Images that can be too quickly recognized. To preconceive an image, or even to dwell on an image, and then to go ahead and paint it is an impossibility for me. I have oen wondered why I find an image that is easily recognizable to be so intolerable in a painting. My answer is that it’s intolerable—and also irrelevant—because it’s too abstract. By that I mean that it’s simply and only recognizable. e artist had a thought and then proceeded to paint the thought. Paul Valéry once said that a bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning. In a painting in which this is a room, this is a chair, this is a head, the imagery does not exist—it vanishes into recognition. e trouble with recognizable art is that it excludes too much. I want my work to include more. And “more” also comprises one’s doubts about the object, plus the problem, the dilemma, of recognizing it. I am therefore driven to scrape out the recognition, to efface it, to erase it. I am nowhere until I have reduced it to semi-recognition. HR: Could you say that you are opposed to realism because it is too subjective, too closely confined to the artist’s notion of things? For you, it would seem, an image can have meaning, or reality, only if it first comes into being on the canvas and not previously in the artist’s eye or in his mind. PG: Yes. And this has to do with how the image comes into being, with the process of its creation. It means that the point you are working toward is that—that you didn’t do it. You have to work to achieve a kind of nonentity, although it’s not anonymous. HR: What do you mean by your not doing it? Who is doing it? Or what? First published in Philip Guston: Recent Paintings and Drawings (New York: Jewish Museum, 1965).

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Philip Guston hanging his exhibition at the Jewish Museum, New York, 1966.

PG: It sounds cryptic, I know. Of course, you’re doing it. e hand is doing it. e Other is doing it. I would take it as a criterion or measure—I suppose it’s the only measure I would take—that you get to a point in a painting where you don’t see a reflection of your talent. But you do—by destruction, by erasures. HR: You mean actual erasures? On the canvas? PG: Physical. Which are of course evidences of certain decisions. ings keep looking very good all the time. HR: What do you erase? What you recognize as yourself or your usual way of painting? PG: I have to put it another way. ere is the canvas, and there is you. ere is also something else, a third thing. In the beginning it’s dialogue—between you and the surface. As you work, you think and you do. In my way of working, I work to eliminate the distance or the time between my thinking and doing. en there comes a point of existing for a long time in a negative state, when you are willing to eliminate things that have been looking good all the time; you have as a measure—and once you’ve experienced it, nothing less will satisfy you—that some other being or force is commanding you: only this shall you, can you, accept at this moment. Yet remember that the moment can change over the years. It’s not a static point.

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Movement in painting is very slow, however. It has to do with the mystery of acceptance; what I accept now I erased five years ago. HR: In other words, one of the things you get rid of is what in a particular phase of the development of a painting makes it look like a Guston? PG: I’m not concerned with that. I’m concerned with what I can accept. What you don’t want is either too much of yourself, this is to say, too immediate a recognition, or not enough like yourself. In short, you’re caught, caught between two known things, which you don’t want. HR: When you say “yourself,” you mean yourself as a painter? PG: As I’ve been, yes. HR: So you eliminate in the process of painting . . . PG: at which is too known to me—what’s a habit. HR: What’s “a Guston.” What’s like one of your paintings. PG: Yes, habit. What I want is to be changed by this process. If it doesn’t change me, I become some sort of crasman. But the real problem is not that you want to be changed but how you can be changed, under what conditions. HR: Can you illustrate that? Taking it as a fact that in each painting that you exhibit, which you regard as complete—if it weren’t, you would have eliminated it—you have been changed, in what way have you been changed? is is a difficult question. PG: e only things you can really talk about in painting are impossible to talk about. I can only put it in the negative, but you can do a lot with negatives. e real difficulties begin when the hand refuses to do what the soul doesn’t want it to do. HR: I’m not sure I understand that. PG: Well, you have to reach this point, and it keeps changing all the time. HR: In other words, you reach it anew in each painting. PG: Yes, no coasting. HR: You cannot say, in short: Now I’ve reached a certain level or a certain condition and can stay there? In painting, you feel, this voyage has to be made again each time . . . PG: In a new way. HR: . . . and that there is a certain stage in the painting where that begins to occur. PG: at’s right. HR: At this point you feel that you’re being moved by that Other you were talking about? PG: Yes. And of course this state which you are preparing for—to get into this state, this other world—demands extreme attention, so that things can be happening. It’s a state where you can catch it or miss it. HR: Let me ask you a philosophical question.

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PG: I’m not a philosopher. HR: But we’re talking about a philosophical strategy, a Way. Is there anything you can do when you’re not painting that would either impede or facilitate your reaching the desired state when you are painting? PG: Be more specific. HR: I have in mind that there are certain mystical attitudes toward art, among painters, poets, musicians, in which it is assumed that what the artist does at any time is either pro or contra that state which he strives to achieve in his work. PG: I see what you mean. HR: While another view is that the state, to be relevant to art, can only be one that is achieved within the medium itself. is latter view distinguishes the activity of the artist, as artist, from religious or mystical activity of any kind. If one felt that he ought first to get into a state and then proceed with his work, this would be quite different from what you have in mind? PG: Yes, I’m not talking about that. HR: Would you say, then, that the spiritual condition of the painter is only attainable within the process of painting itself ? PG: No. I’m not talking about that either. HR: ere are two opposing views here. PG: I’m not talking about that either. Neither seems true to me—not actual. It doesn’t seem to me that that’s the way it works. HR: It’s hard for me to conceive how it can be neither. PG: Well, because these two opposites seem too pat to me. It doesn’t feel that way as you work, as you try to create. HR: is is not a question of how you feel while you work but of characterizing your relation to yourself. PG: But I don’t have to characterize what I do in relation to those opposites. HR: No. But for the purpose of clarification you might try to say what you mean as distinguished from these two approaches, which, by the way, are not either of them trivial. PG: I don’t think they’re trivial. ey just don’t seem real to me. When you begin painting there is a kind of working—it’s going on, and you begin again in this very particular activity. It begins where it le off. HR: We’re discussing the heightened state. Let’s take a more precise hypothesis. A man gets up in the morning and starts to paint. Another man gets up and, as among the ancient Greeks or the medieval monks, before he starts to work, as a preliminary and as preparation, he refreshes himself by reciting an incantation or prayer. “O Muses,

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give me memory!” Or something of the kind. In short, by means other than his work he endeavors to put himself into that exalted state that will make it possible to achieve in his work a worthy disclosure. Now, something like this, or equivalent to it, is probably still practiced, usually in secret, by many artists. It’s another way of saying that one can do his work only under some species of intoxication. PG: at’s like putting yourself in the mood. I wouldn’t know what that means. HR: Not mood. It might be an actual physiological condition or, if we follow Freud, a psychopathological one. ere are people who accept this but to whom the use of external means—a poet or artist who works while drunk or under the influence of drugs—is suspect. Today, this is a very pertinent question: whether the stimulation of the imagination by means of drugs can have any intrinsic relation to the kind of condition that is produced through the work itself. PG: I know what you mean, but it has nothing to do with me. HR: Well, take my Model Number Two, who doesn’t use either spiritual or chemical devices apart from the work. It makes no difference if he’s drunk or sober, hashish, no hashish. It has nothing to do with his work. With him the kind of heightened condition that means something is achieved only in a certain stage of the evolution of the work itself. PG: at sounds closer—but it doesn’t sound true either. HR: Well, go on from there. We’re simply trying to pin down what you have in mind. PG: I know that my saying that the Other does it can easily be misinterpreted as a kind of subjective self-indulgence. Yet paradoxical as it may sound, the more subjective you become, you also become, in those moments, more critical, hence more objective. ere is done a work which is recognized by yourself at some point as a separate organism. I can really only tell you what my sensations are during this process. e strongest feeling I have, and it’s confirmed the next day or the following week, is that when I leave the studio I have le there a “person,” or something that is a thing, an organic thing that can lead its own life, that doesn’t need me anymore, doesn’t even need my thoughts about it. But when I haven’t quite achieved this state in the painting, I find that the closer I get to it, the easier it becomes to fool myself. Because you become vulnerable. You are open in those last stages. So it is easier to deceive yourself, and this happens all the time. ese are the most crucial erasures—on the picture that stays there for a few days and still keeps looking good, but on the third day it still needs your memory to inform you how you felt when you did it. at’s no good; there should be no assumptions necessary. It has to be there objectively. HR: e painting has to stop following you around. PG: at’s right.

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HR: e worst thing is a painting that’s like a cat? PG: Exactly. [Aer a break, Guston resumes:] When there’s no model in front of you, no model concept, that is, and it’s impossible to paint as you did last year, then what are you doing? HR: Let me ask you a question, one which would be likely to occur to anyone. You speak of rejecting, a constant process of rejecting, and one of the criteria of rejection is that what is before you reminds you too much of you. You want to get out of yourself. You want to get into new territory. PG: New territory has to have recognition in it too. HR: What kind of recognition? PG: It has to be new and old at the same time, as if that image has been in you for a long time but you’ve never seen it before. When it comes out, it must have this double experience in yourself. I can’t accept something which is so new that there’s no recognition of myself in it. HR: A big problem has to do with the fact that your paintings have a great deal of resemblance to one another. Or let’s say a great deal of thematic continuity. It’s as if your paintings of the last three years were one long . . . PG: at wouldn’t matter, because we’re talking about how it feels when you do them. HR: But also that the way the painting looks to you while you’re doing it is a part of your process of doing it. at’s how you got on the subject of erasures. So the question of how the painting looks is basic. PG: How it looks to me? HR: To you. How it looks in relation to your self-recognition. ese are the terms we are using. PG: Well, certain definite things can be said about the work of the last three years. It began developing earlier, but in the last years there’s been, obviously, no color. Simply black and white or gray and white, gray and black. I did this very deliberately, and I’ll tell you why. Painting became more crucial to me. By crucial I mean that the only measure now was precisely to see whether it was really possible to achieve—to make this voyage, this adventure, and to arrive at this release that we have been talking about without any seductive aids like color, for example. Now I’ve become involved in images and the location of those images, usually a single form, or a few forms. It becomes more important to me simply to locate the form. So I use the most elementary way of making a mark, which is black on white. e reason it becomes gray is the erasures. Here, for instance [pointing to a painting], this form is black, and since you’re working wet on wet all the time—it all has to happen at once, you know—it’s gray. You scrape out and put white over the black. In sum, it’s a question of locating the form you’re making. But this form has to emerge, or grow, out of the working of it, so there’s a paradox. I like a form against a background—I mean, simply empty

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Philip Guston, Air II, 1965. Oil on canvas, 69 × 78 inches. Photo: Sarah Wells.

space—but the paradox is that the form must emerge from this background. It’s not just executed there. You are trying to bring your forces, so to speak, to converge all at once into some point. HR: Would you say that the intention is anti-artistic or that it has nothing to do with art? PG: It’s a strange thing to be immersed in the culture of painting and to wish to be like the first painter. HR: Many an artist today wants to be the last painter. PG: I imagine wanting to paint as a caveman would, when nothing has existed before. But at the same time one knows a great deal about the culture of painting and one is conscious of that culture. HR: You know Mallarmé’s formula for the poet? He calls him “un civilisé édénique,” a civilized first man. PG: at’s marvelous. Exactly what I mean. I should like to paint like a man who has never seen a painting, but this man, myself, lives in the world museum. Obviously, the painting is not going to be a primitive painting. I hate primitive painting anyway.

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HR: e primitivism of a cultivated painter. PG: But the question is: Why do I need this? We were speaking of erasures. ey represent erasures of notions and of good intentions. Knowledge of what you thought you knew but really didn’t know. In this condition of not knowing, you arrive, not at a state of ignorance, but at a state of knowing, the only thing you can know at the time—and that is what is concrete. We’re talking about the real thing, of what goes on, because you’re not making a painting, obviously. You are using this material; it’s symbolic material. You use space and pigment, and your problem is: What should be where? It’s matter I’m working with. But the fact that I’m doing it on a flat surface causes me no end of trouble and contradictions. You can’t walk around it as you can a sculpture; you have no different point of view. HR: Is that what causes it to appear as a thing? e fact that you haven’t seen it before? PG: Oh, yes. Imagine bringing into existence a thing which, as you said earlier, doesn’t have to follow you around, that’s not a domestic pet, but exists by itself. My quarrel with much modern painting is that it needs too much sympathy. e fascination of certain great paintings of the past is that they don’t care about the sympathy you have for them. All the art lovers in the world could march off a cliff and they would still be there. HR: Your ideal would be the Egyptians who created ships and other objects and buried them in the mountainside. Invisible art. PG: Yes. But it also has to do with possession. is thing which can exist for itself must be in a condition that when you leave it—when you say, this picture is finished— [it] really hovers on the brink, hovers like a fog over the landscape and veers one way, then another, and won’t settle. It’s the unsettling of the image that I want. erefore I can’t paint like a caveman. It cannot be a settled, fixed image. It must of necessity be an image which is unsettled, which has not only not made up its mind where to be but must feel as if it’s been in many places all over this canvas, and indeed there’s no place for it to settle— except momentarily. Yet it must have its past. e image must feel as if it’s lived. A picture is finished when it’s in this unsettled, hovering state; not indecisive, though, because it’s lived a long time everywhere else, lived in me, lived in previous paintings of mine, and now in this picture it’s in a new and very particular situation . . . it’s won its freedom from inertia, you might say. HR: Someone, you have said, has asked you why you couldn’t do this right away. PG: You can’t put the image there in the beginning because you simply haven’t experienced anything of it. at’s the reason the thing is worked until it finds this special place. What is this place? It’s a place that promises future conditions of this same condition, a future particularity of this indecision, this hovering. In a word, it promises future creation. at’s the only place it can be.

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HR: What do you mean by “it”? You keep saying “it,” meaning the image. But since it’s not the whole painting— PG: Oh, I mean the whole painting. But the image is what conditions the whole. HR: But if you are talking about the painting as a whole, where does that have to be? What does it mean to say that it has to be in the right place? PG: Well, I work with forms, but my eyes are so geared to the total rectangle that form by itself means nothing, and if my eye is focused on the form, as it is sometimes, I delude myself. I mean, something happens, but it doesn’t feel right. It can become too finished, this form. Actually, some kind of leap takes place when your eye is geared to the whole and you are painting the image, whether it’s a head, a circle, an object. You paint the form without looking at the form but looking at the whole. HR: Still, the question of where is the right place for the form, that is clear; but when you say that the painting as a whole has to find the right place, I’m not sure I know what you mean. PG: I don’t say that the painting as a whole has to find the right place. HR: Would you say in this painting [one similar to Air II] that what you are talking about is that rectangle? PG: Absolutely. But where it is, is important. Why is it up there? Something about this down here is making it be up there. is makes it necessary for that to be there. HR: at black form is really the subject of the picture? PG: Sure. HR: In other words, it’s as if you were painting a still life. PG: Oh, absolutely. HR [later]: From which specific aspects of modernism do you separate yourself ? It seems to me to relate to the idea of having an object . . . PG: at’s right. HR: . . . in the picture. at was the thing that led you to say that you were a traditional artist. PG: Yes. at’s all I mean by that. You know, Rembrandt partakes of something like our dilemma, of that curious ambivalence. It’s as if he eliminates the painting plane, the plane of art, and gives us a real man, yet it isn’t a real man. e trouble with most modern painting is that it’s too clear. e painting of the past which fascinates me is the painting which you can spend the rest of your life trying to figure out, trying to fathom what the artist’s intentions were. at’s what keeps you looking at it. HR: Well, distinguish between making an image that cannot be recognized immediately from making an ambiguous image, as in trompe-l’oeil. PG: Oh, that’s deliberate. at’s camp. at’s something else. HR: Why bring in camp? It’s too fashionable.

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PG: e reason I say it’s camp is that camp has to do with the fact that you know that I know that you know. Everyone knows what’s going on. HR: But, eventually, the trompe-l’oeil image remains ambiguous. PG: But deliberately so. HR: It looks like one thing, then you look at it again and it looks like something else. Now, there has been a great value placed on this capacity to deceive the eye through much of the history of art. It has always played a large part in the popular response to painting and sculpture. Since you raised the question of avoiding a too-soon recognition of the object, also of a recognition that would hold without changing, I think you ought to distinguish what you have in mind from what one might think you were aer. PG: I should like the image in my painting to be as puzzling and mysterious to me as if a figure walked into this room and we stopped talking and wondered: Who is he? What is this appearance? We can’t fathom why he’s here, who he is, what he does, and why he should look the way he looks—as in a story by Kaa, if my memory is correct, when the protagonist comes home, unlocks his door, and there are some beings on the stove. He doesn’t know who they are, what they are doing there; they’re pulp, they’re make-up. He doesn’t know what is going on.* HR: Why not . . . PG: A golem fascinates me. HR: . . . Why not Magritte . . . the table with the tail of cat? PG: Magritte is fascinating. But that’s fantasy. I’m not talking about fantasy. HR: I suspect that you want this strangeness to appear not only in the image but also in the way the painting is painted. PG: Oh, completely. HR: at’s what you have been leaving out. PG: We covered it. HR: You give this analogy of Kaa—what you are leaving out is that no scene . . . PG: Can possibly create . . . HR: If the man did come into this room, if you did wonder who he is, what he is doing here, it would not mean anything because the quality must belong to the painting as well as to the scene. PG: Correct. HR: You have tried to trap me with a literary . . . PG: I did. [laughter] But, of course, the strangeness is precisely in how it’s painted. In

* Franz Kafka, “Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor,” in Complete Stories (New York: Schocken Books, 1971).

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other words, its formality is the thing that makes the strangeness. Otherwise, it would simply be fantasy or a dream. In Valéry’s phrase, it would vanish into meaning. It’s the form that not only brings the meaning into existence; it’s the form which keeps it perpetually renewing itself . . . But listen, oughtn’t we to go? HR: Should we think of going? PG: I guess so.

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FA I T H , H O P E , A N D I M P O S S I B I L I T Y 1965/66

ere are so many things in the world—in the cities—so much to see. Does art need to represent this variety and contribute to its proliferation? Can art be that free? e difficulties begin when you understand what it is that the soul will not permit the hand to make. To paint is always to start at the beginning again, yet being unable to avoid the familiar arguments about what you see yourself painting. e canvas you are working on modifies the previous ones in an unending, baffling chain which never seems to finish. (What a sympathy is demanded of the viewer! He is asked to “see” the future links.) For me the most relevant question and perhaps the only one is, “When are you finished?” When do you stop? Or rather, why stop at all? But you have to rest somewhere. Of course, you can stay on one surface all your life, like Balzac’s Frenhofer. And all of your life’s work can be seen as one picture—but that is merely “true.” ere are places where you pause. us it might be argued that when a painting is “finished,” it is a compromise. But the conditions under which the compromise is made are what matters. Decisions to settle anywhere are intolerable. But you begin to feel as you go on working that unless painting proves its right to exist by being critical and self-judging, it has no reason to exist at all—or is not even possible. e canvas is a court where the artist is prosecutor, defendant, jury, and judge. Art without a trial disappears at a glance: it is too primitive or hopeful, or mere notions, or simply startling, or just another means to make life bearable. You cannot settle out of court. You are faced with what seems like an impossibility— fixing an image which you can tolerate. What can be where? Erasures and destructions, criticisms and judgments of one’s acts, even as they force change in oneself, are still preparations merely reflecting the mind’s will and movement. ere is a burden here, and it is the weight of the familiar. Yet this is the material of a working which from time to time needs to see itself, even though it is reluctant to appear. To will a new form is unacceptable, because will builds distortion. Desire, too, is incomplete and arbitrary. ese strategies, however intimate they might become, must especially be removed to clear the way for something else—a condition somewhat unclear, but which in retrospect becomes a very precise act. is “thing” is recognized only as it

First published in Art News Annual 31 (1965/66): 101–3, 152–53. © 1969, ARTnews, LLC. This article, published in late fall 1965 in the 1966 Art News Annual, was based on notes for a lecture at the New York Studio School in May 1965.

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comes into existence. It resists analysis—and probably this is as it should be. Possibly the moral is that art cannot and should not be made. All these troubles revolve around the irritable mutual dependence of life and art— with their need and contempt for one another. Of necessity, to create is a temporary state and cannot be possessed, because you learn and relearn that it is the lie and mask of Art and, too, its mortification, which promise a continuity. ere are twenty crucial minutes in the evolution of each of my paintings. e closer I get to that time—those twenty minutes—the more intensely subjective I become— but the more objective, too. Your eye gets sharper; you become continuously more and more critical. ere is no measure I can hold on to except this scant half hour of making. One of the great mysteries about the past is that such masters as Mantegna were able to sustain this emotion for a year. e problem, of course, is more complex than mere duration of “inspiration.” ere were pre-images in the fieenth century, foreknowledge of what was going to be brought into existence. Maybe my pre-image is unknown to me, but today it is impossible to act as if pre-imaging is possible. Many works of the past (and of the present) complete what they announce they are going to do, to our increasing boredom. Certain others plague me because I cannot follow their intentions. I can tell at a glance what Fabritius is doing, but I am spending my life trying to find out what Rembrandt was up to. I have a studio in the country—in the woods—but my paintings look more real to me than what is outdoors. You walk outside; the rocks are inert; even the clouds are inert. It makes me feel a little better. But I do have a faith that it is possible to make a living thing, not a diagram of what I have been thinking: to posit with paint something living, something that changes each day. Everyone destroys marvelous paintings. Five years ago you wiped out what you are about to start tomorrow. Where do you put a form? It will move all around, bellow out and shrink, and sometimes it winds up where it was in the first place. But at the end it feels different, and it had to make the voyage. I am a moralist and cannot accept what has not been paid for, or a form that has not been lived through. Frustration is one of the great things in art: satisfaction is nothing. Two artists always fascinate me—Piero della Francesca and Rembrandt. I am fixed on those two and their insoluble opposition. Piero is the ideal painter: he pursued abstraction, some kind of fantastic, metaphysical, perfect organism. In Rembrandt the plane of art is removed. It is not a painting, but a real person—a substitute, a golem. He is really the only painter in the world! Certain artists do something and a new emotion is brought into the world; its real meaning lies outside of history and the chains of causality. Human consciousness moves, but it is not a leap; it is one inch. One inch is a small

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jump, but that jump is everything. You go way out and then you have to come back— to see if you can move that inch. I do not think of modern art as Modern Art. e problem started long ago, and the question is: Can there be any art at all? Maybe this is the content of modern art.

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CO N V E R S AT I O N W I T H J O S E P H A B LOW 1966

Joseph Ablow: I wanted to ask Mr. Guston something that occurred to me as I went over his biography. Abstract expressionism, or whatever it’s called, is . . . Philip Guston: I prefer the term New York School, by the way, because I think that appellation doesn’t seem actual to me. It seems like a coined phrase. As a matter of fact, I don’t remember, in any of the get-togethers I had with the painters of that period, the names of which you probably know, that that word was ever used or exchanged. I mean, nobody ever said, “You so-and-so abstract expressionist, you!” I mean, I don’t think that Picasso and Braque set about to make “cubist” paintings, you know? Well, imagine a primitive painter, Henri Rousseau, saying that he’s going to make a “primitive” painting. You know that famous thing he said to Picasso. He said: “You represent the Egyptian School and I represent the Realistic School.” And it’s right, it’s absolutely correct, what he said. Picasso is a kind of Egyptian painter. So anyway, there was something going on, of course. And every painter was different. But I’m interrupting your questions. JA: Fine. Go right ahead. PG: But I think it happened to be a geographical thing. I happened to be there. If I hadn’t been there, I don’t know what I would have done. You could say the same thing about the other men involved. I think what made a kind of, not a unity but a kind of a group, roughly, that met in each other’s studios or in bars and here and there, was a kind of dissatisfaction with what had been going on previously, or what each of us had been doing previously. It’s as if you didn’t know what you wanted to do, but you knew what you didn’t want to do. It’s very important to know what you don’t want to do. I mean, negatives can be very positive, very important. And there was also a sense of the time it was, and so on. A sense of embarking on something of which you didn’t know the outcome at all. It’s not like now. And of course, the idea of having a career in this didn’t seem possible. at you’d ever make a living at it, or that anybody would look at it. ere were maybe two or three galleries showing that stuff at that time, out of sheer dedication to this idea. So it’s not the way it is now. Anyway, the term was coined, like all terms. Isn’t that how the terms impressionist or cubist were coined? I think of those two terms in terms of derision, actually, if

The conversation, which took place at Boston University in spring 1966, was first published much later, in the catalogue for Guston’s show at the Boston University Art Gallery, September 17–October 30, 1994: Philip Guston, 1975–1980: Private and Public Battles (Boston and Seattle: Boston University Art Gallery and University of Washington Press, 1994); © Joseph Ablow and Boston University Art Gallery.

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I’m not mistaken. “He’s an impressioniste.” I think Matisse said, when he wanted to see what the boys were doing, when he came back from Africa, he said: “ey’re cubists, they make little cubes.” Now it’s in the history books, and it’s why cubist paintings are worth so much on the market, and so on. So New York School is a better term. JA: All right, I’ll use it. You partially answered the question I was going to ask. All right, let’s use a similar term. I was going to compare abstract expressionism, which I’ll now call the New York School, with cubism, which I’ll call the School of Paris. PG: Yeah, that’s a better term. JA: So, let’s say that the School of Paris has a life of thirty-five years, about. And we are having it reported to us through various media that the New York School . . . PG: Is dead. JA: . . . is dead. And it was truncated at about the age of sixteen or seventeen. Considering the vitality and the purpose of the New York School, why do you think this happened? Or had to happen? PG: at’s better. “Why do I think this happened?” is like an “Are you still beating your wife?” question. You mean, what’s happening? JA: Why do you think the reports have happened? PG: I have all kind of ideas about that. First of all, what I enjoy about the School of Paris, one of the most marvelous things about it, is that everything was going on at the same time. You have to remember that while Picasso and Braque were painting what they were painting in the teens, one of the great painters of the century, to my mind, Chirico, was painting his masterpieces. At the same time, and they’re totally different. Soutine, a little later, another giant, to my mind, was painting what he was painting. Matisse was painting what he was painting. And I prefer to think that in spite of the second generation of the New York School, which saw the work of the first generation as a manner in which they could comfortably work, and in spite of all the imitators, each man was totally different. I see no connection between, say, Mark Rothko and, let’s say, Kline. And I could go on mentioning names. It’s not important. By this time I think there’s been so much jazz printed about the whole business that you know all the names. ey’re always listed like who was there at a cocktail party or something, and then somebody gets sore that his name wasn’t put in. But each person was really different. Let’s see how I can really answer that. I mean, I’ve thought a lot about it and I think that the original problems that were posed aer the war period in painting were the most . . . To my way of thinking, naturally, and I won’t preface that anymore, it’s all my way of thinking. I’m very prejudiced, of course. e original problems were the most revolutionary problems posed, and still are. In other words, nothing is dead. You can’t put it under a rug and pretend it’s gone. And I think the reason for wanting it to die off was that the critics, dealers, the establishment of the art world, museums and the avant-garde officialdom, same thing as any other kind of officialdom,

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saw the work of abstract expressionism as style, as a certain way of painting. Now, if it seemed that way, of course, styles come and go. I mean, everybody gets sick of a certain style. Aer ten or fieen years you’re bored stiff with it, so younger painters come along and want to react against it. I think that was one of the motivations for trying to kill it off: it’s dead. And then, of course, the American idea of change enters into it. e idea of new emotions, new feelings, having to find new forms—all this is true. All that exists, and there’s nothing wrong with it. Yet I couldn’t paint another minute if I didn’t believe in the way I do, if I didn’t believe that this was a revolution. It really was a powerful revolutionary instinct which may have lost its power, which may have lost its efficacy in our current emotional climate. at’s possible, but that can change. All right. Now what was this revolution? at’s really the issue. What was it? What was it about? Or what is it about? Because I think it’s still current. I think it’s about, I know it’s about, and revolves around the idea of whether it’s possible to create in our society at all. Whether one should . . . Not make pictures. Everybody can make pictures. ousands of people go to schools, galleries, museums. It becomes not only a way of life, it becomes a way to make a living now. And in our kind of democracy, this is going to proliferate like mad. I think in the next ten years there’ll be even much more than there is now. ere’ll just be tons of art centers and galleries and pictures. And everybody will be making pictures. But the real question is . . . I mean, painting and sculpture are very archaic forms, really. I’m just rambling—if that’s okay with you? I mean, just thinking out loud. It’s the only thing le in our industrial society where an individual alone makes something with his, not just his hands, with his brain, imagination, heart, maybe. And it’s a very archaic form. Same thing with words, writing poetry. Or making sounds, music. And it is a unique thing. Just imagine: 99 percent of the people just report somewhere, are digits, go to the office, clear the desk, and then get plastered, and then they do the same thing the next day. So what is this funny activity that you do? I mean, what is it? Now, I think the original revolutionary impulse behind the New York School, as I felt it anyway, and as I think my colleagues felt it, in the way we talked all the time, was that you felt as if you were driven into a corner against the wall, with no place to stand, just the place you occupied. And it’s as if the act of painting itself was not making a picture, because there are plenty of pictures in the world. Why make more pictures, clutter up the world with pictures? But it’s as if you had to prove to yourself that truly the act of creation was still possible. Whether it was possible. As if you were on trial. is is how it felt to me anyway. I’m speaking very subjectively. I felt as if I was talking to myself, having a dialectical monologue with myself, to see if I could create. And what I mean by create, I mean that the thing I felt and that I enjoyed about certain painters of the past that inspired me, like Cézanne, like Manet, and I could go on with a few more, was that complete losing of oneself in the work. To such an extent that the work itself, even though it was a picture of a woman in front of a mirror or some dead fish on a table, the pictures of these men were not pictures to me. ey felt

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as if something living, a living organism, was posited there on this canvas, on this surface. Now that’s truly to me the act of creation. And I still puzzle about it and worry about it, and I go two steps forward one step backward or one step forward two steps backward, because I’m so puzzled by a lot of problems that I wouldn’t know how to begin talking to you about. And these problems revolve around problems of abstract painting, nonobjective painting, or image making. And of course I’m seeking a place, an area, where these questions would be dissolved, where they don’t exist. Where somehow in me all this would come together. I mean, that’s my hope. So, I was going to say that, for reasons which I did not understand at the time, in the late forties, early fiies, when I went into nonobjective painting or at least nonfigurative painting, I felt I was even then involved with imagery, even though I didn’t understand the imagery, but I thought it was imagery. For some reason that is not quite clear to me yet, and maybe I don’t want to be clear about it either, I was forced and pushed into the kind of painting that I did. at is to say that the demand, in this dialogue of myself with this, was that I make some marks. It speaks to me, I speak to it. We have terrible arguments going all night for weeks and weeks. “Do I really believe that?” I make a mark, a few strokes, and I argue with myself. Not “Do I like it or not?” but “Is it true or not?” And “Is that what I mean? Is that what I want?” But there comes a point when something catches on the canvas, something grips on the canvas. I don’t know what it is. I mean, when you put paint on a surface, most of the time it looks like paint. Who the hell wants paint on a surface? You take it off, put it on, it goes over here, it moves over a foot. As you go closer, it starts moving in inches not feet, then half-inches. ere comes a point, though, when the paint doesn’t feel like paint. I don’t know why. Some mysterious thing happens. I think you all experience this, maybe in parts of canvases or something like that. If you can do it by painting a face or an eye or a nose or an apple, it doesn’t matter. What counts is that the paint should really disappear. Otherwise it’s cra or something like that. But that’s what I mean by “something grips on the canvas.” e moment that happens you are sucked into the whole thing, like into a kind of rhythm of some kind. And I don’t mean a dancing rhythm or action painting. I mean you’re psychically sucked in, and the thing, this plane, starts acquiring a life of its own. en you’re a goner. en, if you’re lucky, you have a run of two or three hours and you can’t repair it, you can’t fix it. And you feel like you’ve just made a thing, like a living thing is there. All I can tell you is what it feels like. I can have all kinds of wonderful ideas, a little green here, a little blue there, and I’ll proceed to do it. But then I’ll leave the studio and it’s like having a bunch of rocks in your stomach. You can’t stand to see the illustrations of your ideas. en all the trouble starts, and the dissatisfaction starts. So you go back and you scrape it out and you move it around. But then there comes a time, if you persevere long enough, when the paint seems alive. It’s actually living, and there’s some kind of release. at’s all I can tell you. I think a lot of artists who paint have that experience, in one degree or another, of this release where their thinking doesn’t precede their doing. It seems to be that

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the space is shortened between thinking and doing. It’s a funny sensation most of the time. And what I really hate, yet I have to go through with it, like somebody preparing for sacred vows or something, is the horrible sensation of putting paint on. You know, I’ve been painting a while and it gets so boring to put paint on, and to see yourself putting paint on. You’re really preparing for those few hours where it’s like some kind of umbilical cord is attached between you and it. And you do it and the work is done. And this cord seems to slacken, as if you le yourself there. And what a relief, to leave yourself somewhere! You get out of it entirely. en you leave the studio and those rocks aren’t there anymore. You can go to a movie in the aernoon, or two movies, and you feel okay. I mean, you don’t feel guilty about anything. You’ve le a living thing there. And I come in the next day and I know it. One of the signs that I go by is that, when I’ve le this thing there, I don’t remember it. I don’t remember what it looks like. I only remember the general feeling of it. But I don’t remember parts of it. And that’s what I want. I don’t want to be stuck with parts. I know I haven’t finished the picture when I sit down to eat outside the studio and I think: “Gee, that’s a pretty nice relationship between that part and that part. A partial relationship.” And then: “No, what about the other part?” It has to be this peculiar kind of unity. And I think that once you’ve tasted that, experienced that, it’s hard to settle for anything else. Also, I’m not entirely sure that it’s a good thing, either. I mean, I don’t propose this as a great value, because in some way I think it’s kind of like devil’s work because man is not supposed to make life. Only God can make a tree. Why should you make a living organism? You should make images of living organisms. But it seems presumptuous to attempt to make a thing that breathes and pulsates right there by itself. It’s unnatural in a way. What’s inhuman about it is that the human way to create, I think, is the way we see: from part to part. I mean, you do this and then you do that. You learn about composition and you’ve analyzed the old masters and you form certain ideas about structure. But it’s an inhuman activity, trying to make some kind of jump or leap. Aer all, a painting is only a painting. A painting is always saying: “What do you want from me? I can only be a painting!” And you have to go from part to part, but you shouldn’t see yourself go from part to part. at’s the whole point. at’s some kind of leap, that you can be painting over here and seeing the square as the world. I mean, that’s reality for those few minutes or hours. at’s the world. I don’t know what I’m talking about. I mean, I do know what I’m talking about, but I don’t know how to . . . I just feel as if I jumped right into the whole thing. I don’t know where to proceed from there. I could ramble on, but . . . JA: Well, you were describing the feeling you had. PG: I’m describing, I guess, the process of painting. Audience: I was wondering. When you’re working, at some point if you see something that reminds you of a literal image, how does it affect you? Do you try to take it out? Or leave it and say, “If someone sees it, good. If not . . .”

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PG: I don’t care about someone seeing it. I’m my own spectator. It’s not arrogance. I just feel that I’m as good as anyone else, and I can be my own spectator. What do you mean by a literal image? You mean an actual form that’s recognizable? Aud: Let’s say a particular form or color which just reads as, say, a head or a hand. PG: You mean, will I leave it or take it out? Aud: . . . a particular attitude that you have toward it. PG: I don’t know that I have an attitude about it. I know I tussle with these things all the time. A few years ago, like I do quite oen, I got very nervous about what I was doing, maybe exhausted. And I came in the lo one day, and I never paint on an easel, I just tack canvas on a wall. It’s a very old lo, full of dirty skylights and a lot of crap around. So I thought, “I’ll just paint what I see. Just don’t think.” So I painted the whole lo, like one of those Matisses. Easels, broken chairs, electrical wire hanging down, all the way right up to my hand, below, painting it. I worked steadily for eight hours without stopping. en I ran across the street and got my wife and I said: “Look at that! I can paint! It’s as good as a Bonnard.” And I was really upset. Like, this denied everything I was doing, you know? One of those funny moments you have. About five years ago, I guess. Because I’m puzzled all the time about what you’re asking about. I mean, the literal image and . . . Not nonobjective art, I don’t know what nonobjective art is. ere is no such thing as nonobjective art. Everything has an object, everything has a figure. e question is: What kind? Does it have illusions? In what way can you have figuration? at’s what counts. Anyway, in this case I painted quite literally. Fancy color and so on. Dirty grays, nice pinks, ochres, and it looked terrific, absolutely wonderful. But I had a hard time sleeping that night. I was very upset: “Where do I go? Is this a new career or what? Am I changing? Am I afraid to change?” All these problems, psychological problems. And I came in the next morning and there was nothing there. ere was literally nothing there. I mean, there was a representation of all this, but it seemed like a fake, faked up. Because it didn’t seem real. It didn’t seem concrete. It didn’t seem to have any life of its own. All it did was represent something, and depended on all this recognition. Like, you have to be briefed on it and say: “Oh yeah, a chair, a torn cloth. Oh yeah, a broken mirror.” And it was composed nicely. You flowed and moved through one part to the other. All around, your eye moved nicely. Absolutely satisfying as a painting. Well, then I proceeded to destroy it. And then I had to rediscover again and again that I guess I’m not interested in painting. at is, I’m not interested in making a picture. en, what the hell am I interested in? I must be interested in this process that I’m talking about. You know, I scrape off a lot and I don’t keep the studio very tidy, so you have on the floor just big blobs of paint that’s been scraped off, like cow dung in a field. So something comes off on a picture and I look down at this stuff on the floor and it’s just a lot of inert matter, just inert paint. And then I look back at the canvas and it’s not inert. It’s active, moving and living. And that seems to me like

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some kind of peculiar miracle that I need to have again and again. Why I need to have this miracle, I can’t psychoanalyze myself. But I need it. And also my conviction is that this is the act of creation to me. I mean, that’s how I have it. So I’m in a corner, painting. And I can’t seem to move out. Maybe there’ll come a day. And I’ve done this, like painting the studio, I’ve done it again and again. Recently, with a few objects, paint cans on the table, anything. And it won’t stay there. It won’t stick there. Last year I got involved, thinking I ought to paint something. I have a five-and-dime coffee mug, so I take a small canvas and I’ll paint this coffee cup. Cheap coffee cups are kind of nice. I don’t know, that ear . . . It looks so ordinary, you know? And maybe I’ll put in two, make it interesting. But I end up with one, and it won’t stick. It just won’t stick. It won’t hold on the plane. en you start shoving this form around. It gets pushed, it gets distorted, one side goes up, the ear goes way out. It feels good. I don’t know why. If you push it, it feels good. I don’t know what it is. It must have something to do with—what’s the word?—kinesthesia. Is that a word? JA: Yeah. PG: It means what? JA: It creates an action in something else. PG: So that I feel now that I’m not drawing or representing anything, not even nonobjective art. You know, you can represent abstract art too, as well as represent heads and figures, nudes. A lot of abstract artists are just representational painters. You know that. And a lot of figurative painters are very abstract. I don’t feel as if I’m doing that. I feel more as if I’m shaping something with my hands. And I think I always wanted to get to that state. Like, if a blind man in a dark room had some clay, what would he make? It’s very physical. I mean, I want these forms. I end up with two or three forms on a canvas, finally. But it gets very physical to me, aer all these years. I always thought I was a very spiritual man, not interested in paint and everything. And now I discover myself to be very physical and very involved with matter. I want to be involved with how heavy things are. A balloon. How light things are. ings levitating. Pushing forms. Making it feel as if I’m pushing in a head, and then it bulges out here. Like feelings you all have. You know, you see somebody’s head and you want to push it, squeeze it, see what happens. Or gravity interests me. I think you might be able to write a whole book of philosophy about: If you had a ball and the floor was just tilted a little, at what point would the ball start rolling? Sometimes the form ends up on the canvas in some peculiar positions. It’s about to fall but it isn’t falling because some little thing is holding it up there, some peculiar balancing going on. So, I’m really involved in all this foolishness. Of course, I believe it’s very significant, not foolish at all. And it becomes in my mind as important and as crucial as painting the baptism of Christ, really. I don’t know why. It’s very important to me. Maybe I’m skeptical about it all too, because I think it’s a terrible state for man to get down to. But then, modern life is like that. You walk on the street, you have to

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keep your balance. I mean, how you walk. And then I can listen to a couple of guys, as I did the other day, having a heavy philosophical discussion about Sartre, and instead of listening to them I was watching the way the guy was shiing, the way his pants sagged and the way one leg was going, the way he shied his weight on his hips. It seems to be very important. JA: You were talking about making this jump. You see yourself putting the paint on. Do you think it’s harder to make that jump while working with the object? PG: No, not at all. I think this. Frequently when I see painters, or young painters, working what’s called nonobjectively, whether it’s colored stripes or brushstrokes or bull’seyes, it doesn’t matter, it’s all the same. I think it’s too limited. Not in making a picture—but we’re not talking about making pictures, we’re talking about one’s experience and one’s enlargement of one’s self. Because that’s what’s important, the evolution of one’s self. I mean, how can you continue to evolve? at’s the point. And how to bite off a big-enough hunk of something so you can evolve. You don’t always have to move horizontally. I feel now I’m going more vertically. At one point earlier, if you allow the analogy or metaphor, I felt I could do everything. And I painted all kinds of things. And I could move horizontally on the landscape, just conquering everything. And now I feel like I’m in a deep mine sha, trying to penetrate, mining. But it feels inexhaustible to me. But what I was going to say, in relation to what you asked, was that when I see people making “abstract paintings,” I think it’s just a dialogue. And a dialogue isn’t enough. at is to say, there’s you painting and this canvas, but I think there has to be a third thing. ere has to be a trialogue. And whatever that third thing must be, to reverberate and make trouble, you have to have trouble and contradictions. It has to become complex, because life is complex, emotions are complex. And whether the third thing is a still life, something you look at, or an idea, a concept, in each case it has to be a trialogue, and has to above all involve you. Painting from something is no assurance of anything at all. It just gets some recognizable objects, it doesn’t matter. e real thing that matters is: How involved are you in that? I can certainly imagine that there are painters who are involved in painting some objects or stories they want to tell. Just as involved as I am in putting what where, which is my third thing. But just a simple act of deciding limitations right at the beginning, which I feel a lot of abstract painting does . . . I’m not delivering a diatribe against abstract art, nor am I trying to be facetious. I thought a lot about it—abstract, representational, I just don’t think of it that way. It seems to me somewhat irrelevant except as it might exist as a problem to an individual. en it becomes interesting and exciting. What was I talking about? I think what I don’t like . . . Not don’t like, but a lot of things you don’t even notice. Your eye just bounces off a lot of painting, as it does a lot of things. Somebody paints a figure or paints stripes—do you like it? Well, you say . . . Yeah, you don’t dislike it. I don’t dislike this chair.

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[tape break] Why fight it? I mean, what is a painting? A painting is a flat surface upon which unequal lights are placed. You might put it that way. Different colors, unequal lights. Whether it’s so-edged or hard-edged, and so on. In other words, you have a preconception, an expectation, and then you simply proceed to meet that expectation. And you have a measure. You know when it’s finished. You know when to stop. When to have them trucked out to the gallery every year. And you know where you’re at. It’s a kind of adjustment, which is saying, “Why torture yourself with imponderables and so on?” I think I’m talking about the first question. at the original, as I said, revolutionary impulse of the New York School was that nothing can really be decided. at painting will have to be, no matter what form it takes in our times, in modern life, a continuing, plaguing, harassing argument about whether it should exist. Whether you can create, and under what conditions can you create. And that seems to be, will always be, current in our time. I don’t like it. I’d rather be settled. Because everybody wants some peace. I’d rather be able to decide, sure, painting is some paint on a flat surface, and I’m talented and I could make all kinds of doohickeys, you know, and they’re nice to look at. And you can make a pretty good living at it, because the whole climate is prepared for it, certainly. One reason, and the main reason really, coming back to the original question about why abstract expressionism had this demise, is that there’s no audience for it. at’s a fact. Because the audience for it would be too demanding. It would involve the same kind of feeling and thinking and questioning that the creator is putting into it. In other words, it demands this kind of participation. Now if you’re going to tell me that a lot of these paintings are in museums and in collections and in books, that’s true. But I believe they saw it as an interesting new style and not what it really was about. Aud: Do you think you’re related to older painters, like Chardin? PG: Oh well, you have to name names. Somebody where I’m teaching now said he was giving a course in modern art, and I was lonely that night and I was sort of prepared for discussion, and I said, “Oh yeah, you start with Cézanne or Delacroix.” “Oh no,” he says, “I start with Noland and Morris Louis.” So, you say “older,” you might mean Rothko or me or de Kooning. I don’t know. Or Chardin. Yeah, what gallery does he show in? [laughter] Aud: I was wondering if you felt you were similar to Olitski? PG: No, I don’t think so. I think he’s just a gorgeous painter. But not similar, no. It would be very nice to make art through the ages a great unity. e same things exist, the same basic principles. And to some extent that’s true. To some extent. And I think Cézanne was the key figure here. I mean, if you’re interested in it. You don’t have to be interested in it. You can paint like Raphael if you want to. But if you’re involved in it, you’re forced to the conclusion that there is such a thing as modern art, which

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is this peculiar individual activity a single man does. Self-commissioned, mind you! Nobody’s commissioning you to do this. To create in such a way that the painting becomes a vehicle of a living autonomous organism which can exist by itself. Why this exists, I don’t know. I mean, I’m puzzled by it, but I know it’s there. I know this need is there. And Chardin is delicious to look at and proposes all kinds of complex thoughts and emotions. e way the fruit is balanced, where everything is, the skin of the fruit, the dew on the cherry, the fuzz on a peach, is so controlled. It’s not a Dutch still-life painting by a long shot, of course. And its uniqueness, its rareness, is a very special thing. But I don’t think he went through this kind of hassle at all. I think Delacroix did, somewhat. I mean, it varies. It can be different. JA: Would you say that the sense of living organism is less great in a Chardin or Piero than it would be in the best of the New York School? PG: Well, I prefer the other. I don’t mean to be perverse, but I certainly would rather look, there’s no question, at Piero’s Flagellation painting in Urbino, or the Baptism painting in the National Gallery [in London], than I would any modern painting. It seems so complete, so total, so balanced/unbalanced. All I can tell you is that I’ve had a reproduction on my wall of these two paintings for about twenty-five years. In the kitchen, where you really look at things. I mean, where you are most of the time. And I’ve not only never gotten tired of them, but I see new things all the time. I’m at a point now where I don’t even see the architecture, and I think that’s a lot of baloney. Everything I thought about it, everything that’s written about it, is a lot of baloney. ere’s no architecture there at all. I think they’re on the verge of chaos. I think they’re the most chaotic, disorganized pictures now. ey’re like trembling—they’re just posed there for a split second before they want to become something else. ey’re the most peculiar paintings ever painted, I think. And more unclear than most modern paintings. As a matter of fact, the trouble with modern painting is that it’s too clear. I mean, some of the old masters are so unclear that you can’t even fathom what their intentions were, you know? Just because there are columns and legs doesn’t mean . . . But Piero is a great inspiration to me. And even though my work used to be very influenced by him superficially, I didn’t know what I was seeing. I see something else now. Maybe I’m seeing it for the first time. I work all night, you know, in the hours of the morning, and I come in the kitchen and eat around three or four. So I kept looking at the Baptism and the Flagellation and started writing about it. Not to “write,” but to put down my thoughts. I don’t write. Anyway, I worked on this for about a year and a half. It was about two years ago I started this business. And I wrote a lot and I got involved with how to write. You know, writing’s very difficult. I mean, to get certain thoughts into shape. And I ended up with a couple of paragraphs. It was printed in one of the art magazines [see p. 41]. And the reason I bring it up is that I said something in there that I feel strongly. And that is that his work, unlike that of other masters of the Renaissance, which would be the fieenth century, has a kind of innocence or freshness about it, as if he were like a messenger from God looking

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Musa McKim in kitchen at Woodstock, 1974. Photo © Denise Browne Hare.

at the world for the first time. In his Baptism, which I’m sure you all know, it’s like he came down to earth and opened his eyes up for the first time. You see a tree, angels, some ground, a little bit of water, some reflections, sky, clouds, hills, limbs. And it’s as if he came down and started measuring everything and locating everything for the first time. It has that feeling. And I want to do that. I want to paint a world as if it’s never been seen before. at’s what I’d like to do. And maybe I have to go through this whole torturous business in order to do it, but that’s what I have to do. And painting becomes worthwhile, like total activity of some kind. I usually talk more reasonably than this. I don’t know what it is. JA: Well, we’re lucky. ere are some other questions. PG: More logically, I mean. JA: Do you want to take some more questions? PG: Sure, I’d be happy to. Aud: ere’s a painting at Brandeis that is titled To Fellini. When you finished it, you said, this painting is what Fellini is like. How did it become To Fellini? PG: No, that’s just a moniker. Well, you want to know how it came about? It’s very foolish. It has nothing to do with the picture. It’s just that I was on the canvas for about a month and there was a week or four days when I was getting close to it, you know?

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It was tightening, it was locking in. And on Forty-second Street, when I lived in New York, I used to go all the time to the movie strip, and there were two early Fellini movies there. One was e White Sheik and the other was I Vitelloni, which I still think are his two great ones. You know, I stop work at midnight and that’s the strip where you can even go at one o’clock and still see features, and you come out refreshed, or sleepy, either way. So I was doing that that week, and when the picture came off I just said it was like an homage to Fellini, that’s all. I just thought in those two films he was a great artist. Particularly Vitelloni. I’d like to talk about movies for a while, talk about Fellini. I think he’s deteriorated very badly, but . . . To me, he deteriorated because he became programmatic, which I think is the death of art, the death of creation. Although 8½ had good things in it. at last one was a disaster, what’s it called? e one about the woman? Giulietta. But in Vitelloni, which some of you may remember, about the young guys in a little town who don’t know what to do with themselves, everything was so sharply observed, every mannerism of people and how they talk and move. And his art was created out of this marvelous looking that he did. Whereas now he seems to have a great philosophical idea and the pictures are just diagrams. ey just illustrate his ideas. ere are no people in it. ey’re caricatured, they have to be, in order to bring out his ideas. ey’re made of cardboard, really. And then he’s forced to become satiric and ironic, which is a bad sign. Well, anyway, I don’t want to talk about Fellini. But I mean, a lot of painters do this too. Aud: In relation to your discussion on Piero della Francesca, do you think you are more, or can be more, conscious about his work than perhaps he was? PG: You mean that he didn’t think about all the things I think about him? at question always comes up. I don’t think I could be one-millionth as conscious about what he’s doing as he was. We talk about past masters and the question always comes up: Did they think of all these things? Well, first of all, how did the painting come into existence, do you think? You know, if you’ll forgive my saying so, that’s the pure Hollywood idea about artists. at the most expressionistic of painters, Van Gogh, say, was supposed to be this mad genius who cut off his ear and he was compulsive and so on. You ever read his letters to his brother eo? He was the most conscious of artists. I mean, he goes on for pages about Rembrandt and Giotto. e reason I say it’s a Hollywood idea, the reason they could invest two or three million in making Lust for Life and be assured of enough profits on it, is that the average man could go in there, put down two and a half dollars, and have a fantasy that he too could be Van Gogh. Or leave his wife like Gauguin and become a genius. It’s fantasy life. Van Gogh obviously had some dramatic incidents, so it’s like material for a movie. But someone asked Jean Renoir, the movie director: Wouldn’t it be nice to make a movie about his father? And he said, “A movie about what? He came in, he hit us over the face, then he ate and he le, and four hours later he came in again and he ate and he went back again.” Nothing happened to poor Renoir. He just painted.

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Of course painters know what they’re doing! ere’s no such thing as an unintelligent painter. It’s an anomaly. Whether you can write about it or talk about it is a question of individual predilection. Some could. Some didn’t. Some couldn’t. Delacroix wrote beautifully. Cézanne wrote beautiful letters about what he was doing, what he was aer. So did Pissarro. Corot didn’t. Some do, some don’t. Matisse hasn’t written very much. Picasso has. But, my God, they certainly, not knew what they’re doing, but knew what was involved with what they were doing. Unless you’re a primitive. Primitive artists, by that I mean what they call self-taught artists, they may not get so involved. But then, that’s like children’s art or something. Aud: Do you think that we read and think more than they did? PG: All right, let’s assume that we do read more into it today. e real question is: Can we avoid it? Yeah, it’s debatable. Maybe you could say that we read more into the human being than they did in the past. Well, can you avoid it? e fact that we do it means that we need it. My own view about that is that it’s great. It’s impossible to return to less complicated states of mind. at is to say, it’s possible that this is the evolution of our minds and imagination, that we become more complicated, more conscious of our processes. But try to avoid it. You could. You could take various drugs, all sorts of things, and get out of it. You could be lobotomized too, and get out of it. But how the hell are you going to avoid it, if you feel certain contradictions? I don’t see how it could be avoided. ere’s a wonderful part in Teilhard de Chardin’s first book, the Phenomenon of Man—it’s sort of startling—where he talks about the great leap it must have been, when man started becoming fully conscious of his actions and judging them. Imagine! Not just kill and eat and sleep and reproduce, but to act and start thinking about all kinds of values. Well, he suggests that that’s the evolution of man and it’s a continuing evolution. And I believe that idea is very inspiring. Because I used to go crazy, I used to wonder why: not only to be so fully conscious of yourself but even to be conscious that you’re conscious, you know? To act, to do something and watch yourself doing it, is a strange state of affairs. But it’s an evolutionary process, which is going to go on and on and on, and leads, I think, in art to new subject matter, to new content. Has to. So the question, about whether Cézanne or Piero della Francesca really thought about all those things we think, is irrelevant. Even if they didn’t, it doesn’t matter. We see what we need to see and have to see. In other words, we’re painting the Pieros. We’re painting the Cézannes. PG: I’m going to accept one more question. One more last question. All right? Aud: Does the New York School, or art in general, need a more intelligent audience to keep alive? PG: Absolutely. If you want my ideas about it, I think that audience is dwindling in our time. Let’s see if I understand your question right. Yeah, I think serious high art needs a serious high audience. Yes. I don’t see how it can exist otherwise. Finally, I don’t see how it can exist. But I’m not so hopeful about it. I think, as I suggested a little ear-

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lier, in the democratization of art we’re going to have a leveling out and a proliferation of mediocre artists and audience: where less is demanded, less needed. Maybe that’s natural, I don’t know. Maybe that’s the way things go. But I think, as that’s happening, and it’s happening now and will continue probably at an even greater rate of speed, I think the reverse might happen. at there might be an underground, a private art, like the early Christian martyrs or something, like you will pass a little poem, a little painting, like they’re supposed to do in the Iron Curtain countries. at might be a good thing, I don’t know. Like a connoisseur’s art or an aristocratic art. Both could exist side by side. Might be a nice thing, you know? ere have been periods in the past where there’s been art for the marketplace, thousands of prints and everything like we have now. And then there was the art of the palace. In Chinese painting, the Sung period, if I’m not mistaken, it was somewhat similar. ere was the big art of the marketplace: pictures of cockfights and wrestlers, genre painting. And in the palace, statesmen and military men and so on exchanged these very special paintings. ey weren’t bought or sold. ey were like pawns. ese marvelous things we see now weren’t public. It might happen again. I wish it would. JA: Could we try for a couple more questions? PG: Sure. I have a lot of energy. JA: Okay. Aud: In your later paintings, as you were working, you didn’t make it stop at the edge of the canvas. PG: Yeah. I le the canvas showing all around? Well, I seem to have done that over the last four or five years. It seemed to happen first just in a practical way, since I don’t stretch the canvas. I just put a big hunk of canvas on the wall and keep working and try to locate these one or two images. And when I stretch it up there’s always an inch or two le. I remember when that first happened, I liked the feeling that there was bare canvas around. Now, why I liked it: first of all, it seemed part of the total, part of the composition. And the other reason I liked it was that it didn’t pretend to be real, that is, like an art of illusion. It’s as if it said: “Painting is really an art of illusion,” and I want to show the canvas, it’s really just paint on canvas. It seemed to be part of the complication that I liked. If you’re making a drawing, you like to show some paper, uncovered. Or if you’re working with clay, if you’re modeling, you know how wonderful it is to see in a Rodin the head’s worked out and then a bunch of clay. It’s made of clay. I want to show that it’s really just paint too. Even though I’m trying to eliminate the paint, it’s still paint. I just enjoyed that feeling. Aud: [inaudible] PG: You’re asking, “Who is the audience?” ey don’t have to be painters. Sometimes painters are the worst audience. at’s a myth, you know. People say: “Oh, he’s a painter’s painter.” Or: “Painters make a painter.” I don’t believe that at all. It’s not been my experience. I’ve had the experience of men coming into the studio or to a

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show, who are not in art at all. Several people who have been involved in experimental psychology, various forms of existential psychology, say, who, once they make the break, or what you call the transfer to reading this language of painting, forms in space, I’ve been more rewarded by their reactions. Or it’s frequently meant more to me than a painter’s reactions. Is that what you’re talking about? Aud: No. [inaudible] PG: Oh, I don’t know. Well, you have to be involved with what it’s involved with, no? Various levels, you mean? I don’t know. I haven’t thought about that. You know, they always say that about Shakespeare, don’t they? JA: Or Piero. PG: Yeah. Well, is it a value? In other words, let’s say I go, as I did once, over to Urbino. It’s a real trek: you go up that hill and you get there, and you finally go through all these rooms, all to see this little picture—this big [gestures]. And there’s somebody else looking at it. Now, we’re both looking at it. Are we seeing the same picture? It took me a day and a half to get there, buses and so on. And the guard stands there and he says, “at’s Piero della Francesca.” I said, “Yeah.” And he says, “at’s the Flagellation.” And I said, “Yeah.” He’s a guard. So, who’s seeing what? I don’t know. I’m seeing what I have to see, what I need to see. Now the question about whether art is better if it exists on different levels, I don’t know. Not to me. en you have to have some kind of social idea about art. Somebody reads Crime and Punishment, and he says it’s a whodunit too. Is it good to have somebody read Crime and Punishment and they say, “What’s it about?” and he says, “Well, there’s this guy commits a crime and then there’s a detective—see?—and then he goes out to get him.” Well, that’s on one level. Is that good? Another person reads it and finds tremendous psychological complexities going on in the human spirit and being, sadism and so on. at’s what you’re talking about, is it? Or do you think it’s better that it exists on different levels? I don’t know. I don’t need it. I think a work of art should be seen in its, I won’t say highest, but its fullest levels, its fullest meanings. Aud: [inaudible] PG: Well, by serious I just mean awareness of what it’s about, of what’s going on. In any involved work of art there’s a lot going on. Aud: [inaudible] PG: Too bad. JA: You’re using very loaded terms. PG: Why is it loaded? JA: Well, it means that there is another group that isn’t in on the secret and that’s unfair. PG: Let ’em. Let them get educated. e hell with them. Make it a big elite. at’s fine. We’ll have a Greek society. Aud: Do you have any thoughts about color? In the show [at the Jewish Museum in

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1966], the recent works center mostly around grays and blacks, whereas your earlier works are painted with a broader range of color. PG: Yeah. I have had a lot of thoughts about that over the years. Well, first of all, I’ve never been interested in color to begin with. I used red a lot in the early fiies to become acquainted with red. I didn’t use so many colors. ey may appear like many colors, but that’s just appearance. Pinks and reds, a little touch of green maybe, or blue. at’s about all it was. A touch of black. So. But I feel that there has to be a moral value to color. Why should there be this color or that color, or that color? It took me a few years to get the feeling of red, and particularly cad red medium, which I happen to love. I like pastrami. I just like it. I couldn’t tell you why. I like cad red medium. It has a certain resonance to it. You can go both ways with it. A little black goes well with it. A little pink goes well with it. So I think I’m more of a tonal painter, maybe. I work with a few tones. en, I don’t think I’ve ever been a colorist, you know, working with color to create space. I think I’ve tried to do it, locate forms, more with tone. But then, color puzzles me. I don’t know much about it at all. So I’ve become attached to a single color and worked with it for years. I had a blue time. I worked with blue for a few years and got involved with blue. And I don’t really understand blue at all. But this cad red medium just seems to stay on the plane. You can’t budge it. It’s there. Blue is nowhere. It really bothers me. Unless I put black on it to hold it, like you put your foot on it to hold it there. Or green, I really am puzzled. I mean, I look at Bonnard. I think he’s a marvelous color painter. is whole tapestry of color, it’s magnificent. I don’t know how he does it. It’s wonderful. For his vision, it’s perfect. Naturally it’s perfect, it’s what he does. en, lately, I got to a feeling that I wasn’t much involved with color anyway. e red seemed to go. I didn’t seem to need it or feel it anymore. I’m not even interested in red anymore. So, what’s there to work with? Black. I mean, stuff. I don’t even think of it as black. It’s just stuff that you put on. And you don’t like it when it’s over there? Well, you take it out with white, so it gets gray. en you put the mud over here. You don’t like it there, it goes out, you put it over there. So the whole picture ends up being this kind of thing. Although, I am aware of light. I’ve discovered that, even though you work with gray, white, and black, you can’t avoid light. Fortunately. And it’s marvelous to create light. But then I’ve always admired, always puzzled over, some of the masters, like Goya. Goyas I’ve seen. Or Zurbarán—in the Prado you see the magnificent monks painted just in gray and white. And Hals. And Rembrandt. Late Rembrandts with just a few tones. Gray and black seems magnificent to me. And I guess, also, I want to see how much I can do with very little things. Very simple. Just two colors. I mean, white and black. And a brush. My hand. Nothing to paste on. I want to see if there’s anything le to express with the most elementary means. So far, I’ve found it very challenging and inexhaustible. So far.

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I N T E R V I E W W I T H K A R L FO R T E S S 1966

When the show [at the Guggenheim in 1962] was first hung, it was somewhat traumatic for me. You see, the year previous to the show I got pretty neurotic about it. I got into a collapse about it and talked to the director, Arnason, who was doing the show, and cancelled it, as if I had to act out the fear of myself seeing it all together. Because by not seeing it all together, you could still perpetuate to yourself perhaps certain hopes and myths about yourself that you need. Aer I cancelled it, I thought then that this was some sort of defeat for myself. I wanted then to have it. It would be a greater defeat not to have it than to have it. I thought I better face it. I thought that in having it, exposing it to myself, and in being willing to be judged on your production, your work, that this might be a way I could get rid of it and move on. Aer it was hung, my first response was shock. But aer a few weeks, almost as one would feel aer an operation of some kind, I recovered. I would go there on Mondays, when the museum was closed, and study it as if it were in my own studio. I began to regard the Guggenheim as an extension of my studio. It was of great value to me. It took me about a year to get started painting again and stop brooding about the work. I have a capacity for self-criticism, and it enabled me to move on. I think I became more ruthless with myself in the work following. One of the problems of exhibiting altogether, along with its value, which is to expose it, get it out of your studio, get it out of yourself and put it into the world, is to get out of the self-indulgence of daydreaming or fantasizing about yourself. Something happens when you put it up cold on the wall and it’s looked at by eyes, which, sympathetic though they may be, are not as sympathetic to you as you may be to yourself. Together with that value go other elements which aren’t so valuable, which are apt to make you more self-conscious than you otherwise would be. But that’s unavoidable. You have to get over that and lose yourself again in painting, so that you’re painting alone in your room with nobody watching you. When I say I couldn’t work for a year aer the Guggenheim show, I mean that I wasn’t able to achieve the total loss of self-consciousness which I need. But that happens to me every time I have a show. I get into too much awareness of myself and have to withdraw and achieve an aloneness in the studio, where I feel no one is watching me. Usually when I have a show, I have to wait while the pictures are on the wall. I can’t work while they are on the wall. I don’t believe anything is ever finished in a painter’s life. Not previously published. Guston’s statements here are from an oral history interview recorded for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, on April 14, 1966, in Boston.

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In the fiies I entered a very painful period when I’d lost what I had and had nowhere to go. I was in a state of gradual dismantling. I felt I was nowhere. I was using these children I’d been painting as kind of props, which I didn’t like, but found nowhere else to move into. When I finally, in 1947 or ’48, dismantled everything and started from scratch again, I began to think, “Well, maybe I don’t really possess anything anyway, and maybe I’m not as good as I thought I was. Maybe I don’t know what I think I know.” And over a period of three years I ended up in a kind of freedom almost, a kind of nothing. I have a desire to put paint on. at I know. ere’s a surface in front of me. I think, “Well, I’ll just start from scratch, I’ll put brush in paint, I’ll put it on the canvas.” I, even in 1949, wanted to see if I could paint a picture, have a run, so to speak, without stepping back and pulling out a cigarette, looking at the canvas and thinking. Just to be willing to accept what happened, to suspend criticism. To test myself to see if my sense of structure was inherent. I would stand in front of the surface and simply keep on painting for three or four hours. I began to see that when I did that I didn’t lose structure at all. e 1950–55 paintings, in general, were very diffuse lyrical pictures. About 1956 I began to become very dissatisfied. I began to feel a need for a more solid painting. I began to look at my earliest work with a kind of renewed interest, the solidity of that. I found it a terrific challenging problem, in my own terms, to create forms. Now I’m almost going into a kind of figuration. Heads, still-life forms, solid as I can make them, although not recognizable. I don’t feel the need for that. In the early sixties the colors disappeared. I wanted to work with the simplest means possible. I didn’t even stretch any canvas. Finally, I was just using white and black. Painting became a crucial problem of location. I have a small studio in the country [in Woodstock, New York]. And I didn’t stretch these canvases. I rigged up what looked like towel racks, just to hang them up. By the end of four years, it looked like Macy’s rug department. . . . Teaching is a way to lose interest in what you thought you were interested in. e more I tried to impart what I knew to the students at Iowa about this area (cubism, Picasso, still life) that excited me, it was as if the energy or concentration drained out of me into them. I then started in my own work in Iowa to become a very romantic painter, like Corot. I almost did the opposite of what I thought I would do. You can’t just believe something and teach it and continue believing it. I’ve had trouble teaching. I must be quite candid. From 1941 to ’46 I lived in the Midwest teaching painting to graduate students. Some of them, I’m pleased and proud to say, have become very good painters on their own. But I must say that the last year or two of this stint was really killing to me. In fact I had a kind of breakdown and had to stop, couldn’t continue. I was lucky enough to get a grant or two and was able to stop in 1947. I didn’t begin teaching again until 1951. at was about a four-year period of no teaching, when I was going through a sort of crisis in my own painting. When I began teaching in 1951 at NYU, I didn’t teach painting, by choice. I refused. I taught beginning drawing. e students worked from still life, and it didn’t involve the personal aspect that does get involved when you teach a person who’s been paint-

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Philip Guston in his Woodstock studio, 1964. Photo: Dan Budnik © 1964 Magnum Photos.

ing for five, six, eight years. And at that graduate level, you’re given ten to twelve people to work with. ey’re like your disciples. You eat with them. You go drinking beer with them. ey go to your studio and you go to theirs. It’s not just a class situation. And while this is good for them, you have to be more alone to paint. Besides, you can only teach what you know. How can you teach what you don’t know? But when you paint, you have to deal with what you don’t know. I’m not flattered by students who imitate me. I’m embarrassed by it and try to get them away from it as quickly as I can. I tell them not to trust any contemporary. Why be interested in me? Why not be interested in who I am interested in? Why not be interested in the masters? I don’t think any contemporary’s that good, by the way. I once told a young painter who was imitating me, and the pictures were pretty good: “My God, you’re copying all the things I hate in my own painting! All the things I can’t help.” Paintings are, for the most part, not successful. ey are valiant tries. I’m not stimulated by students, but sometimes you can be shocked into a kind of self-recognition, which can be a good thing. One of my strongest memories . . . When I was teaching a beginning drawing class, at NYU, I would have them draw still lifes, two aernoons and one evening a week. And you know how beginners draw: they put a bottle in the center, or some perfectly modeled piece of business. To get them to take that out was like asking them to jump off a precipice. One day I remember realizing that in my own work I’d been doing the same thing I’d been asking them not to do. I went back and took my own bottle out. Does teaching help clarify my thinking, my ideas? No, that’s not the kind of thinking I want to do, or that I should be doing.

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I still consider myself socially involved, but not socially active, although I sometimes think that this is the only way I really could be active, in the paintings I do. I feel very much in the world. What I’m painting is challenging to myself, and I hope it’s challenging to the looker. I don’t feel I need to be explicitly socially aware in my painting, as I used to be, but more symbolic than illustrative. I read nonfiction, poetry, essays, literary criticism. Once, when someone asked me who I studied with, I told them I studied with Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard. I studied with Kaa. When you read a man, you have contact with his mind. I’ve always liked to be in the company, as much as I could be, of writers, critical writers. Being a painter has to do with self-development. It sounds very corny, I know, but if your objective is to paint pictures . . . Well, naturally the result, the by-products, are paintings. And I know that they’re on the market, sold, in museums, they’ve been written about. But I think that’s a by-product. I think my curiosity and boredom and just plain wanting to know what to do with my life leads me into an area of preoccupation with my own evolution as a human being. I don’t know how else to put it. I don’t mean that it’s always going higher. You may be going to hell and not know it. But at least it’s some kind of movement. I look forward to a modicum of surprises. Since you go from month to month and year to year, you don’t go by your own choosing. You’re driven by the nature of your momentary solutions into territory you never thought you’d get into. In fact, if there is choice, something is wrong. I don’t believe in alternatives. I feel more alone now. My contemporaries, the painters of the forties and fiies, have died now, or are living as I am, more separately. We see each other once a year, maybe, when one of us has a retrospective. I feel that this is the real way it should be. All the smoke that existed ten years ago or more was the false situation. is is the way a painter really has to live. How am I affected by the current situation? When I see young painters in their twenties and thirties in Time and so on, getting all the attention for their work, I think, “Goody, at least I don’t have to go through that.” I think, “Poor guy.”

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O N M O R TO N F E L D M A N 1967

This talk and others at the New York Studio School came about by invitation from Guston’s old friend, the founder and director of the school, the painter Mercedes Matter. Guston conducted occasional seminars there from 1967 to 1974. He would drive down from Woodstock, replenish his supply of canvas and paint, have a big meal (usually Italian), and spend the rest of the day with the students, talking, showing slides, commenting on students’ work, and ending up eating and drinking into the late hours with anyone still awake and able to continue the conversation.

I was on a panel once, sort of a popular panel, and someone asked the question about artists in society and so on, talking about support. I mean, real support, moral support. Would Van Gogh have painted if he’d been all alone, if he had nobody to support him? And I answered that he couldn’t have. He had to have eo, his brother. It occurred to me that it would be impossible. I mean, you’d have to be insane, like the man who says he’s Napoleon. So I had Morty. I guess there are some other people, but I don’t know about a lot of other people. But, in this sense, I need Feldman to tell me I’m not insane. He has a way of seeing which always more than fascinates me. I mean, it really involves me, how he sees. So that when I finish a painting, I call immediately. Or if I break down during a painting, I call him to come over. Not to hold my hand but to hear what he says. I remember one time when I was beside myself—I’d destroyed a painting I don’t know how many times. He lived at that time near me, a block away. And I was practically in tears and I called him. He said, “I’ll be right over.” And he came over and he looked at the painting. He didn’t say anything. It was a painting I had destroyed a lot of. I’d been going on it for weeks, and in desperation I’d done some things, very spontaneous things, almost automatic, like you do when you destroy a painting. And so I told him all my troubles, and we went out and ate and saw a movie on Forty-second Street. And then he went home, and I went back to the studio and painted all night and did it. I called him the next day, at his factory where he was then working, and said: “You better come over. I did it. I really did it this time.” So he said, “I’ll be right over.” He looked at it and he was quiet for a long time. He usually is. And he said, “You know, it’s a marvelous painting, it’s terrific.” He says, “Last night when I saw this destroyed thing I had a feeling, as if I saw you on the street from a distance and you were with a woman that I never knew you to be with. But as I got closer and closer it turned out to be your wife, Musa.” Well, that kind of criticism, it may be elliptical, but it’s very important to me. Who wants someone to tell you they like the red or they like the blue or something like that? Not previously published. This talk was given at the New York Studio School.

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Philip Guston in the studio with Morton Feldman, 1965. Photo © Renate Ponsold Motherwell.

Or it’s better than the one you did before, or worse. And this winter Feldman was in Texas and I was in Florida, and again I’m going through some kind of changes and so on. I was doing a lot of drawings and I was really distressed. I was down to a line, a couple of lines. And he called from Texas and said, “I’d like to come and visit you.” And I said, “Oh, I’m going crazy, I’m down to one line.” He said, “Hold that line. I’ll be right there.” He was in Houston and he was on his way home, but he came to see me down there on the Gulf of Mexico. I picked him up at the airport, and all these drawings were on the walls and he didn’t say anything. Aer dinner we went walking along the seashore in the Florida moonlight. And I said, “What do you think of these new things?” And he said, “You know, the last trick of Houdini was that he locked himself up in a trunk, they threw away the key and then threw the trunk off the Brooklyn Bridge, and he got out.” And then there was a long pause. We walked another five minutes and he said, “But you haven’t thrown away the key.”* So you can tell what I feel about Feldman. He’s a remarkable man. Cage is different. I don’t know why I should bring that in, except that in the early fiies we were kind of a trio for a while. I met Feldman through Cage. I had known Cage some years earlier, * See “Conversation with Clark Coolidge” (p. 202) for an alternative version of the Houdini story (sans punchline).

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Philip Guston, Mark, 1967. Ink on paper, 14 × 161⁄2 inches.

in the late forties or so. John used to come to the studio and talk. Anyway, in the early fiies, John was enthusiastic about my painting. So, I think it’s important, if not crucial, to have one person. If you can have one, you can have a million, it doesn’t matter. But you need that one. One you can talk to. He gets on the stage in your theater, your drama. And one time I remember, it was very hard with Morty. About the mid-fiies or the later fiies, he didn’t care so much for what I was doing. I was working with very heavy forms. And he implied that he didn’t recognize me. He said, “It’s such a beautiful land you created, so how can you leave it?” He was still in that land and I was going away. I was working with very heavy solid forms and, well, I was doing what I had to do. But I remember feeling very distressed that he didn’t seem to be as enthusiastic as previously. Now Musa, my wife, who is very close to my work, is a kind of whipping post for me. I wake her up in the morning and say: “Look at this, look at that.” And she’ll say, “Well, it’s beautiful.” And I say, “What do you mean, it’s beautiful? Why don’t you say it’s lousy?” But I have to see a look. She says nothing, but I have to see a look in her eye. And Mercedes Matter, also, was in my drama on the stage. ose three people. And she didn’t care so much for the new development of things.

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But it’s a good source of energy to have these two or three people who are with you suddenly not reacting. And the reason it’s a source of energy is because I remember feeling that you develop an “I’ll-show-them” attitude, which does give you a lot of energy. Because you can fall asleep with the other too. I remember thinking: “ese few people who are the closest to me and think they know me well, they don’t know me at all.” And that became the most important thing, that the people closest to you don’t really know you. Because if you’re doing something that you’re absolutely compelled to do, and they’ve been with you up to that point . . . I mean, my life hung on a thread over some precipice. Well, they don’t know who I am. e hell with them. I think that relates very much to teaching and everything else. You’re all painters and I, or another teacher, or your friend, tell you something. You want confirmation in what you do, but what if you don’t get it? Well, that stage is a very important state. And then when they start liking what you do, you think there’s something wrong with it! I’m going to react again. I think you need a protagonist. Absolutely. I’m sure this protagonist is a subjective creation, but that’s the way it has to be.

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CO N V E R S AT I O N W I T H M O R TO N F E L D M A N 1968

Philip Guston: Well, you always start out with what’s on your mind, what you’ve been thinking about, just that week or that night or something. I was reading a book, one of those concentration camp books, but this one is very unusual. It’s called Treblinka, written by a French Jew whose parents were killed in this Polish camp, one of the worst concentration camps.* And the reason it’s on my mind is that it’s not just another Holocaust book. If you haven’t read it, there is a part of it which this writer develops which started fascinating me more and more. Well, I’ll put it this way. In order for this camp to exist, for all the camps to exist, but this one in particular because this was an experimental camp, the Germans had to develop techniques there first in order to burn up so many thousands a day efficiently. And one of the problems was to take care of the incredulity of the tormentors. To benumb the killers, the guards of the camp, just as they had to benumb the victims. In other words, both parties had to become benumbed in order for this efficient process to go on. Well, not to go into too many details, because you can read the book for yourself, but his main point was this: ey worked on all kinds of experiments psychologically to get the killers benumbed as well as the victims benumbed, so they would carry through their life normally, playing as if. e railroad station, for example, one detail—where they all arrived, it had to look as if it wasn’t what it was. So it was decorated like a small town railroad station. ey had ticket windows, they had trompe l’oeil painted everywhere, tickets going east and tickets going west, and potted palms and a potbellied stove. So that the Jews arriving would say, “Well, this isn’t so bad, it’s a regular railroad station.” And the guards, who would seize them and go through this processing, also had to believe this wasn’t so bad: “What the hell, it’s life.” Because if things are so shocking, a human being can’t accept those inhuman shocks. Well, anyway, the reason I bring it up is that Treblinka was one of the few camps where there was a successful escape. Aer quite a long time, aer years, an escape was organized. Now, of course, everything was against it. It was just absolutely impossible. And these few Polish professional people, intellectuals, would talk to each other. ere are documents of their conversation. Morton Feldman: I’m waiting. PG: What’s the matter? MF: I’m waiting. Not previously published. This conversation took place at the New York Studio School on October 23, 1968. * Jean-François Steiner, Treblinka (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967).

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PG: For the connection? MF: How you’re going to tie it up with painting. [laughter] PG: If you don’t know, you’ll never know. Well, to make it short. To make it shorter . . . MF: Longer. PG: Longer? So, about this escape, they would argue interminably. What’s the point of escaping? I mean, you’re going to die, the world won’t believe you, and all these things. But the final ultimate decision is to do it. Obviously, they’re not risking their lives. ey have no lives. But why do it? Why escape? And there’s a magnificent one, a doctor, I believe, who makes this magnificent exegesis about why to do it, trying to convince this small band of the others. And that is, that the only reason, of course, you can guess, is to bear witness. But imagine what a process it was to unnumb yourself, to see it totally and to bear witness. So, as I read this, and my mind anyway starts running away with everything I read or touch or see, I began to see all of life really as a vast concentration camp. And everybody is numbed, you know. en I thought, “Well, that’s the only reason to be an artist: to escape, to bear witness to this. Unless you want to make pictures or something.” Also I’m a great clipper of newspaper things. is is in yesterday’s Times. e headline is marvelous: “Los Angeles Museum to Put Artists Inside Plants.” “Los Angeles. Twenty technological and industrial corporations in California have joined with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in a program to establish new art forms in new media. Maurice Tuchman . . . ,” who, incidentally, put together my show some years ago at the Guggenheim. I mean, he did the legwork.* He’s a great authority on, and did a show there of, Soutine. “Tuchman, now curator at the Modern Museum, said today, ‘e program is one of the most dynamic concepts in the evolution of art. is program will place artists in residence within each corporation for three months. e artists will create new forms of art, using available materials and technologies. ey will work closely with company personnel.’ ” at’s the part I like. [laughter] So you see, I asked Morty, I said, “What’ll we talk about?” And he said, “Well, I’ve been depressing them here for all these lectures.” So I said, “Well, I’m going to depress them too.” But I always say, unless you want to dedicate your life to bearing witness, which is really what it’s about, if you know what I mean, you’re in the wrong art school. You’d just as well go to a place where you can work with company personnel. [laughter] I don’t know what else to say. MF: But I think this is an extension of his own masochism. PG: Who? MF: Maurice Tuchman. In fact, I met him right outside this building about four months ago and he was telling me about this project. And then he started telling me about * Maurice Tuchman is credited in the Guggenheim show catalog with “bibliography and documentation.” The director of the exhibition was H. H. Arnason.

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something else, that he got involved with some black militants in Los Angeles. He said, “It’s crazy; we go to these places and they tell us, ‘You go in the back.’ ” at’s what they should do to the painters and sculptors. [laughter] PG: e other day I was in New Haven to see my daughter who’s there, and my son-inlaw, and they showed me through the new Yale Art School. Attached to it is the Yale University Museum, and there’s a marvelous Soutine there that is just a wonderful thing. I mean, here’s a room full of Braques and Picassos, and you don’t want to look at anything else but that Soutine. It’s just a house and trees, but it’s so mysterious and so inner. So inward, you know. It’s as if he ate up the building or squashed the building or . . . Unnameable emotions about what? I don’t know. Not about the building, but it’s there forever. It’s a thing. ere’s a powerful emotion in this little thing. And then I saw this big art building, the kind of work they do at Yale, five floors of designing. But which is art? I mean, here’s this big modern skyscraper, and if that’s art, then what the hell is the Soutine? If the Soutine is art, what’s this big building about? And the work they do in it? MF: ey’re bearing witness? PG: Who? MF: e building. PG: I don’t mean the design of the building. MF: No, what’s in it. PG: What it represents, what it is, in fact. I mean, what its function is, what they do. So that, I suppose, there’s never been a time when . . . Oh, aer the war I met Kokoschka, whom I like very much as a painter, and we spent some evenings together. And he used the word Kunstgewerbe, but I suppose you know it. Translated, Kunst being art, Gewerbe being I suppose some kind of crawork. And of course his particular fight was against Kandinsky and whatever followed from Kandinsky. And I suppose what we have is crawork. ere’s no other way to look at it. And of course crawork can work with company personnel. I’m just voicing some particular gripes on my mind this week. MF: Philip, don’t you think that a lot of this came about with some kind of mythology about the language, through the years, as being part and parcel of the cra? I was always very impressed when I was reading about the early Hebrews some years ago. ey figured it out that the language must have come from God. So the language itself must be holy. PG: It had to do with naming God, as a matter of fact. MF: en they’d examine the letters themselves. e construction of the letters themselves, they felt, had some kind of mysterious impact or implication. And I think that’s what always goes wrong. When you feel that the language has some kind of fantastic . . . Like in e Magic Mountain there was this brilliant section where he goes from

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old German into modern German, all on the strength of what he thinks is the power of the language. And then there’s a very classy German that I know, a very classy guy, where every word is made up of three or four different esoteric languages. He knows Sanskrit, Old French, Medieval German. He uses the language as if the language itself is going to make for some fantastic experience. So then that in itself, the way he makes it in a sense, is a form of cra. I don’t think it’s different at all. I think the Hebrews felt that there was something fantastically potent about that language, because it’s the language which they used to express their belief. Audience: Well, there’s a story about the Egyptians, that the Egyptians wanted to find out whether their language was truly from God. So what they did was, they took about ten kids who did not know how to speak yet, and they put them in this house far away from any people. And they came back a few years later and they found these kids were running around bleating like sheep. e thing that they had overlooked was that there were a bunch of sheep that were grazing nearby. [laughter] PG: Where’s this conversation going? [laughter] Since we all know that you can’t make a work of art, it’s utterly impossible. e only thing that’s possible is to have this miracle happen once in a while. en the problem is: What do you do the rest of the time? Isn’t it? Well, you keep working. Of course. MF: Philip. PG: Yeah? MF: Before you go on. PG: I’m not going to talk about control, different kinds of control. Go ahead. You wanted to say something. MF: Do you feel the miracle comes from the language? PG: In terms of painting, you mean, the medium, the idiom of painting? MF: Yeah. PG: Alone? No, there’s no such thing as painting or drawing. I mean, if you’re in a certain state of shrinkage inside, then nothing will happen, you can’t make a line. Like Pascal said, a trifle makes us happy, deliciously happy, and a trifle makes us want to commit suicide. It’s the same way in creation. I mean, an inch of a shi and there’s everything to draw. You know, everybody experiences that. So what is the medium? ere is no medium. MF: ere is no medium, but . . . PG: But you. You’re the medium. MF: All right, but do you feel that that miracle is happening before you have to see if you can represent your miracle? Is it happening anyway? PG: Yeah, it can be happening. MF: Anyway.

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PG: at’s a very moot point. It can be happening and you may not see it, which is something else. You know, things are happening all the time. A great problem is: When are you prepared to see what is happening to these marks you make? And then should you see it? But I think God takes care of that, time takes care of it, some angel takes care of it, the fact that you’re not allowed to see. Of course this is my own particular bent. at you’re not allowed to see until a certain point. But maybe other people don’t have that problem. You see, other kinds of painters, preconceptual painters, want to have total control. But it’s an uncomfortable feeling, not to always have control. It’s too much a feeling as if then you’re not doing it, or you can’t control it in any case. In other words, you can’t ensure its coming into existence. But maybe I got off the point that you were making? MF: No. Mine was just a creepy point, which I don’t know if we can even follow. Let me just talk for a minute about what I wanted to say. I’m getting very angry, [about] the fact that I feel like a miracle. But, as soon as I have to make my work of art, it seems to me as if I have to structure this thing for others to see it. I don’t have to see it. I feel fine. PG: Oh yeah. [laughter] MF: I feel fine. So to what degree am I supposed to articulate . . . PG: Yeah, I see what you mean. MF: . . . to make it clear for them? PG: Yeah. For whom? MF: e weakest part of myself. [laughter] PG: Well, yeah. at’s not such a creepy point. What you’re really talking about is technique. To a certain degree, you’re right. You don’t have to create. But then what? You’re all right, as you said, you’re fine. en, what would you say? e least amount of structuring to make it visible to yourself ? Sure. I agree with that. But it’s more complicated than that, because not working, not creating, not structuring, not forming is just too free. MF: Now you don’t want to be too free. You don’t want so much control. PG: at’s right. Everybody knows that if you just think about things, our minds are always dialectical. No sooner do you think of one thing than you think of its opposite. Your mind moves around in a vast space. And you can get intoxicated. e only value of any medium, paint on a surface, or marks, is that the moment you deal with matter of some kind you’re less unfree. e curious thing is that the more you cope with this matter, the less free you are. But in some other way it’s like you go through another door. You’re freer than in the so-called free state, before you used matter. But I’m convinced that you have to work with matter, as if almost to prove to yourself what you can’t do, what it’s impossible for you to do, or what it’s impossible for you to see at this time. I find, as I start working, the range where I can move, the feel-

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ings about space, about image, about fixing, it all narrows down considerably when I start using matter. And it’s not a question of technique. I mean the resistance of matter to your ideas. Your ideas can be way ahead of the matter, the means. In any case, it all depends on one’s demands, on the demands one makes on what one wants to see, what one needs to see. In my case it has to be a certain thing. I mean, it has to be involved with the resistance of images, definite images, and then I can’t stand these images. en they’re obliterated. en I’m in a nowhere world where I could do anything, and I don’t want to be in a place where I can do anything. And I don’t want to be in a place where I can do one thing either, if you know what I mean. But there comes a moment, the only time this miracle happens, and it’s just a little miracle, a minor miracle which happens. Only you know about it, and some other inmates. [laughter] As far as I can analyze it, and I dassn’t analyze it too closely, but as far as I have, I’ll just sort of very delicately say it has to do with this fixing. It’s an image which encompasses a lot of images, not a specific image. And the means with which this is made up are just as insistent, like the strokes in the drawing have to be as insistent on their own life, as the image, the recognition of the image in there. So that, in other words, it’s a mistake to carry art to its logical conclusion. Because it’s like thinking. You see, in thinking you carry things to their logical conclusion, but when you deal with matter you deal with opposites always. ings that won’t . . . What’s the word, Mercedes [Matter]? or Morty? When things don’t easily mix or fuse. MF: An English bathtub? [laughter] PG: Huh? Not exactly paradox but close to that. Aud: Incompatible. PG: Incompatible things. And the fact that you deal with incompatibilities forces something else. I don’t like to analyze this stuff too closely, but I know it’s along that line. And furthermore that fix, that thing you make, has to be in such a particular condition that at that moment of your evolution you may do terrific things that you don’t see and that are obliterated. You wipe them out. But you’ll do them five years later. It sounds like predestination, but, in a way, it is. As if there’s some kind of law or force which—what’s the current usage?—in which the feedback is only what you put into it. at is to say, it’ll only come back to you somehow in a ratio to where you are and what you do and what you can see. I guess that’s my belief in some omniscient force or being. And I always thank God that it is so. But then I’m slow, I’m like a creeper, you know? I mean, some artists are able to throw things way out like a lasso and then come up to it. You know, you could spill a bucket of paint on the wall, or make a line, and think, “Gee, it’s terrific, I’ll come up to it with a lot of thoughts and philosophy and ideas.” But I can’t do that. I have to, kind of like a bug, creep. It’s got to go together, me and my shadow. I have to go together. Well, what are we talking about? We’re talking about the process of creating. at’s all there is to talk about. No, we can talk about all the different conditions under this, in this process. MF: You mean, all the different escapes.

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PG: e different escapes. at’s right. Some artist has another kind of escape. But I’m not even convinced that there are so many kinds of escapes. I naturally am convinced that there’s only my kind. MF: Do you believe in it? PG: Do I believe in it? MF: Yeah. PG: It’s all I’ve got. MF: In other words, you haven’t got any choice. PG: I have no choice. It’s all I have. I’m stuck with it. It’s my only possession, if you can call it a possession. I’m stuck with it, yeah. at’s right. How I got that way I don’t know. MF: at’s what I mentioned the last time I was talking here. I was saying that one should only use what one is stuck with. en you’ve got to believe in it. [long pause] How could you be enthusiastic about that which you’re just stuck with? I mean, you’re supposed to be inspired, I thought. PG: I’d say, my main feeling is: I move all around. You know, artists are like actors. You can pretend. Everybody pretends a lot of the time. You pretend you don’t know anything. You’re a primitive. And like people pretend they’ve got one leg, for a few minutes you feel like a one-legged man. Or half-blind. You pretend you’re Michelangelo and you make big things. You’re Rubens and you can do all this. But those are fantasies and everybody has fantasies. But then you wake up one morning and you’ve made a trip and come back and it’s a relief to deal with the only thing you’ve got. And that is your own sensibilities, whatever they are. To make a mark. And finally you realize it’s like a poverty situation. Lately I’ve been just drawing with charcoal, for months. I used to draw with a brush and ink, but I le that because the brush is a few inches too long from the thing that makes the mark. So that’s why I’m doing this: the charcoal is right in my fingers, and the hand is pushing it out. It’s the closest I could get to not doing it. e closest I could get to doing it so directly. Like drawing with your finger, you might say. So then all you possess is the simplest and most archaic of means. A piece of stick, a stick which makes a black mark, a surface and your instincts. Finally that’s what you have. And you’re not Michelangelo, you’re not Picasso, you’re not this guy or that guy. You’re you and that’s that. What’s the matter? MF: Nothing. I was just thinking that when I’m in trouble I think I’m Michelangelo. [laughter]. No, but seriously. I’d like to get back to language because that’s what’s bugging me. And we haven’t had a conversation in a long, long time. PG: Yeah. What do you mean by language? I don’t know what you mean exactly. MF: Well, by language I mean reality. at is, if I take one sound and I put it against another sound, that’s language.

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PG: I’m down to one sound. MF: Well, if I tell him to make a sound and him to make a sound, any sounds to be presented in an audible reality, that immediately becomes the language, you see. en immediately I’m involved with history. In relation to that language, I cannot escape both the reality of the sound I hear and the reality of the history, the audible history which it comes from. at is, I can’t make my sound the way you would go with your charcoal. I can’t get close and . . . PG: You can’t make a mark. MF: I can’t make a mark. PG: Why not? I’ve seen you go to the piano and make a sound. MF: Oh, it’s so different, so different. It’s there for me, a priori. It’s all there, those eightyeight notes. It’s a color chart. PG: Uh-huh. MF: I’m playing on a color chart. Aud: You should try an electric guitar. MF: at’s a cheaper color chart. [laughter] And it’s completely different. at’s where it is. at’s one of the basic . . . I think that’s where we part. In a sense. It’s that you’re inventing your medium to some degree as you’re going along. Just in terms of this against this [knocks table] would be an invention. In other words, you can invent your interval, you see. You can make your measurement of your interval in a measurement that someone else never had. But in music, everything is there a priori. ose eightyeight notes are there, and if you’re really classy you split them. You make quarter tones. PG: Yeah, but on the other hand, you have a rectangle, which is a given space. MF: Yes, well, that’s something . . . PG: Your medium is space, not the mark. e mark is the mean of creating the space. at’s like A-B-C. Of course that’s not what you’re doing either. Who the hell wants to just make space? at’s no pleasure. But it’s one of the things you work with, certainly. In other words, you can make a mark on this rectangle and immediately, in a way, it’s almost already given. You can be fooled by that. You can be easily deluded. at becomes like a readymade too. You know what I mean? MF: Mmm-hmm. It sees for you. PG: It sees for me. Exactly. at’s very well put. It sees for you. MF: e other hears for me. PG: Yeah. MF: I don’t want anything to hear for me. And that’s my problem now. I don’t want to hear that coming from there, that reality. PG: What do you want?

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Philip Guston, Untitled, 1967. Charcoal on paper, 18 × 241⁄6 inches.

MF: I want my reality going there, not there coming here. I want a kind of insanity. I want to go like this and I want you to hear something not coming from your references, coming over from fieen hundred years of goddamned references. PG: Well, you have that in art too. MF: I mean, the only way I could do it is if I screw the whole thing up, just screw it up and act as if it doesn’t exist. PG: Yeah, but that’s . . . MF: I’m tired of that now. I’ve been screwing that up for too long. PG: But that’s a preconception. MF: My idea? PG: No, no. I mean screwing it up, acting as if it doesn’t exist. MF: You know that German school that did kind of academic stuff and then they kind of made rough trade out of it? PG: No, but that’s just like jazzing it up or something. MF: No. Well, to kind of hypnotize somebody with a dot as if nothing has existed, end it all there, you could do it for a minute. Like John [Cage] could do with his concepts, for example. For a minute you could do it, as if nothing else exists. But then

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Philip Guston, Untitled, 1968. Ink on paper, 18 × 24 inches.

that minute’s over and everything comes rushing in with it. Or it becomes part of a reference. And that’s more or less, since I’ve spoken to you, where I’m at. PG: Yeah. Except now I’m down to a dot myself though. MF: Well, that’s the only reason I’m mentioning it. Because Bill Berkson was telling me that you were drawing this summer and . . . [to audience] Oh, I have to tell you something that Philip said last year when I was in Florida. PG: Yeah. MF: It was just marvelous. I hadn’t seen Philip’s work for at least a year before that, and I was down south and Philip was staying there at the time and so I dropped in to see him. I went into his studio and there’s a whole bunch of drawings, and one particular drawing had two lines. It’s not important where they were. And Philip said to me, “It’s all rhetoric.” And I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “You see that line? And you see that line a little bit on top of it? Well, that line on top of it is talking into the ear of that bottom line, telling him its troubles.” [laughter] PG: Yeah, well, that’s my particular . . . Ten years ago I wanted to get away from my past. I was tired of what I had been doing or had done. I was somehow exhausted with it, and then I was unable to see it. I’d look at the pictures that are hanging at home, that I have of the past, and consistent with current desires and needs they began to look

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like stories. Forms were threatening each other or kissing or moving into each other or coming together or leaving each other. I mean, it seemed like fairy tales. You know, stories. And I wanted to get away from that. Well, now that I’m working in this terribly reduced way, they’re still stories. I can’t get away from stories, whether they’re heads or lines, or leaves or circles. I don’t know. I can’t be a pure artist. It’s impossible. Pure. [sigh] Arthur, don’t you have anything to say? MF: We need another story like the sheep. [laughter] PG: is is Arthur here from St. Louis. Arthur: Well, when you said something about . . . PG: We’re not stuck or anything. [laughter] I mean, this is like conversations Morty and I have had anyway in the past. We’re not stuck. We’ll go on. MF: We’re carrying on from last year. Arthur: I oen wonder at the attitude a painter takes to another painter’s work. You said you can’t be pure. PG: In quotes, you know. Arthur: I know what you mean. You’re involved in, perhaps, formal relationships. PG: Yeah, that’s what I mean. Arthur: e thing becomes an end in itself. It’s the right color, the right line. It doesn’t have a metaphoric connotation where it begins to bring in a third or fourth party. And I’ve oen tried to explain to myself what my attitude is about people who do this, who work purely, who reduce the thing down to the irreducible. And I oen find that when I first see their work, a lot of the things that I’m concerned with have been swept out of the front, no problems, and this thing has been le very pure, very uncluttered, and so on. I can have a great time just looking at this absence of what, for me, are tremendous problems. PG: Yeah. Arthur: And then the strange thing is, when I come back to these works that first pleased me because they had swept away so many of these things that continually bug me and so on, I find that this began to disturb me aer a while. e fact that there isn’t this clutter, this record of hopes, disillusionment, fear, joy, all the things that get into a thing that’s very impure. I teach in St. Louis, where everything comes in by way of art magazines, and people’ll show me this and they’ll say, “What about this? What about that?” And many of these things they bring in are very minimal, really stripped. Sometimes not even done by the guy himself. It’s done for him. And I say, “It’s very nice, it’s very clean.” e guy has really given you something that, as I said before, has pushed away a lot of things that are, for me, very important. And he’s le something that’s very shining and bright and all. But I find that I can’t live with these things for long. ey’re like a big explosion when I’ve seen them the first time, but they have no reverberation. So that when I come back the second time, what was

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initially a big sound was a lesser sound, then it became a lesser sound, and finally there’s no sound at all. And I always bring in the example of certain Cézannes which meant so much to me. I went to the Art Institute of Chicago. You see how circuitous this has been. I’m going to wind this up soon. I grew up with a work of Cézanne’s where he has a little glass thing with a flower growing out of it, an apple, and an orange. I get back to the Art Institute every now and then, and I find that the older I get, the more reverberations this work has for me. I come in there and it always makes my scalp prickle. Finally getting old enough, you get some idea of what this guy has been putting into it. And I bring this instance up for the students, the fact that an art that is not pure has the possibility, because of its impurity, of breeding a lot of germs which can live aerwards and affect a lot of people in a wonderful way. And this infection that comes out of impurity, to me, is a wonderful, wonderful thing. So I find that, confronting a lot that is pure today, I find it’s oen very antiseptic. PG: Can I interrupt you for a minute? Arthur: Yeah, I wish you would. And then I’ll shut up. PG: I think that you’re, if you’ll forgive me, I think you’re talking . . . Arthur: In circles. PG: No, no. You’re talking very directly, but you’re talking about the looker rather than the maker, I have a feeling. What I’m getting to is this, that the only thing that’s relevant is what’s relevant to the maker. at is to say, since you cannot begin where you think you may end up. You can’t begin with what you’re going to end up with. So that process, and all the complexities of process, are all important. But what you’re striving for, what painters strive for in all times, all the great painters, is not minimal or abstraction or not abstraction. I think those are rather irrelevant. I think what’s relevant and what you strive for is totality always. If it means a dot and one line finally, then that’s what it means. And as far as the looker is concerned, he better be able to discern the difference between a Mondrian, who’s gone through this process, and a guy who’s said, “Oh yeah, verticals and horizontals. I’ll just start with those means.” Now, there’s a big difference there. Huh? Arthur: Well, I was thinking of it in terms of the doer. e fact that, with an openended experience, where you can move in many directions, it isn’t already, to coin a phrase, pre-intellectualized. In other words, when it’s diagrammed like a blueprint, then you can take the blueprint and you construct something from it. But the openended possibility is, for me, the important thing, because you never know what will come in. PG: Sure, sure. MF: Yeah, but that’s a kind of historical thing that you could almost program to yourself. If you want to even define a pure and impure art. But what if we get into an art that we don’t even know what the hell it is, you see? Which of course I think is much more interesting. I mean, we know what minimal is and we know what this is, but

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how about getting into something that we don’t know what it is? I think that kind of dialectic is an unfortunate one, which has given people also various escape hatches. “Oh, I’m going to have inspiration through reduction,” or “I’m going to throw in everything but the kitchen sink.” Aud: Would you get back to talking about a dot? When you were talking about like everything was a dot, what you were saying before, don’t you have some sense of self ? PG: Who? He was talking or I was talking? Aud: I think you both said something about reducing everything to a dot. PG: Well, we were just making a . . . Aud: When you go and look at some other artist for a while, don’t you then have the feeling of coming back to your own way of working? MF: May I answer the question? PG: Sure. I’m not clear what . . . MF: I don’t really listen to other people. PG: I was just going to say that. I don’t look at other . . . Aud: Do you work by ear at all? MF: Huh? Aud: Do you work by ear at all? MF: Ear? Aud: Yeah. MF: Only. To a fault. Aud: How did you learn anything in music? Wasn’t it by listening to other people and trying to get where they were? MF: I don’t know how I learned. I learned through a kind of osmosis, I think. I think I learned more trying to avoid learning anything. I think I learned, more than anybody else, just trying to avoid learning. It’s a lot of work trying to avoid learning. But that’s a problem. My students know more than I do. Aud: About what? MF: I’m always very happy to say that. Aud: What do they know more about? MF: Oh, they know more music history. ey know about acoustical phenomena. ey can tell you exactly how a violin is constructed acoustically, and all that kind of business. at is, the equivalent, they could be like guys that mix their own paints, instead of buying it from a tube. If I learned anything, the most important thing I ever learned from other music was to admire something that is totally unlike myself. But then I can’t learn anything om it. I always had that paradox in my life with Varèse.

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I mean, no one could be so totally different, and yet I’m just nuts about Varèse, and I can’t figure out why I should be so nuts about Varèse. Aud: When you hear a piece of music, do you hear it as sound, as a composition created with sound, or do you listen to it, then try to imagine in your mind what was happening in the mind of the composer to turn out a thing like this? MF: at’s too easy in music. You always know what’s in the mind of the composer. Aud: Or not simply what existed in his mind at the moment of creating the piece, but the way that he heard all the time? I suppose that musicians, composers, have particular styles of hearing just as painters have styles of seeing. Or is the whole thing to get out of that? MF: Look, I don’t want to give you such simplistic answers. Let me just briefly tell you, for example, my disillusionment with music. You remember the image I said, where those eighty-eight notes are just waiting for you? It’s this color chart, and you can’t do anything unless you show how brilliant you are in mixing up those eighty-eight notes, and that’s becoming boring now aer a few hundred years. It’s the same thing, the way a composer hears. A composer hears in relation to a system. And the great composer then hears how he gets out of somebody else’s system and gets into his own system. And that’s where his hearing changes. But it’s usually in process, or in limbo, from one system to another. en there were periods of history where everybody felt that the old systems were dying out and there were no new systems to take their place. And so the work was running every which way. e end of the nineteenth century was very much like that, aer Wagner took tonality as far as anybody else really took tonality. And for about forty years they didn’t know what to do with this new chromatic harmony because it wasn’t really systematized. en Schoenberg came along and systematized a much more complicated scale. So when I hear a piece of music, I’m hearing that this guy was sold on a certain system, doesn’t have a system, or is waiting for a system. It’s all clear. But the great guy was a guy that made moves in this ambivalence between periods. Webern, before he got influenced with Schoenberg, in 1906 wrote a piece called Six Pieces for Orchestra, which is absolutely phenomenal. Listen to this piece. Get it, as painters get it. You never heard such color in your life. Really, he was looking ahead, he was looking backwards, but still he moved. He still moved. And it’s fantastic. I think maybe that’s what you meant a bit by the resistance. PG: at’s right. Well, there’s a particular point in Mondrian’s work where almost the comparable condition existed. MF: Same time. PG: It was looking back, it was looking ahead, it was a particular kind of poise. A pause. You know the work I refer to. Around 1910, ’12, ’13, up to about ’17. MF: e plus-minus.

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PG: Yeah. e drawings at that time. MF: And the erasure. PG: Mm-hmm. I don’t know what to say. Maybe in modern times, which is our times, the last century, at least for a hundred years, art has become a very problematic thing. And by art I don’t mean the art world, I don’t mean lovers of art. I mean creating. It’s a very problematic thing. Anyone who gets involved with it feels it immediately. And actually I don’t see any other way it can be. It always seems impossible and finished, until somebody comes along, within this, as you say, ambivalent situation, and does something and it becomes a minor miracle. MF: I think the great work was the ambivalent. PG: Sure. And therefore, as far as what is a work of art, the constant questioning about what is a work of art, I fail to see that it can be anything else but a by-product of a man’s thinking and feeling about it. Although it is seen later on as a work in a museum, or performed, to the man himself it cannot be more than a fragment snatched out of a time process of his own feeling and thinking about this whole mishmash. It’s a peculiar situation where one work changes the previous one, and then the next one changes that one. So that the looker, and even the artist as the looker, is placed in a fantastic position of always being in a condition of foreseeing future states. Least of all as an object to sell, to put on somebody’s wall. I mean, it must be a terrifying demand on anybody to look at a painting, because what the hell are you looking at? What are you looking at, in fact, if not a by-product of something, of this process, of a particular mind, a particular sensibility? MF: Unless it’s just a well-made thing. PG: Yes. at’s always existed. MF: I mean, that was always demanded of music. Music, I never felt, was as adventurous as painting. Music was always the well-made thing. I was on a panel recently with composers, and again they bring up that old thing about the well-made piece. And I got very angry. I said, “Look, what if you knew a guy that only wore well-made suits. Why be interested in a guy that just made well-made suits?” PG: Unless he gave you some. [laughter] MF: at kind of dandyism that goes into that. And then this whole thing of mixing up things. It’s like the Duke of Windsor. You ever see that fantastic photo of the Duke of Windsor? He had the crazy pair of pants, crazy loud jacket with the crazy handkerchief, crazy shirt, crazy tie, and he looks great! He’s a modern artist that wants to make that crazy well-made thing. Same thing. I like to dress up too. [laughter] I’m only interested in a work of art that has, for me, and I’m sorry to use such a word, but I only look for one thing: character. I take it for granted in these classy times that somebody could deal with a brush, that somebody has ideas, that someone can make a magnificent orchestration. I take it for granted. So what? So you do it great; someone’s going to do it better. So what else am I going to look at? And that is the image

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of the work, that’s the only thing it tells to me. You know, Varèse doesn’t make it with the establishment. Just like I remember Boulez telling me the deficiencies of Ives. He says, “Well, his orchestrations . . .” All right, so it’s not French orchestration. So it wasn’t formula orchestration, where everything is going to turn out good, the choirs are going to sound good, everything’s going to sound good. And, a priori, those standards they have. No one’s going to tell me I don’t know how to orchestrate. But let’s say I don’t orchestrate the way the French do. I had a concert in Paris, and in one of the pieces I had a chimes that speaks late, and I had a tuba that speaks early. e chimes, you hear it late. e tuba, you have to blow and then the sound comes to it; he can’t speak on the dime. And the other one cannot speak on the dime. ey’re imperfect for synchronization on the dime. No Frenchman would ever use a chimes and a tuba together. Okay. So I’m having this concert in Paris and I see the conductor going like this, like a lunatic. Quiet music, you see, and he’s going . . . He wants to get it to speak like a Frenchman. I told him, “Don’t knock yourself out—it’s not French orchestration.” [laughter] I was at a party with Rothko and a woman came over and said, “Mark, how do you finish your edges?” [laughter] PG: It’s a good question. Very good. You think there’s something wrong with that kind of thing? Aud: Well, what does Varèse think about it? MF: First of all, Varèse . . . You never read my obituary of him.* I’ll have to send it to you. First of all, Varèse hasn’t made it because he has not invented a system. He just invented a world. at’s a world that cannot be imitated, right? So in a sense he’s treated like a kind of exotic, where they could steal something. ey could take what they want. e irony is that one of the tragedies about music is that people just can’t conceive of it outside of a system. Because a system is sanity. I mean, you listen to the Beatles, you’re listening to sanity. at is, you’re listening to a consistent thing from the beginning until the end. at’s what’s in a system. A lot of passages in Varèse are irrational, because in terms of cause and effect they cannot be analyzed. PG: Actually, if certain artists didn’t create, hadn’t created an unanalyzable art, or world, there’d be no problem, would there? en we would all accept art as being sane, consistent, controlled, and this is what we would know. I mean, if certain painters like Goya and Rembrandt and Piero and Cézanne hadn’t existed, then we wouldn’t be here today talking like this, truly. Or Mondrian. MF: Who’d be here telling you what to do next? PG: at’s right. Or we wouldn’t be here. Or we would be different people. MF: Richer. PG: Be what? * “In Memoriam: Edgard Varèse,” reprinted in Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 2000), 41.

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MF: Richer. [laughter] PG: Well, you’d be able to work with plant personnel, as this article says. Aud: What about beauty? PG: Who? [laughter] Aud: You talk about logical order, and then I was thinking, well, what is there? I mean, you look at something, and why is it that it has anything at all that I thought was beautiful? PG: Well, I like beauty. I mean, I love beauty. [laughter] But I’ve always thought that beauty takes care of itself. I’ll put it that way. I don’t mean it’s a by-product, but it takes care of itself. And then there’s different kinds of beauty too, if you want to qualify it. I like a kind of troubled beauty. Baudelaire defines a beautiful woman as always having a deep melancholy on her face, for example. Now that wouldn’t fit everyone’s definition of a beautiful woman. But I don’t think you can control beauty or put in beauty or make beauty. I think this ineffable quality takes care of itself. Aud: Do you mean by that that it isn’t worth your . . . PG: Not what you’re aer, no. Aud: And it only happens if something newly . . . PG: Exactly. at’s the other thing, that beauty has to be new. MF: I find it also painful. PG: Yeah. Shocking even. MF: I mean, if you read Santayana, then you have a sense of beauty. at’s already defined, I suppose. But I don’t think the artist should have an aesthetic sense. PG: Yeah. MF: I’ve been reading . . . PG: Such perversity here! [laughter] MF: Did you ever read the two volumes of [Kierkegaard’s] Either/Or? PG: Sporadically. I mean, I dip in it. MF: Well, for the past ten years I’ve been reading Either/Or, and I’ve had a fantastic experience with the book. First I’m annoyed to death. I’m taking the aesthetical point of view on the artist, right? And I oppose the philistine. He starts talking about the aesthetic type of man, and I identify with him, you see. en a few years pass, and I no longer have a vested interest in the fact that I’m an artist. And then I read the ethical point of view. at seemed closer to me. PG: Yeah. MF: And then about two years ago I read the religious point of view. en recently I reread it again and I didn’t have any of them. Neither aesthetical, neither religious, neither ethical. I didn’t want any of them.

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PG: Pretty intransigent, your viewpoint. Aud: at’s supposed to be it, right? MF: What? Aud: Isn’t that where you’re supposed to be going: none of them? MF: None of them. He himself says so. I’m trying to get away from a point of view! I don’t want to have a point of view. But it’s impossible. I was listening to some old music. My old Columbia record* is being reissued; it’s coming out in January. So I was up there today, and I didn’t hear a lot of those things for a long time. And I said to myself, I thought I was working within a nonstyle. I was interested in just the material, just let them speak, and I had no style. I actually felt when I was writing it that I was anonymous. And now I listen to the stuff and it’s the way I felt aer looking at Kandinsky when I was mature, and first seeing him when I was about eleven. I saw it when I was eleven; it was free. I saw it when I was an adult and it was commercial art. [laughter] So I listened to my stuff and it was just classy style! Elegant, everything. e way it was phrased, everything fit in place. PG: I know that feeling, yeah. MF: All the right things at the right time. And here I thought I was in this material in a nonstyle. Wallowing in it, as a critic once wrote. Wallowing in sound. And I wasn’t wallowing at all, just walking lightly around and shaping it. So, the truth. Do you even have to have a point of view to speak the truth? e truth changes. What does it mean? You want to speak the truth: then be silent, you’ll speak the truth. Speaking the truth but thinking lies. [laughter] I love these postmort . . . I was going to say post-Mortons. Postmortems. [laughter] Because, I mean, it would be threatening for me to talk about what I want to do when I go home. I think that’s why we go and look at paintings and listen to other people’s music. Anything to escape from doing it. [long pause] PG: Is this the way you usually have a lecture, Morty? Pause? [laughter] MF: No. PG: I like it. [pause] MF: It’s great for music students. To get them rid of any kind of anxiety about time. Because a young composer writes like somebody who can’t pick up a pencil. If you pick up a pencil you’re lost! [laughs] at whole anxiety about time is a big problem. Everything has to be filled in. PG: Yeah. Packed. MF: Packed. Everything has to be for an occasion, either intellectually, emotionally, or aesthetically. Everything is programmed for an occasion. I never yet had a student, when I asked him what he’s doing he couldn’t tell me. * Morton Feldman, New Directions in Music 2, Columbia LP ML5403, 1959.

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PG: So you don’t even have to ask them. MF: ey all know what they’re doing. I remember when I first started to lecture, Mimi Brach’s father [eodore Schapiro] ran the Rand School.* I have to mention these people because they’re bringing me back to the feeling that I’m having a little bit of a conversation with Philip. I was just a kid, and Mimi Brach’s father asked me to give a series of lectures, which I did. And the first time, there was one guy, a very nice guy, who always asked questions, intelligent questions. But I had something to say, you see? It was scheduled for eight lectures, and I was a little annoyed with him because I had notes and I wanted to go through all this material. So, through the first three lectures he would continually ask me questions. e fourth lecture, I ran out of material. Pure silence. And I used to look at him, but he wouldn’t get up. PG: As long as you’re telling stories, I have a story. Some time ago, I guess in the early fiies, I was very broke and I needed all the teaching I could get. And a psychiatrist, I mean a guy who worked in a clinic in New Jersey, wanted to study painting with me. e idea was, he would bring me his paintings once a week and I would criticize them. For twenty-five dollars, something like that. And I said sure. And he came and he must have brought about a hundred paintings on paper. He filled up my whole studio with his work. He tacked it all up and I criticized it. And he came back the next week with ten paintings. And I started criticizing them and talking about painting. Well, to make a story short, he skipped a week, which meant I didn’t get any money that week. en he came with one painting. And finally he stopped coming. He called me about a month later and he said I’d made him stop painting altogether. [laughter] He decided to give up painting. You know, he thought he was . . . Christ, his hand moved, he made colors, forms. It’s very dangerous to study painting, with me anyway. I can stop anybody painting. Aud: But I thought he brought you a bottle of whiskey. MF: At the last session. PG: Oh, the last session. at’s right. No money but a bottle of whiskey. [laughter] at shouldn’t be the way, though. MF: What, Philip? PG: I say, it shouldn’t be that way. You know. [pause] MF: What was he looking for? He wanted to study art? PG: I don’t know. He wanted to be an artist, I guess. You know, a painter. And make paintings. [pause] MF: But I have this complaint against me all the time. I’m told that I want to make things too difficult for the young composer, that I want to discourage him, that I’m just showing him how impossible it is. And I always thought that would be kind of ex-

* The artist Mimi Brach (the wife of Paul Brach) is better known today as Miriam Schapiro.

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citing. Just thinking about Varèse again: another thing about Varèse that was exciting is that he did close up fantastic avenues. First of all, he made it exciting that it wasn’t impossible to do without a system. at it was possible, that he did. it. And he did bring in elements that closed off, you see. So I would think, if the young artist, if the young composer really is against the wall, it should become kind of exciting. I mean, that’s part of the dues, isn’t it? Aer my own work I close off areas of escape. It’s part of the fun. It’s part of the perversity. Certainly, we don’t demand it of life, that kind of comfort. But there’s just something about life: you could take away all the hope from people, but they manage to keep on living. You take the hope out of a young artist or composer, they give up the work. PG: I don’t think you take out the hope, though. You don’t. I mean, what everyone is seeking is a principle, however vague. And a principle needn’t be control. It could be a very generous principle, a principle to continue working. You know, negatives only seem negative. at’s what you mean, I think. MF: Yeah. PG: ey only seem negative. ey’re not negative. ey’re very productive. ey’re very fruitful, actually, because what they do is define you to yourself. ere’s that relentless demand of the muse, that in order to do something you have to give up other things. But you have to learn that by yourself, on your own terms, what it is you have to give up. And it’s important what you give up to find the place where you can move. Where you can gain, however little it may seem at first. Well, I think that’s perhaps what’s meant by character. What seems negative isn’t, and what seems hopeless in fact is the most hopeful. Having cleared away the debris of fantasy, of fanciful hopes and so on. But real hope is faith. at’s what we’re talking about, then, isn’t it? I mean, you’re talking about faith in the miracle, faith in the possibility of something. MF: Yes, but it always seemed to me that it’s like you’re under two flags. At one degree you have to have faith about art, and the other thing you have to have faith about is your own survival. PG: Yeah. MF: Each side of a schizoid situation is shutting off the other. PG: Not necessarily. MF: I always feel that I’m killing off art and art’s killing off me. PG: Yeah. MF: It’s a bad marriage. PG: Yeah. MF: One side finally has to be destroyed, which is the case in any marriage. And that’s the way I feel it. I mean, I’m very upset. I don’t want to kill it. Look what it’s done for me! I mean it is this thing, and as the years go by it’s becoming . . . PG: I guess I disagree with you. I agree with you about the battle which is going on, the

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bad marriage. But one does not have to be killed off, and I’ll tell you why. Because in fact, if one can exist in a realm of negative capabilities, I think those opposites have to be somehow balanced. But that’s not what I mean to say. I mean to say that in this ensuing battle, and if you continue it with intensity, with energy, what happens then is that it’s not what you thought it was. You can create but not where you thought it was. Because we have a great tendency to fix. You know how it is in a family. You made the analogy of a marriage. Well, one of the great troubles with a marriage which is a bad marriage is that terrific fights and battles go on, but . . . MF: Or no battle. PG: Or even no battle. But it gets fixed. It gets like a fixation. And you go out and take a walk, or you take a trip, and it all changes. And it’s not where you thought it was at all. I think the same thing is true about creating. What? Aud: en it’s not a bad marriage, if it changes. MF: He said it changes when you go out for a walk. [laughs] PG: No. I think this is proven in one one could name. I don’t have to name it now. I think you all know what I would mean. In certain battles that go on while you’re painting, for example. Your destroying of the picture, your negation, and your constant desire to be free. Everybody wants to be free. at is, you want to create in a certain condition of, let’s call it, freedom of spirit. Something molded freely in the spirit. MF: Free will. PG: Free will. [chuckles] Well, it seems impossible. But I think it only seems so. MF: But I think what you said earlier pinpointed what I was trying to get at. It’s only the fact, probably, that I feel that it should go a certain way and it’s not going that certain way. PG: Yeah. MF: In other words, I had notions about what I wanted to do. PG: Exactly! And those notions can and do, in fact, as you know, you’ve experienced it before or else you would not have created the art you’ve created. at it moves in another direction that’s unsuspected to you at that time. And you know the experience when it happens: so that’s where it is! I never knew that that’s where it was or could be. You see, the fact that your work that you heard, of your past on the Columbia record, I know it sounded to you momentarily as formed classic work, but that’s beyond your control. I mean, this has been put in a cultured time. It’s something which has nothing to do with you. And you, in turn, can see it in many ways. You listen to it again and it will seem fresh and inchoate as you felt when you did it. MF: I don’t think so. PG: You mean, you think you’ve actually evolved? Into the state you are now, you mean, from that state? MF: I think, in a sense, the problem is that we are culture. I act as if culture is the en-

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emy. I’m the enemy. I am culture. Consequently, everybody also agreed with me when they heard it, that I was wallowing, you see. And now the point of view will change again, just like I feel. I don’t really feel any different about our work than they do, at the time that it happens. Because, in a sense, one of the most frightening things is that, when we become irrelevant to ourselves, the outside world hears a bell of irrelevancy at the same time. ey’ve been cued in. PG: Yeah, but then your problem is always one of constantly having to divest yourself of all these accumulated or accrued values, which have nothing at all to do with further creation. MF: Yes, but even if we don’t have notions, our notions become defined and then they become notions anyway. PG: No, I don’t think so. I think you’re talking about Either/Or. e key word in this polemic he has, the aesthetic and ethical and religious, is the word dethroned. Somehow the word dethrone stays in my mind. MF: e religious dethrones the aesthetical. PG: Yes. No, the ethical dethrones the aesthetic. And finally, yes, the religious dethrones the ethical and the aesthetic. What was I saying? MF: Something obviously dethrones the notions. PG: Yes. at’s what I meant. e fight is constantly with yourself. But that’s the fate of modern art, I guess. Aud: I once showed you a painting that I was working on that was a work that had no reference to things outside myself. And you said the danger of working that way was that you become your own audience. Do you still think about that, in terms of your own work? PG: Well, I am my own audience, of course. Did I say that? Aud: at danger . . . PG: Well, it’s a danger, yeah. at doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do it. I guess I might have been trying to convey that that’s what you were going into. I don’t know how to answer that. Could you enlarge on that question? Aud: It’s being an art lover, looking at paintings. PG: Yeah. at’s right. Aud: Becoming your own art lover. PG: Yeah. I frequently or usually, when I do a body of work, do certain things. I will contradict myself. Not in the sense of a game, but I think probably in terms of going almost to the opposite of what I’ve been doing, to see what it is I had been doing previously. Because I find if I don’t do that, I become so blinded, you might say, by my own thoughts about it. Well, to be specific, a couple months ago I started working counter to what I had been doing. at is, I started working pretty much visu-

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ally. I’d been working in very reduced forms and terms, and I got to a point where I really couldn’t see what I was . . . Not that I couldn’t see what I was doing, but that I had to remind myself what I’d been thinking. And I came in the studio one day and I had all these things up and they looked . . . Either I was out of it or something, I don’t know, but something broke or snapped. And I had to start reminding myself what I had been thinking, so I sort of reacted. I’ve always done this. is always seems to be my process. So I started working in almost an opposite way, and I spent a month or more working and drawing and painting visually. And that wasn’t what I wanted to do, but I just did it. But in some way it enabled me to look at these former things without any thoughts about it. Just look at the thing itself, the objective reality of it. is is not done through any kind of planning or anything like that, or even as a strategy. It’s just almost done compulsively, in the sense that I really can’t stand what I have done. So then I’ll just do something else. Because mainly I want to feel free. I don’t want to feel caught by my own ideas. And if I’m caught, truly caught, then I have to prove to myself that I’m really caught and have no way to go except this way. But I have to prove it to myself. MF: We have to create our own situation in order to give ourselves the illusion that we have free will. PG: at’s right. Sure. But it doesn’t appear as an illusion when you . . . MF: When you’re doing it. PG: When you’re doing it. But . . . Yes, well, of course, the evolution of man’s mind is that he has become superconscious. ere’s no escaping at this point. Anyone who has the thought “Wouldn’t it be nice to be simple again?” is playing some kind of a game. at is, it’s possible to get beside yourself so that you act compulsively, as if you have no choice. But it’s a different kind of consciousness. It’s some kind of superconsciousness. So that we can not only think about what we’re doing but we can even get on a plane above that and think about thinking about doing it. We really think about our thinking frequently. So that’s the way it’s become. And I don’t think there’s any turning back. MF: Who wants to be unconscious? I mean, sure, let’s be superconscious, but how can we become superconscious without vested interests? PG: Vested interests? What do you mean? MF: Vested interest in our work. Vested interest in what we . . . PG: Believe, you mean. MF: Believe in, in terms of our accomplishment. To be conscious without vested interests, then you’ll be a philosopher. PG: Without, you say, vested interests. MF: Without vested interest. I mean, you never had a vested interest in your work, the way other people have. Colleagues.

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PG: Yeah. MF: at’s why I say that, because I think that’s one of the lessons. PG: at’s storekeeping. [chuckles] MF: No. [pause] So I don’t think it’s really innocence. I think it’s just that you feel: “What have I got to lose?” PG: Nothing. You mean, when you get to this state. e state you can describe as being a state in which you finally feel that you have nothing to lose. Is that what you mean? MF: at you have nothing to lose. And I think that your work always had that quality, and you talked about it earlier. Where you had these two things going, which weren’t necessarily opposed or opposite, weren’t necessarily paradoxical, but let’s say they were just two states of mind that refused to make a synthesis. at is, it was two states of mind that refused to read and believe Hegel—you know?—and tie everything up and make a picture. And I think that the power of your work is that you possess it as it is, as they would say today, without feeling that what it is should then become something else. PG: Yeah. MF: Now, if you’re going to leave something what it is, you want reality. When you find it, there is nothing so blinding. PG: It’s horrible. MF: But you learn nothing from it. It’s a state. It’s a condition. It’s not something to learn something from. PG: I feel I find total recognition in what you say, because I finally reached the point in these “essences,” these “abstractions,” that were of such essence that it drove me crazy. ere was nothing to do with it. So it’s as if then I have to immerse myself again, you might say, in the multitudinousness of forms. MF: Yeah, what are you going to do with reality? PG: And reality is not multitudinousness of forms. MF: No. PG: Reality is one. MF: One. PG: Is a total thing. MF: Is a total thing. PG: And you have nothing to do with it. at’s right. Well, then the only answer is to go through this. But then living is like that, with only occasional glimpses of reality. And I think art is the same way. So that then you continue organically. And there is the faith and the hope that I’m talking about, in contradistinction somewhat to what you said. at there’s no other way but then to get involved in the many, let’s put it this way, in order again to arrive at the one. Because one’s total hunger is always for

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the one. [pause] We’re going to start liing tables in a minute. [laughs] A séance. [laughter] Does anybody have anything to say? Aud: I think the one must always be fertilized again. PG: Exactly. I think so. I find that more and more. MF: e thing is to be careful and not make that ersatz one. PG: Well, there’s no danger of that, as far as I can see, because when you reach that point everything is so intensified, you feel so intense, that the ersatz one is quickly recognizable. I mean, it takes the shape of disgust. [chuckles] It’s recognizable. But the abstract experience that you’ve written about, Morty . . .* MF: Yes. PG: It’s a very nerve-wracking thing. It’s to be pursued. It’s the only thing you pursue, but it’s ineffable. It’s like trying to catch a . . . It eludes and eludes and eludes. It’s a very difficult thing to work with, because there’s nothing to work with. Or everything to work with, of course. I mean, it’s always on the brink. Aud: You said something earlier in your conversation about being Michelangelo, right? PG: Oh, I mean having illusions that you have gis and talents. Aud: . . . going to the many and coming to the one . . . PG: Yeah. Well, that’s something we could talk about philosophically for hours, I suppose. But I know I have the feeling that as I go into it deeper and discard and keep working and working in pursuit of this abstraction or this essence, or this totality, that you become very divested. I mean, you don’t have any cra anymore. It’s almost as if your signature isn’t there anymore. Well, the particular kind of impersonality it takes is one of feeling that anyone could do this, you see. And it’s almost a feeling of great relief to be relieved of your own gis. And a feeling of great exhilaration that you’re in a place that anyone could have made these marks. And why not? Why shouldn’t it be like that? I’m part of everyone, of anyone, and so I enjoy that. I guess I’m speaking psychologically here about attitudes towards myself, but I don’t know how else to do it. And so you begin to enjoy somehow being part of a reality of essences, a world of essences, where you’re just part of it and you need only make some marks to bring that into existence. So you exult in this feeling. You’ve done some things at four in the morning, you come out and there’s the constellation. I think it’s part of a grandeur. And then, of course, one can’t stay in that state. en you rebel and you want to be you, more of you, more of your talents and your gis and your genius. And you say, “What the hell is this—a few lines? I can do more than that.” So there are times I look at the world around me. I like to touch things and feel things, so I’ll draw trees and leaves, the way they feel and crumple and break. All those things. A mountain that’s in front of me there. And they look good for a moment,

* See Morton Feldman, “After Modernism,” in Give My Regards, 74–76.

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for some weeks. You think, “Well, now I’m really working.” en I look at these other things and they look like nothing. at crumbles. It just looks like spots and lines, you know? And then these visual things: my God, I do fiy a day. Why not? ey just roll off the presses. I’m talented, they just come right off. And I hang them up and: “Well, now you’ll have a show.” Everything’s great. I’m an artist again. What is all this other stuff, from which I will eke out maybe one drawing a week? en something will happen that excites me with this other stuff, this other thing, this other pursuit. I guess I have too much of a hunger for that other thing. So then this prolific business just fades away, just vanishes. I had this run and it just vanished. I guess I’m exposing all my conflicts, but what else can I do? So then I take out those other drawings that were put away and smudged up. I thought, “e hell with those things.” And I put one up. It looks like a pyramid! It looks like the Parthenon and a pyramid. en I look at this stuff of trees and it looks like a bunch of nervous wriggles of things. Who the hell wants things!? I don’t want things. I don’t even want things done abstractly. [laughs] at’s known. It’s impossible. So then you’re in that. So it goes back and forth. And you do funny things. A few weeks ago I went to have my car fixed and I hung around this old garage while it was being fixed. It’s in that kind of punchy village, poorer village. Everything is crumbling and slums and the garage is full of dirt and oil. And you like that stuff, you know, rusty stuff, that kind of atmosphere. You know how one always feels connected with deteriorating things. And I came back to the studio and my work looked so fancy. [laughter] So I started drawing and I didn’t reason it out, but I think I felt, vaguely: What if I were like the mechanic, like as if he was drawing me something? Something was wrong with the starter and I didn’t know the parts, so he was drawing, he had this funny way of drawing. So, what if I was the mechanic there and wanted to draw? I went through a whole week of drawing like I didn’t know anything. Like a primitive. Not like a primitive in the sense of Rousseau, but like those self-taught people who paint Scottie dogs and send them to exhibitions. You know what I mean. So, maybe I’m not an artist. It was a game, I realized later, but it was a funny need I have to not know anything. From the studio window I can see the house I live in, the windows and shingles and chimney and so on. So I drew that like I didn’t know how to draw. And of course it looked very good. en there was a tin can with brushes in it, so I would draw that like I didn’t know how to make it round or anything. And I hung these all up and they looked pretty good. ey looked completely divested of anything, like I had no notions about art. [laughing] ey had nothing. I called Musa in and I said, “Look at these things. ey excite me because they’ve got nothing to do with thoughts I’ve had or anything. ey looked like graffiti, like public toilet drawings, in a way.” And she said, “You’re crazy, they’re terrible!” I tried drawing a man’s face. I tried drawing my face. You know, you want to explore everything. I’m making all these admissions because it’s the way we all are, in a way. Well, that didn’t hold up. Nothing works!

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Philip Guston, Untitled, 1968. Charcoal on paper, 177⁄8 × 191⁄2 inches. Photo: Michael Korol.

Aud: Did you think of having a show with that? PG: Sure. I thought, I’ll show those guys, they got all those fancy ideas. And I don’t mean they were as elegant as Dubuffet or Paul Klee. ese were really like toilet drawings. And suddenly I thought there was a whole world to explore. Everything my eye fell on. My coat hanging on a chair. My self, my hands. A pair of shoes. Anything in front of me was grist for the mill. And I thought, “My God, I’ve got a whole life’s work ahead of me. I solved it!” [laughs] Do you ever do that? MF: I haven’t got the talent. [laughs] PG: I’m sure you have. Done it, I mean. I’m sure you have done it. MF: In music it comes out kind of like a kitsch. PG: Yeah. Like David Amram. MF: David Amram. PG: Well, should we send out for some Chinese food?

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Aud: When you were doing those so-called toilet drawings, I think you sort of had the same feeling that you were the mechanic. PG: No. It may have started that way. But we’re all fascinated by crudity, you know, people doing something when they don’t know how to do it. But more than that, as I got working with it I really became convinced that week that I didn’t know anything. But you’ve got the stick in your hand, you make marks. I don’t know that that’s round or that’s flat or how that works. You know, how it looks to a kind of innocent eye. Well, what I’m saying is that that’s part of it, however. You see, all these things that we’re talking about, these graffiti drawings, that’s part of me too and it’s not to be excluded. What I’m really saying is that you cannot take a part and say, “Oh yeah, that’s it,” and enlarge it. In some way, the work that I consider mine, that I’ve sweated for, these few things that are eked out, I then choose to believe that that contains all the others. at’s the hope you have. Whether it’s there visibly I don’t know, but that’s the hope you have. Because the feeling you have about that essence, when you’re in that world, is that it contains all the others some way. I think that’s your faith, or something like that. Aud: Would you be sort of not conscious of it, but . . . PG: Unconscious what? Aud: Totality. PG: Of which are we talking about now? Aud: Of what you said, that you would do something and . . . PG: You’re talking about these crude things? Aud: Yeah. [inaudible] PG: I think they do. It’s not a waste of time, you mean. Aud: Maybe the conflict might be that the essence of the totality is not really visual. PG: at’s right. Yeah. You’re absolutely right. Which makes it very difficult, at least for me, to work with it for any length of time without these detours, you might say. But the fact that it isn’t visual, however, for me, naturally for me, since they’re signs or symbols in a way, it then has to be fed constantly by the experienced visual. I have to feel the way a wind blows through a tree, and the way the leaves shiver and then go back to stasis. Or the way clouds move. Well, all the phenomena of nature, of weight and gravity. All these things. I find I’ve always had that through my painting life. Like in the early fiies, dealing with these essences, I couldn’t stay there. I had to then deal with the solidity of things, and gravity, forces. And then I swing back and forth. I used to be very upset by this conflict. My sudden reaction was: “Gee, I don’t have a disease, an ailment. But maybe it is an ailment.” I used to worry about this ailment. Like, why couldn’t I just have a clear direction? But I don’t feel ashamed of it anymore, or guilty or bad. Because I think that these essences, that this world, really, has to be fed by all the sensations that you get by living in the world,

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and everything you see and feel. Tactility and everything. Because what are these few lines going to be invested with, or by? Mondrian is a key figure, of course, but my argument with a great deal of his work through the thirties principally, and the late twenties, is that it became a way for him. Which is the time, incidentally, when he wrote a great deal.* He didn’t before. He didn’t start writing until the twenties. Well, everything’s problematical. He’s a great artist, but his work then became a great failure. But the reasons for the failure, of course, are grand. And I think it became a way. But I think, in his later work, when he came to New York, in the four or five years before he died, he again unfixed himself and became involved in sensations and intimations of the absolute, rather than grabbing the absolute by the throat. It’ll die if you grab it by the throat. Like [crumples papers]. Aud: ose lines that you put down are not merely symbols. PG: Well, I’m calling them that. I don’t know what else to call them. ey’re not symbols. Aud: ey aren’t, because . . . PG: No, they aren’t. Aud: . . . they are in the realm of matter. PG: Exactly. Aud: ey do give sensation. ey don’t just represent it. PG: No. at’s right. A symbol represents something. at’s right. Perhaps I used the wrong word. Aud: But perhaps then that’s what they would become? PG: Yes. I find that happening. I see it happening and then I don’t like it. I think that causes my reversal: opposite things happening.

* See Piet Mondrian, Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art (1937) and Other Essays (1941–1943), edited by Harry Holzman (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1945).

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T H E I M AG E 1969

Philip Guston: I’ll talk about myself for a minute. You know, I had that show at the Jewish Museum in 1966, three years ago, and then I didn’t paint for two years. I drew constantly for two years, and about a year ago I started painting. And, boy, I’ve got more than I can handle. I don’t want to talk about my work, but I’m involved with images. Real three-dimensional solid images. at’s what I’ve been drawing for a couple years. Well, I talked about it the last time I was here, in that conversation with Morty [Feldman; see pp. 80–108]. It’s impossible to work with images. So frustrating. So then, aer two weeks, I go aer this terrible thing, this disease, called abstraction. I mean, the essence of something. But I really want images. I was thinking on the way downtown, how the origin of art in the beginning, the origin of expression, was image making. Every time I see an abstract painting now I smell mink coats, you know what I mean? It’s really terrible. Terrible brainwashing. I don’t want to talk about that. It’s a terrible thing. You don’t mind my babbling off the top of my mind? Image making, painting what’s around you, what’s there. Paint your hand. e other day I was up for two nights and I painted . . . What do you paint? I don’t want to paint art. All I know is, I ate spaghetti that night, so I was involved for three days in painting a plate of spaghetti. But I don’t want to paint a plate of spaghetti because I just ate it. ings get transformed. e mound got higher, like I want to make it bigger. I’m not advertising a spaghetti restaurant, so the mound gets higher and higher. Pretty soon it becomes like a Gustave Doré illustration. Millions of people in this big mass, it becomes a big bloody carnage. Image making is the most fascinating . . . It’s the only thing. e rest is just a lot of shit, making colors and selling yourself a bill of goods. e other day the Knoedler Gallery sent out a press release that said Mr. Barnett Newman had joined the gallery and was going to have a big show. And Barney is a very scrupulous guy, I think. He controls every bit. So, this blurb goes on about Barney Newman: “Mr. Barnett Newman paints the sublime.” He’s always been involved with the sublime. So Musa and I burst out in hilarity, in the snow. And I wanted to telephone Knoedler’s and give them some other name. I’d say: “Mr. Knoedler, I’m interested in getting a sublime painting of Mr. Newman.” “Well,” he says, “a ten-foot sublime picture is forty-five thousand.” So I say, “Have you got a ten thousand sublime?” Well, this is the world we live in. is is the way it is, see? Isn’t that marvelous? Not previously published. This talk was given in the drawing studio of the New York Studio School on January 15, 1969.

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So I get this thing where I’m trying to paint my head, my self, my hand, a plate of spaghetti. I started working with the body. Paint my teeth? Isn’t that the old Greek myth—what’s the word, mimesis? To make a substitute. And that’s probably the greatest urge. at’s what I was thinking on the way down, maybe I should talk about mimesis, the idea of making a substitution for reality. To duplicate reality and in that duplication, it’s not a duplication, it’s like a super-reality. Probably. I’m not sure about it. Because what’s reality? You don’t know what the hell reality is. But what happens when you make the super-reality? It must then change life. Isn’t that right, Joey? Art makes life. erefore life and art are like two monsters feeding on each other. ey need each other, they try to repel each other, but they actually have to feed on each other. Life makes art, art makes life. But anyway, it’s that wonderful, unique, only mixup, wonderful confusion, chaos, that makes art. But anything else, like beauty and truth and God and the sublime, takes care of itself. I mean, there’s no problem. You don’t have to paint the sublime. It’s like, we all talk with God, and God tells me: “Look, you sing about what I make, you know? Don’t fuck around, don’t try to be me. You sing about what I make.” Well, that may be a question of temperament. Some temperaments want to be omniscient. I guess my temperament doesn’t want to be omniscient. I think things are wonderful about this. I don’t know. I’ve thought, myself, what can I do? I was painting a hand. You know when you go on day aer day on just a hand. A big hand. And then it goes through transformations. e hand starts writing. I draw, I make a hand drawing. It’s kind of an interesting feeling. It goes through metamorphoses. e hand starts to become an animal’s hand. I was so excited last night when I came in, it became a big paw. e hand had hair on it. And I thought, “Gee!” at really sent me, you know? A paw, an animal’s hand, writing, drawing. And then I started thinking about the idea of God. And when animals first had hands. Evolution, the whole thing. It’s so exciting. So imagery is endless. e other thing, and you know what I mean by the other thing, ends up as plastic furniture. e image thing, and pursuing the image, is endless. It changes you. at’s the most wonderful thing. It makes you shake. I want to shake. e other thing I want, and I think what an artist wants, is to be baffled all the time. Baffled, puzzled, new problems. Problem, a terrible word. I don’t mean problem. Baffled. To become dumb, innocent—how? You know, I don’t have anything else to say. Unless we go to the paintings and talk about those? But we can talk. If you want to say something, talk about what’s bugging you. I don’t know how to talk anymore about art to art students. Except to say, “Get out of art school!” But you can’t tell that. [laughter] Huh? Audience: [inaudible] PG: Are you complimenting me? Or putting me down? Which way? Oh, good. I’m so paranoid now. So watch out, boy. Be very careful what you say. [laughs] But I feel too good. It’s all right. I didn’t want to come in. I really pulled a fast one, because I was

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on that paw and I didn’t want to spoil it. I didn’t want to wake up. So. But here you are and I came in. I bought a lot of paint. I didn’t come in to talk to you. I wanted that seventy-five bucks because I spent two hundred bucks on gallons of paint. It’s okay to be truthful, isn’t it? Yeah. [looking at student paintings] It doesn’t matter that it isn’t finished. It’s so strange. e red there and the way the yellow is holding it there. I don’t know. It’s sort of a landscape? I don’t know how to look at painting like that, or talk about painting like that. e composition, it’s so boring. Like what’s wrong with having an image? And it’s absolutely still. It doesn’t move. It shouldn’t move. Why should they move? Why should it move all around the picture when it should be absolutely still? With a thing, when there’s a thing, you find out how banal you are. Maybe. What do you think? Once you find out how banal you are, then you can move from there. Who did this? I’m going to be a very bad boy and I’ll tell you. You know, this school gave me something and I want to do something in return. Last spring, almost a year ago, I did all this drawing and I was holding off painting. You know how that is. I’m going to, but I don’t. Week aer week just drawing, drawing. e canvas is stapled to the wall, but . . . nothing. And I think it was last March, February maybe, almost a year ago, I was in here. I think I gave a talk or something, for a life class, and one of those nights I stayed at the school. Well, I couldn’t sleep, and I came down and the school was empty, and I had a kind of trauma. You know, I have them once in a while, and this time it was in the sculpture studio, where I really talked, there was nobody around. Yelled at myself, talked to myself: “Goddamn it, I’m going to start . . .” Somehow it was the school which gave me something, you know? at’s right. It’s great to be around here. It really is. So, I’m going to give you something. But yesterday when I pulled my car up, I saw Steven and Chuck [two students], who happened to be walking out while I was pulling up. And, gee, I’d been up there alone pretty much for a month or so. I just came in right off the West Side Highway and both of you looked terrific. I mean, dressed wonderful. You were, like on top of the world. Like King of Eighth Street, you know? I had a feeling . . . I don’t know. Do you mind if I absolutely set a fire under your ass? I mean, that picture doesn’t look like the way you look. en what’s wrong? Aud: [inaudible] PG: Dig, but no dig. Dig, but really dig. Maybe you don’t really dig. Set a fire under your ass. It doesn’t look like you. You really like putting those white spots in the upper right-hand corner? Why? What does it mean? Sure it’s nice. So you like Matisse. You’re—what are you, twenty-five, twenty-eight? I’m going to be very personal here. Well, certainly this is no way to start a lecture, a talk. I can’t go on with that. It doesn’t take long to look at a painting. Whether it’s this or a Rembrandt or a Chardin, we see pictures in a flash. All I know is, you looked a certain way. I loved the way you looked. I was thinking about it. I had to go uptown in the subway. You were walking on top of things. And I really am disappointed. Disappointed! I don’t

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know what that means. I mean, all the adjustments in a painting . . . And this is the best art school in the country, you all know that. But it doesn’t mean you’re immune from all this shit. Now I want you to talk. I can’t just continue like this. I’m not Moses coming off of Sinai. All I know is that I shake. I mean, real art makes you shake. Let’s not kid ourselves. Creation is a force, it’s a power. It’s not cra. And don’t tell me about learning. We’d have a big argument about learning. It’s a power and a force, and everybody has that force. If you don’t want to open yourself up to this power, then get out. at’s what it is. Someone will say, well, the guy wants you to be like him. Yeah, I want you to be like me, because I want to be like El Greco and Rembrandt. You know, it’s all the same. Time has nothing to do with it. I don’t know, maybe I mentioned it, I was in Madrid a couple of years ago, and in Toledo there’s a chapel. Maybe it was closed years ago when I was there, but it was open this time. And in this chapel there’s a Christ and the disciples, and they’re marvelous, very brushed-in and so on. In this situation they’re busts, all the saints. And then there’s this one, I think it’s reproduced a lot, the Cristo Mundi [or Christ as Savior]. And that’s all in one little chapel, a room half this size. And the Christ looks like the so-called self-portrait of Greco at the Met. So, I’m a romantic type, so I started dreaming away. I’d just been to the Casa Greco, where you see where his studio was and all that, and I thought to myself: “It’s marvelous.” I mean, I know my feeling, that when I leave the studio and go in the house I like to feel that I le people there, like throbbing beings. Golems are there. Otherwise, why paint? I mean, who wants pictures? I want, like, living things. It’s nice; I go in my house, it’s just ten yards away. I have my drink and I sit down and eat. And I look back at my studio and there it is. You can see the windows, a fiy-foot studio. And gee, there’s a lot of people in there! So, I was thinking about Greco. I saw his studio. It wasn’t so big. It had a high ceiling, but it was almost this size. And he paints Saint John, he paints Saint Peter, and so on. And they look like they were done in maybe an hour, a day, aernoon. e next day he comes in and he makes himself Christ. [laughs] But what a thing. He painted his chums like in a club. Imagine what it would feel like to paint all the disciples. And they’re all there, you know. He’s sitting down having his sherry or whatever, and his food, the quartet is playing—you know?—and he’s painted the boys! Around him. at’s art. at’s the real smell of reality, of creation. You make real things. So I’m that kind of romantic, and you can criticize me for it, but that’s how it is. I like the feeling of when you go to the Brancacci Chapel and see the Masaccio Tribute Money, the Money Changers. You know, he was twenty-two when he painted it. And nobody did that before. And it’s just rough. e robe is a line going all the way from the head down to the foot, a big clunk on the ground. Nobody did that before. Giotto innovated that, the solidity. But he did it, this young guy. I can smell the lime. I imagine the scaffold. You can see how much he painted that day. How did he feel?

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He just painted that big robe, big foot, a nice hey beard. And so that was a day’s work. In a fresco, you could only do eight hours or ten hours at a stretch. Well, all I know is I want to feel like that! You make reality. Otherwise . . . Otherwise you can do curtains. I’ve wanted to say this ever since I talked in this school, but I tried to be fancy. Maybe I should be polite, I don’t know. I guess I was involved in my image. Intelligent and very knowing, and I am, I’m a pretty intelligent guy. Everybody’s intelligent. But I don’t feel like talking like that anymore. If I’m going to teach, I like to really teach. Which is not teaching but setting fire to people, that’s about all. And making them unhappy and frustrated. Really. But for the right reasons. All right. I don’t know whether I should talk about these paintings, because I don’t know what to say. But I know where to look. Is that the idea, that I should know where to look? Why? I can go out in the street and I can look everywhere. It’s natural. It’s photography really, when you get down to it. It’s a snapshot. Is that an ideal? Why? Tell me why. Well, look, if you want to make this a one-way thing, I’m going to have another drink, and I want to go home, eat and go home. Oh, you want to talk? Talk. I’m talking about this like a serious matter. I mean, what are you doing here? What are you all doing here? Don’t apologize. Aud: [inaudible] PG: I could never paint abstractly, although I think for a lot of years I hovered. I think what’s happened to me over the last three or four years is that I’m tired of hovering. I haven’t got much time and I don’t want to hover. I want to nail it. Aud: [inaudible] PG: Don’t let value judgments . . . What do you mean, cruddy? Everything’s cruddy, and divine, so what. Paint what you hate. Paint what disgusts you. Why? If it’s in you. I’m not saying paint disgusting things. Paint true. If you’re disgusted, paint your disgust. I do. Others do. Some painters do. If you’re blessed and you’re touched by the angels every day, dream away. But don’t paint to prove an idea. Don’t paint to prove what’s right. You know what I mean? Don’t paint to be loved. I could make a list. Aud: [inaudible] PG: Approbation. We inherit all these shibboleths. Modern art. Abstract art. We’ve all been brainwashed. You know that. Everybody. But, you wriggle. You’ve got to wriggle under this terrible predicament. We’re not cool. We’re hot. Really, we’re seething. ere it is. But I mean, plastic chairs—do you hate them? If you really do hate them, paint them. e other thing here is so many bottles on tables. Do you really want to paint that? Why? Aud: And they’re all empty, all the bottles. PG: Well, speaking of that . . . [laughs] Aud: Can you clarify your work with images?

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PG: I mean, it’s too ambiguous to me. Yes, no. It is, isn’t. You don’t want to make a figure, you want to make it look like a . . . what? Abstraction? I don’t know. Some notion. Some myth you read about, heard about, inherited. Where is it at? Is it deep enough then in you to push you, compel you, possibly to do it? So where is it at? Aud: [inaudible] PG: Yeah, that’s a contemporary phenomenon. You see, we inherit, it’s unavoidable. For at least a hundred years that’s, like, modern art. We inherit a funny business. We’re split. Modern art really is a schizoid condition. You know that. Goya makes his paint black. It looks like a guy’s black pants—it’s black paint. Goya looks at a beard—it’s paint. He looks at paint—it’s a man’s beard. Rembrandt would hold up a brush and say, “Let’s see, should I make it a beard or just use this paint?” Maybe that has a beauty of its own. Isn’t that right? We are in the condition where we hold up the brush and say blue or red. We’re in that condition. So, you have to confront it. It’s a real confrontation. en you have to paint. What’s terrible, I think, is decisions. You know what I mean? Like, if you decide to paint the sublime, or you decide to paint beer cans. Just different kinds of advertising. But basically it’s the same thing. One is highfalutin advertising and the other Reingold advertising. What’s the difference? But all you can do is deal with the dilemma. But really deal with the dilemma. at you’re split. And push that dilemma. And push it and push it and push it, till you’re out of your mind. And you’re beside yourself and it carries you. en you’re really in unknown territory. en you’re in territory where you’re a primitive. And you don’t know what the hell and how to do that unknown image. But don’t decorate rectangles. You could just as well paint stripes. Don’t have the idea that you’re any different than stripes. Same thing. Don’t kid yourself that it’s not colored stripes. ey’re just more successful than you. ey’re better in the biz than you are. Because their biz is popular. Your biz is not. But it’s the same thing. Aud: Doesn’t what you’re saying put you in a little bit of the same position? I mean, what you’re actually saying to us is: “Yeah, sure, I shit on your floor but you didn’t have to eat it.” PG: I shit on your floor? Aud (1): at’s what it comes down to. Aud (2): What do you mean by that? Aud (1): What the Studio School is basically into is the fiies. Abstract expressionism. Aud (2): at’s not true. PG: But I want to know what you mean, exactly, in reference to me. at I’m saying what? Aud (1): About painting the real . . . PG: You missed me. I didn’t say that. What?

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Aud (2): I got that same impression. at, to you, at this point in life, what I can see from what you say was, that painting the things around you, realistic images . . . PG: Okay. at isn’t exactly what I mean, but I’ll take that. So? Aud (1): But this painting has a lot more to do with your work than a lot of other people. PG: Just as a parallel: the eight to ten years of cubism was a wonderful period. By that I mean Picasso, Braque, Léger were the cubists. Not Gris. I don’t know about Gris. But those three men, they made a revolution, and then they dump it. Because they’re artists! e point is to dump it. Hundreds of guys, you see, got so they were le with it. Aud (1): You have to learn something from every painting. PG: at’s right. Each time new. It propels you somewhere else. You’re not making a painting. at’s assumed. What are you doing? You’re searching. And finding. And leaving. And searching and finding and leaving. Aud (1): Yeah, but what’s the point of leaving? Aud (2): Because you’re building. You can’t stay on the front step. PG: Because you’re human beings. You’re not making tables. I’m neurotic. We’re neurotic. at’s why you make a point of it. We think. We have minds. Why turn around and write ten books about his leaving? I don’t know. He’s an artist. He’s neurotic. He has to hammer and hammer it and hammer it. I don’t know why. at’s the way it is. It’s a funny question. I mean, why? I don’t know. It’s what? Well, I was being a smart aleck. Just to be autobiographical for a minute. I didn’t go to Italy until 1948. I got a fellowship. And that was the first time I saw the Piero frescoes. I was in Rome, so Arezzo is just an hour away. We used to go there, like weekly. And it was a very crucial period in my life. For years previously I had been very involved with that, but when I saw it, well, it was awesome. I had some letters and I was able to get the sexton there to put up ladders so I could look. You see, it’s a small chapel and it starts there and it’s built up in tiers, like comic strips. And I wanted to see it close, so they gave me big ladders and some planks, so I was able at least to see the very top of the Adam and Eve. I couldn’t get up quite that high. It’s about, say, thirty or forty feet. But I could see closely. And it’s painted very roughly. He used lime as white, which is layered in the fresco. As against Giotto fresco, which is transparent—there’s no white, it’s really hues. So it’s a wonderful feeling. It may sound technical but not. So the lime is used as white. You dry lime and you pulverize, powder it and mix with paint, so it’s a lot of half-tones, like oil paint. ere’s all these different kinds of powdered pinks and blues, different tones, and it’s delicious. I used to go back and think, it was so stupid for me all those years to have been like that, to try to do that. Because I didn’t have the story to tell. It’s stupid, in a way, to feel this and that and have it be a still life. Stupid. Because these soaring verticals and circles and cosmic things have to do with the story of Christ, and God, religion. It’s a chapel, you know?

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Aud: Does it look as much like a collage in the flesh as in the reproductions? PG: A collage? I don’t know whether it’s a collage. Aud: Well, the oil paintings I’ve seen look a lot different in the reproductions. PG: Oil paintings? What oil paintings? Aud: I guess they’re oil. e ones in London. PG: No, they’re not oils. Aud: What are they? PG: Tempera. Aud: Well, they look a lot different. ey look more homogenous. PG: Well, they’re smaller. Aud: [inaudible] PG: I don’t know. No. ere’s an art historian I got to know in Rome, and as a matter of fact he gave me the letters. He had a theory that Piero didn’t paint them but designed them. And, you know, it’s possible. Because he may have made the designs, the cartoons. Aer all, he was an architect, a mathematician. ere was a different spirit then. It’s conceivable that a lot of the assistants knocked in the tones. Although the panels, the Flagellation, the Baptism, the Madonna with the egg in Milan, those were probably painted by him. Aer all, they’re just panels, four feet high or so. But it’s possible. People copied them and they knocked in the colors. Aer all, it’s the configuration that counts, not the actual touch. ere’s no touch there, although it’s right. It’s what it is. A different temperament. Aud: [inaudible] PG: Sure. But what I meant was that that time I was in a crucial period, the paintings changing, 1947. So I went to Venice and I saw the Venetian painters for the first time really. Tiepolo. Guardi. Titian, the late Titians. And in Paris I saw Manet, Courbet, Daumier. e paint-painters. Manet, all he has is the sensibility in his eyes, that’s all. No structure, ideas. So that’s when I came back and I didn’t paint for a year. And I decided: Well, I’ll start all over. All I know is I want to put on paint. I had my feelings. I’m nervous. Touch. Feelings. I didn’t know anything about structure. e hell with it. I just put on paint. Find my way to paint. Gradually images grew. I got involved. I won’t go into that. It went on and on. But Piero was a mystery. But you know, more and more now, these years, I don’t even think it’s this. It’s something else. It’s really like a mysterious vision of the world. It’s the most peculiar wax museum you can imagine. It has Madame Tussaud all beat. An ordered universe, like that. I wrote for a year about the Flagellation and the Baptism. Tom Hess published it [see p. 41]. I commissioned myself. Yeah, it was so hard to put into words what I thought, and I rewrote and rewrote it. But my first thoughts about it, I think I should have kept them. Instead of polishing it. I got real schmaltzy. I said, “He’s a messenger come to the earth for the first time.” You know? at’s what it is! I should

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have kept the word messenger. Someone made me take it out. I mean, all the other great masters are different. Michelangelo’s involved with his genius. It’s great. But this is a messenger come to the earth for the first time, and he measures the world, measures distance, weights. Like one of those surrealist cartoons. He opens his eyes for the first time on this earth. e hills are green; water is water. He’s a primitive in the highest sense on the word. He’s the first man. And that’s what gets you. At the National Gallery [in London], the Baptism just makes you weep. e colors are so pink, red. Oh, it’s so judicious! You taste it on your tongue. He was about twenty when he painted it. A young man painting. But you look at the Baptism of Christ, John baptizing Christ . . . e Botticelli, you know, the feet are . . . But in the Piero, the leaves, the rocks—it’s painted like a sign painter: down, straight. Like I say, a messenger new to the world. God sent him: Look at the world I made. Green fields, water, earth, the planet Earth. And it gives you this awe, it’s filled with wonder, and that’s Piero. at’s why the world of Piero’s emotions is a wonder. He made it. It’s here to stay. Aud: [inaudible] PG: at head [St. Julian]. ey found that about fieen years ago, under some other panels in Borgo San Sepolcro. Aud: It’s amazing because . . . PG: Sure. Sure. e red robe. And the Hercules, the Piero in the Gardner, is wonderful. Go to Boston. e Hercules—oh boy, that arm coming out. His testicles, grapes hanging down. One arm coming out with a club. You know that one? at’s a part of a fresco, I guess. And Titian, the Rape of Europa, the bull. Two great things to go to Boston for. Aud: [inaudible] PG: Yeah. Absolutely. What’s the town where the Flagellation is? It’s a hilltown. It’s the ducal palace of Montefeltro, who’s the patron. You know it. It just slips my mind.* It’s near Ravenna. It’s not far from Borgo San Sepolcro, where he was born. And the Flagellation is this big [gestures]. And you have to go through this vast ducal palace with tapestries, tables, marble, all this stuff. en you come into the room. And it’s a hell of a place to get to. It takes a day to get there. You have to take a bus. It’s way up on top of a hill. You get a hotel, you check in, you go through all these rooms, and finally you come to the end room. And there’s a guard with a big mustache, and he says, “is is the Flagellation of Piero della Francesca.” And I said, “Si, I know.” But he’s telling me. He’s telling me a story about the flagellation, what happened to Christ. I said, “I know, I know, I came three thousand miles to see it.” So there it is. at big [gestures again]. And it’s uncanny. ere’s no size. In my reproduction you wouldn’t know whether it isn’t this big [indicates much larger size]. e art historian, a good Piero scholar, at the Uffizi, he had to do with the cleaning * The town is Urbino.

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some years ago, and he was telling me this story in Italian, weeping. He’s telling me how he came in, and he said, “I held it. Just like that. I held it.” Aud: [inaudible] PG: Yeah. I like what you say. It’s wonderful. We’ll have to talk about it. You know, the best book on Piero is written by a guy named Roberto Longhi.* You know that? You know, I stole that book. e only book in my life I didn’t return to the library. It was in L.A., mind you. is was 1930. at’s the only book I stole in my life. I figured, you know, I rationalized it. I mean, who’s going to take this out? Eighteen years old. You know how you do. And it’s a wonderful book. is was translated into English. And I bring it up because all these books, like Clark,† are terrible. But he says a wonderful thing about Piero. He says he doesn’t belong in the Renaissance. He says there’s something Egyptian about him. And I liked that word. ere is something Egyptian about him. I know just what he meant. Something archaic about him. He’s not in the Renaissance. And that’s what I meant: a messenger from all time come to the earth. So it has nothing to do with that. I’d like to see the place like I’d never seen it before in my life. Absolutely, but in another way. I want to feel like I never saw. I want to paint like I don’t know how to. I’ll find out how to paint, eventually. Aud: Rilke mentions that if you went out in the forest and looked for the unicorn and you saw it, you wouldn’t recognize it. You wouldn’t see it at all. at is, if you see a thing as if you were seeing it for the first time, you wouldn’t be able to see it. PG: at’s right. You know, there’s one thing: For many years, up until recently, I, like everyone else, had my heroes. You know, you have your friends, you stay up all night, you’re talking, and you think they know what they’re talking about. And you try to influence them; they try to influence you. You know the way a friendship moves on, with natural companions and so on. You leave them, you come home, you open up Rilke, and you think: “ere’s my real companion.” Or Kaa. Schopenhauer. Baudelaire. You know? “ere’s the guy, yeah.” But, you go on and on and you see a line in Masaccio, and feel how El Greco felt with his chums around, and you think maybe Rilke’s wrong. Not wrong, but . . . my own feelings. You know what I mean? Rilke says he doesn’t recognize it, he won’t recognize it. Or maybe he won’t. Maybe he didn’t! It’s possible. Aud: I brought it up because, perhaps if you don’t have a conception of something, you won’t see it at all. PG: I think we should get conceptions out of the way. What I really mean by what I just said is: To have a conversation with Rilke is great, if it inspires you, but it’s his point of view. It has to do with feeling free. I mean, if you can’t move . . .

* Roberto Longhi, Piero della Francesca (Florence: Sansoni, 1937), translated by Keith Christiansen (Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY: Stanley Moss Book/Sheep Meadow Press, 2002). †

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Aud: [inaudible] PG: It’s my paranoia? You can’t quote the opposition? What do you mean? Be more specific. Aud: You can’t quote somebody with a different point of view, but you can quote somebody with a similar point of view. PG: Oh, sure. at’s your drive—you use what you can use. Are you crazy or something? What do you mean? You use what you need. If you’re hungry, you need it. You’ve got to do it. But lately, in later years, it occurred to me that Rilke was a guy with his own problems, had his own ideas. It’s fine to be inspired by them but not have them on your neck. Saying, “ou shalt, thou shalt not.” Or maybe you weren’t quoting? But I’m saying we get into these habits. It creeps in. And you have to question everybody and everything. Aud: [inaudible] PG: So therefore you’re thrown in an opposite kind of way. But that’s the way it is. You have to, not escape those opposites, but really deal with them in a very forceful way. at’s the condition you find yourself in. What are you going to do? ere’s only realistic art. ere’s nothing else. All the others are categories, and that’s for the customers. Every guy worthwhile was painting reality. You know that. Mondrian thought he was painting reality. Rembrandt thought he was painting reality. at’s the way it is. You theorize . . . I mean, I’m aware of the fact that Mondrian, that magnificent crank, wrote all this stuff. Well, that’s all right. It has nothing to do with painting. Really, it doesn’t. Not really. It does, in some other way. But anyway, what was I going to say? So you’re sent by something, at a given time. You’re human, you know? Not only human, you’re a creator. So you’re not in one place forever. You don’t discover something and say, “at’s it,” and stay there. at’s business. at’s not creation. But any man’s growing conception, burgeoning feeling, has to exclude other things. So it becomes passionate. at—not that. One of the interesting things about Mondrian is what he excluded. You know his writings? Well, read them. ey’re very interesting, on neoplasticism. In the thirties he wrote this series of essays, and they’re very worthwhile reading, because it’s the big challenge. It’s really the crux, and I’ll tell you why, very briefly. Well, he said a lot of things, but let’s pick out what I think are two main things. He says the great art of the past has always been involved with rhythm. He wants to eliminate subject matter. He wants to get rid of that and just paint the rhythm, which is the rhythm of life. Purely, without representation. e second thing is much more interesting to me, and that is . . . [tape break] I live in the world of essences, equivalents. Or I deal with the thing. Which in a way is tragic. It’s because it has weight. I mean, do I want to feel I weigh two hundred pounds? I eat more and I get heavy and finally I feel my weight. I feel everybody sitting here. And all the other things we do. We make love. We defecate. You eat. Do you want that? Are you that? Genet, in a wonderful piece he wrote on Rem-

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brandt,* is terrific. Again, great art writing is by Proust, Genet, etc., not art writers. And Genet’s talking about this woman. She shits. She fucks. He can feel her. She’s there. Do you want to paint that, feel that? at involves his life. Or do you want to paint . . . at’s tragic. Sure, it’s tragic. In some ways Rembrandt is the greatest abstract painter of all. I’m not being sophistic. In a way, that is like the greatest abstraction of all. And Mondrian is in a battle with these guys. A dream is wonderful. A dream of purity. e dream of divesting yourself of stuff, flesh. Yeah, it’s marvelous, but . . . Aud: [inaudible] PG: No. at’s incidental with Mondrian. at’s the way it came out. Actually he’s very mystical, you know. e truth about Mondrian isn’t so popular. We know he was all involved with Vedanta, the Rosicrucian movement, eosophy. He read Madame Blavatsky, Claude Bragdon. He was all involved with the fourth dimension. He was like a mystical nut, really. He wasn’t involved with the heaviness of the world and all that. I mean, he was, but his real motivation was some kind of mystical essence of life. A symbol, I guess you’d call it. Aud: In the late thirties, Mondrian split one of those horizontals . . . PG: Fractured it, yeah. You know the big charcoal drawings of his? ey’re wonderful. ere’s a book on those. ey’re magnificent. So, in his case, if you listen to him, he has a right to do what he did. His drawings are so magnificent. An arm. Reflections. He was a very sensual man. But I’m not presenting . . . Not alternatives, not yes/no, black/white. I mean, I might end up with a line, like Barney Newman. I don’t know. But I think it has to be confronted, forcefully. Aud: You’re talking about immersing yourself in this. It brought to my mind when your drawings got simpler and simpler. What was that like? PG: It’s a part of life. But you see what I’m saying, don’t you? I think, when I get down to a line, moving toward the absolute, the essence, as I said that day, I’ll then work with things. en I’ll take those off, work the other way. But not so much lately. Now the things are closing in. e only way you can really judge is by your feelings. You test. Nothing to do with ideas. is absolute, this purity—I don’t want to live there. at’s what I mean. Do you know why? It becomes too familiar. Actually, the absolute is very strange. e abstract, what Morty calls the abstract experience. Very strange. e fact is, it becomes banal. It becomes common. It becomes ordinary. It becomes too known. So maybe you have to go through this stuff, all the sensate stuff, with passion. e desire, the frustration of passion to finally . . . All I can do, honestly, is just to give you my questions. at’s all I can do. I want

* Jean Genet, “What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn into Little Squares All the Same Size and Shot Down the Toilet,” in Fragments of the Artwork (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 91–102.

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to question. I want to live my life questioning. It’s the only worthwhile way for a man to live his life, is to constantly question. You have answers for a couple of years, a span of time, then you start questioning again and you upset your own answers. Aud: You think you have to upset it because you reach a feeling of banality with pretty much anything that you experience oen enough? You can take the greatest thing in the world and turn it into a banality by repeating. You can put the Mona Lisa up on the wall every day and get bored with it. PG: e thing that’s great is the thing that’s done for the first time. Aud: [inaudible] PG: No, you don’t. Right now I’m passionate about what I’m going to do. But aer some years, I’m under no illusion that . . . I don’t even want to talk about it, where I’m going to go. No, I don’t do it because I think it’s right to upset myself. No. at’s stupid. I want to feel good. If I could stay with what I’ve been doing, I’d stay with it. I don’t want to be unhappy. Aud: Do you ever feel stuck or stopped? PG: Well, Chuck, you have to be more explanatory to help me. Because I could answer that, but I want to be more specific. Aud: A painting I saw of yours, 1956, seemed like a dual kind of image. PG: Already. Aer 1962, I was only working towards an image. Aud: It shis gears, and then you’re hit with, like, a head. And for me it loses all the implications of all the . . . PG: Of the older ones. Yeah, I know that. On that one painting, the one in 1962? Aud: en it becomes only the head and you can’t move out of it. PG: I know what you mean. I see what you mean. at bothers me. at bothered me. at’s why I, up to 1966 more or less, worked for four years where I was involved with those kind of heads or forms. Locating them, feeling right about where they were. In this area, in the world, in the rectangle. You know, you’re passionate about something, you did it. I believed in it, but then aerwards I got critical of it. I went through a rough period. I drew for a couple years. ings. I was worried instinctively. Something was bothering me about that. You put your finger on it. You’re right. Aud: e question that came to mind aer that: Could it be the heads and the hands and the brush and still have the other thing? PG: e other thing being . . . ? Aud: I don’t know. at whole other kind of . . . PG: Metaphysical thing? Aud: at broader range. PG: I don’t know. I’m going to find out, Yeah, that’s a picture of me. It’s a self-portrait. It’s a head with a hand and a brush. at’s right. But I want to know. I want to paint . . .

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Aud: But can you do it? PG: How do I know? I can’t foresee it. I can’t intellectualize about it. I’ve got to see it. I’ve got to try it. I’ve got to do it. How do I know? Failure. It’s all a failure anyway. I don’t mean that . . . I’m not trying to be sentimental. I don’t think I’m doing anything with myself but posing a lot of questions to myself, on my own terms. To see what happens. As you know, I’m an analytical mind and involved with cultural opinion. I want to see what I can do. I want to see what will hold. What happened in painting . . . ere’s no such thing as painting anymore. It’s a dilemma. I mean, who’s a painter? I don’t know. I mean, I want to see if it’s possible. I’m a real student. I think of myself that way. But you put your finger on it, Chuck. at’s right. But, what am I going to do, live in that world of 1956? I know that picture. I like that painting very much. Fine. It’s one of my nice babies. But what am I going to do? Do you know, when I did that picture I worked for six months trying to duplicate it? You know, that’s natural. When you do the thing you love, you want to make more of them. at’s a very natural thing. I know what that picture is. I didn’t paint it. It moved through me. en, like a dope, for six months I tried to do more. And then I could kid myself, kind of. You want to make more babies like the nice baby you made. But it didn’t work. en I got into that black stuff. I got into the mud again. e muck, the chaos, again. Aud: Since you came here with a lot of questions . . . PG: I didn’t come here with a lot of questions. Aud: Well, you said that’s all you have for us, these questions that you’re asking yourself, right? PG: I didn’t come here with a lot of questions. I came here to buy my paint. I haven’t been in New York for a month and a half. And I came here without bullshitting you. Aud: But I want to say that I’m prefacing these questions that I have with the utmost respect. PG: You don’t have to say that. Aud: Well, I want to. But, that show at the Jewish Museum, whatever you may think of those paintings now . . . PG: Oh, I like . . . Aud: I mean, you did something. at’s the one show that sticks in my mind. But I’m just thinking, when I hear you talking about it and all these questions that you’re asking yourself, never finding the answers and that whole syndrome, I mean, talking about getting rid of the fiies, what you are actually talking about to a large extent . . . PG: I’m not a cultural historian. I’m not getting rid of the fiies. Why should I want to get rid of the fiies? Aud: Well, it seemed to me that you rejected them. PG: I’m not rejecting. I’m just not there anymore. I love all those. I just don’t live in that

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world anymore, in pink painting. I’m not in the world of the black paintings that you saw. It’s not rejection. It may sound like it. I’m not rejecting. Well, maybe I am rejecting . . . I’m not there. Well, go ahead. I’m sorry. Aud: But that whole period is confused with the fact that I think that generation, since you’re all questioning . . . PG: Actually, I think it’s true, if you want to put it that way, that I’m more true to that ethos the way I feel now. I’m more true to the way I felt then. Right? What am I going to do, have a shop and sell my merchandise? Be a shopkeeper? I don’t want a responsibility. I don’t have a responsibility to a period. Aud: I’m not saying a value judgment. All I’m saying is that I think almost everyone has these questions and we need help, man. And I think the fiies chose a really bad drug. PG: To you, you mean? Well, that’s your problem, however. I don’t want to sound hardboiled but, like, that’s your problem. You have to deal with that. Aud: Well, I’m not despairing. oreau made that great statement, how a lot of people are living lives of quiet desperation. It seems like almost everyone from the fiies who’s spoken here is unquiet desperation. PG: I see what you mean. It doesn’t sound real to me, but I see what you mean. I don’t know who spoke to you. I don’t know who spoke here. Aud: And bars are the most desperate places there is. PG: Bars? You mean drinking bars? Aud: Right. PG: What do you mean? e Cedar Bar? Aud: I’ve never been to a bar where I didn’t feel like it was impossible to stay in it for more than an hour. PG: Yeah. Aud: ey’re not very pretty. I’ve never seen a pretty one yet. Even with . . . PG: Even with what? I don’t know what he said. Aud: So you work on a painting for a while and then you go out and you have a drink, and maybe another drink. And you come back and it still didn’t work. So what are you going to do? So, you have another drink and maybe it will work out. Aud (2): Bullshit. PG: I never saw it. ere’s a lot of bull about the fiies. e men I knew, those who are alive, those who are dead, were marvelous painters and cultured painters. ey knew what they were doing. ey didn’t have that problem of having a drink and . . . Maybe that’s Resnick’s problem, I don’t know. But de Kooning is a real painter. Kline, he knew. He was a painter. Drinking had nothing to do with it. Oh, it had to do with something else. ere’s a lot I miss about that time too. Not much has been written

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about that period of any value yet. ose who are still alive, and I see them occasionally, are still hot. In different ways, moving. Some. But that’s silly to talk about a period. Nobody chooses to be in a period. Everybody painted differently. It’s like: things happen in conjunction, happen to be at one time. Like I’m sure with the younger generation of painters now, the stars are in conjunction. ey didn’t get together and say, “Let’s do this or that.” It was open, very open. e best thing about that time with that group, which was loosely called the New York School or abstract expressionism—it was open, anything was possible. And there was no settling anywhere. Anything is possible. And that was the prevailing feeling. at’s just a generality, say. It was very open. I don’t have much contact with the art world now, very little. I do see a few guys I know, once in a while. So, I don’t know. It’s all right, the newer stuff, but it’s just like settling somewhere. I mean, decided. So you look at it and yeah, well . . . Aud: ere were still some definitely reacting to . . . PG: Up to when? Aud: Till recent. And there were still things that you weren’t supposed to be allowed to do. And now it’s pretty much that there are no rules like that. And you have nothing that you can take a direction against. It’s kind of, you can do whatever you want. PG: Now or then? Aud: Now. I mean, you always could, but you had something that said, “is is what painting is.” Now people don’t say that. PG: Well, I don’t know. en, my most prominent feeling was that it was open—what painting is. You recognize quality. Kline loved my painting. I loved his. Bill [de Kooning], I like Bill. Motherwell, Rothko. It was open. ere was a feeling that each guy made his own world, his own reality. ere was no “way.” ere wasn’t even anything you were supposed to do or not supposed to do. But each guy knew what a real thing was, that came from the gut. Out from here, out. at you knew. at you could feel. And there was a roughness, a rejection of anything which wasn’t that. I’m putting it in a very journalistic way. at’s how you felt, daily. Aud: I mean, you’re saying that to yourself against a certain . . . You realized that openness had to happen. PG: Oh, it was a real need. Yeah. Aud: You had to put down . . . PG: Reaction. You mean, being reactive? Yes. Right. Aud: You don’t think there’s a different thing now? In that, there’s almost no . . . ere isn’t any dream. Everyone should do whatever you want. I mean, it’s so open that you can’t . . . PG: Yeah. But when you paint for a while, for years, you really get involved with reacting against yourself. You know what I mean? Your own history. I’m not so involved

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with what another guy does. You want to upset your own applecart. You’re involved with your own stuff. You’re involved with your own past, your own possibilities. You’re involved with yourself. You’re not involved so much with that guy. He says that’s what art is? No, I’ll show what art is. You don’t feel that way. I thought, when I had that show four years ago—that’s art? No, that’s not art. is is art, the way I am now. You get all involved with yourself. What else is there to get involved with? And then things you love in the past. It’s not just yourself, but it’s yourself as you reflect, as you’re reflective about . . . Goya. Stuff. e way things look, feel. New York, country, many things. I can’t name it all. You’re absorbing, rejecting. It’s an action. It’s a movement. So I think I’m more involved that way than in what that guy shows. I did a talk at Columbia. I wanted to go, but it’s funny. ey read the art mags, they read the puff sheets, the advertisements. And I like colors too. I mean, what kind of a stupe doesn’t respond to colors. ere’s nothing wrong with that. But I was busting my gut talking about Rembrandt for a solid hour to brainwashed kids. e selfportrait in Washington, or the one in the Frick. ey were nice and quiet—they’re all trained. So the faculty guy, who brought me there, says, “Any questions? Let’s make this like a studio session, with graduate students too, yet.” And so a girl says, “What do you think of Noland?” Aud: What about Don Judd? PG: I don’t know him. Oh, the sculptor, the guy who makes those boxes? Well, anybody can decide anything. You make decisions. You can question his decision. Maybe he doesn’t . . . Aud: [inaudible] PG: You mean, some guy decides you can’t paint an image, right? So then he works on that decision. So what? It isn’t invalid. Valid or invalid doesn’t mean anything. It just means, “Yeah, I saw his work but I don’t care about his decisions.” What’s wrong with that decision? I’m not going to prove his decision is wrong. It can be just as valid as my decision. But his work is not spooky enough. It doesn’t send me. It doesn’t spook me, that’s all. I just see a lot of cubes. You know, talking about the sublime, I can read the advertising but I’m not a customer. I don’t have to be sold. But, gee, art is open, anything can happen. Right in the middle of cubism, flat painting, so-called shallow painting, exists a guy who throws things in deep perspective, and everybody’s floored by it. Chirico. e early Chirico, see? He says, “I want to paint the world like it’s never been seen before, in such a light.” He made a self-portrait and his motto on it is: “What shall I paint but the enigma?”* ey used to joke about him; they called him the Painter of the Railroad Stations. But, boy, what a painter, huh? What a spook! He painted, he believed that. His bananas pulling down a corner of the ramp going to the train. You know. * The inscription on Chirico’s Self-Portrait from spring 1911 is “Et quid amabo nisi quod aenigma est?” (What shall I love if not the enigma?).

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Giorgio de Chirico, Self-Portrait, 1911. Private collection. Photo: Art Resource, NY. Art © 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE.

So anybody can believe anything. e only thing is the passion. I mean, Judd didn’t have enough passion. I don’t know. A bunch of boxes. Aud: But I think that they’re spooky. PG: Oh, you do? Well, that’s you. at’s an individual reaction. Aud: I think it has that too.

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PG: I see. Well, they were talking about: I like this, you like that. All I know is, it doesn’t spook me, it doesn’t send me. I’m willing. I want magic, miracles and everything. And it doesn’t do it. I think Kelly is a very intelligent painter. I enjoy looking at Kelly’s work. I like Oldenburg. at’s another thing, you know. Well, sure. Show me a person who doesn’t like a twenty-foot ice cream cone made of plastic, I don’t want to know that person. So it’s wonderful, it’s fine, it’s great. He’s a kind of poet too. So it’s all open. But I want to be . . . moved. But I have my own way of being moved. I know enough about myself: I tend to be moved by that art where I find some recognition, something close to my own search. I would never dream of attacking painters who work in a totally different way than me, on principle. I don’t think that way: right/wrong. at has to do with something else. I just don’t function that way. I want to be taken in, because art is magic. And I want to believe the trick. It’s magic and I want to believe it and it’s a miracle. No. What I mean is, modern art being what it is, all the dilemmas and stuff, one’s own ravaged feelings about everything lead you unavoidably into what’s popularly known as anti-art. at’s a phrase that’s popular now, and of course when it’s popular it becomes copied, which doesn’t mean that there isn’t a powerful basis of truth in it. ere is. Of reality in it, of actuality. Because there is. In this state you paradoxically can create by being anti, you know what I mean? It doesn’t matter if you’re in art school or not. All an art school is, really, is meeting another guy, another girl, meeting somebody who sends you. And you send them and there’s some kind of electrical thing going on. Or maybe there’s a teacher, or not. It just means some contact that’s going to detonate you. Otherwise why do a hundred people come together in one place? You hope that something is going to detonate something in you. Otherwise what is it for? You aren’t going to prove something is right, uphold a proven theory. [long pause] Am I being paid for the silence? I should remember that. [laughter] But then of course this is not silence. You know that. is is everybody’s. It’s thick. e silence is a thick silence. Huh? Aud: [inaudible] PG: When you’re compelled into certain states, or you’re pushed into certain states, it’s very natural to seek help. You do brush drawings for years, so you read Zen Buddhism or you read books on Sung painting. When you’re troubled, you read Kaa. Any condition you’re in, you need help. at’s natural. And it’s fine. It’s just that you have to be careful that you don’t delude yourself. You can’t sell yourself a bill of goods. You can’t be sentimental about it. ere’s a roughness you should have about yourself when questioning yourself. Sure, the hell with painting. Drawing is everything. It’s the core, the bones of it, the line. Why do I need color? Why paint, pigment, spaces? Well, that was fine for a couple of years. But I need matter now. I need things. ickness

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of things. e way things bulge. e things you bite into. Just counter to the way I was two years ago. But you’re alive, you feel differently each day, each week, each month. Aud: When you’re painting that form, from the past, what happens to the plane? Or was the plane ever the medium for you? PG: You know, I was rereading a book by Wallace Fowlie on surrealism,* and there’s a chapter on Picasso. And he does something interesting. I never read this before. He talks about a conversation that Cocteau had with Picasso. And you can trust Picasso as always being perverse and contrary. But it piqued me, interested me. Picasso said that the only thing that can’t be taught is métier, technique. Everybody thinks it’s the reverse, that technique can be taught. And it’s really the most illuminating thing. When I read it I thought, “e guy’s right!” As always, a true guy, a contrary mind. Well, geniuses are. And it’s right, ideas can be taught. Métier, the plane that you talk about, it can’t be taught. I find, involved with things, objects, as I am now, I don’t want to go into it and talk about it. I want to wake up. But what plane? A myth. I’ll take my chances with the plane. Isn’t that what you’re talking about: what happens to the plane? I’m not going to pack it in. How can I pack it in? Hold the plane— what plane? e object, the thing . . . ere’s no time to think about the plane. It’s like light, an endless series of problems and troubles, like things go from bad to worse. You know how it is in life. e stream of time is so fast, you’re always faced with what’s the biggest disaster, what do I have to worry about? You can’t worry about what you thought was the disaster last month, because it’s been superseded by worse disasters. Same with painting. ese few months I’d been going very well. en I came in one night and I started worrying about the plane. And I picked up Mondrian. Oh, it was a terrible night. I just sat around looking all night till dawn, and I fought it out with myself. e biggest disaster is how to deal with this object I’m painting. I can’t suddenly start worrying about a disaster I was involved with ten years ago. So what do I care about Mondrian? at’s his crankiness. at’s his worry. I can’t worry about the plane. God works in mysterious ways, the plane works in mysterious ways. It’s really a great mystery, this plane. It’s a fantastic mystery, the way it manifests itself. Pursue it? It’ll run away. Or you can illustrate it, theorize about it. Don’t pursue it? It may not even be there. I mean, there are so many intricate levels of the mysteries of feelings. It’s touch and go, all the way. You have to keep alternating your instincts as you pursue some thing. You also have to keep altering your own previous conceptions about art. You’re forced to. Your instincts are ahead of your mind, your analytical mind, your theorizing mind. Am I talking about what you were talking about? Kind of, huh? Actually, some days you worry about that, and then you almost want to throw things into deep space, just to test your own feelings. Not theories. Feelings about the plane. Paint things going into deep space, like Renaissance painting. I mean, lit* Wallace Fowlie, Age of Surrealism (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1960).

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erally test it. If you take an object, show it in perspective, in space. Don’t try to plug it up with modern art, with all these myths. But what happens? How do you really feel about putting something into space? Aud: I find it very difficult to do that. PG: You do? Well, let me ask you to find out why you find it difficult. What’s wrong when you don’t feel it? at’s when you have to investigate that whole business. You find it difficult because . . . ? Aud: I don’t know. Something to do with the consciousness you have . . . PG: . . . of ? Aud: Oh, I don’t know. PG: Yeah, what’s that consciousness? Question that consciousness. Aud: Well, it’s not something you can arbitrarily make a choice about. PG: No. Well, what am I talking about? Aud: Using that object in Renaissance space? PG: Well, it isn’t going to be Renaissance space anyway, because you are what you are. You know what I mean. Aud: A deep space. PG: Yeah. What you’re testing is not whether it’s going to work or not. You’re not involved with pictures, you’re involved with feelings. What you’re testing is how you feel about this state of consciousness about doing that. I make a form that you could walk around, for example. Why not? Walk around, touch, feel, put your hand around it. Who says painting has to be flat? e collage stuff, shallow space, this in front of that. I mean, who says? Why? ere’s no law. You have to find out. You may end up there, but you have to find out why you have to end up there. You can’t accept it right away. Aud: What do you mean, you can’t accept it? Why not? PG: What have I been talking about for two hours!? I don’t know how to teach. I can’t explain it. Aud: I’m wondering why you can’t accept it. PG: I don’t know. [long pause] But I have been talking for a couple of hours, and I can’t spell things out, but I can talk around it. Why I can’t accept it. Why I think you shouldn’t accept it. I am saying, “Don’t accept notions, myths, shibboleths.” Don’t accept. Question. Everything. Because that’s the real state of affairs. You ask me why. I said the only purpose in living a life is to question. What is the purpose of living except to question everything? Why? Because you’re alive?

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Aud: You’re answering the questions. PG: Oh, you didn’t hear me. You’re not listening. I said it answers momentarily, then you upset the answers. Aud: Maybe I misunderstood it. PG: My own temperament . . . I mean, to me that’s the way it is. I’m not saying you have to. You do what you have to do. You do what you have to do. But to me, the only reason why I’m here, obviously, naturally, is because . . . Aud: Well, that’s exactly what I’m saying. I’m questioning too. PG: Well, that’s wonderful. [laughter] It’s marvelous. e only reason I’m here is I’ve been questioning a little longer. at’s the only reason. But otherwise, we’re all in the same boat. So, I’m saying I’m prejudiced. I think that’s the way an artist should be. at’s all. You agree or not agree. No, I like discussion, as you can tell. Steve, I can see you’re on the verge. Aud: . . . modernity . . . PG: You mean in the Baudelairean sense? What Baudelaire said: Be modern at all costs. Aud: Well, I’m not sure what the sense is. PG: Could you be a tiny little bit more . . . ? Aud: [inaudible] PG: Well, I’m not a historian. But what he meant, in my paraphrasing, my interpretation, is that he was upsetting the scene. Which in his time was classical art, classical poetry, the Academy in painting. And he meant modern like a sardine can in a poem. He was walking along on Easter on the Champs-Élysées and he meant modern the way he felt life. He wanted to put the snow, the hair, in his poems. e armpit smell, he wanted to put it in. at I liked. Him being modern. See, I’m trying to define it a little more. Aud: [inaudible] PG: Keep up with the times? I don’t know what you mean by that. But I like reality. I like the smell, feel, taste, of how I live. But that’s not the only thing about Baudelaire. He also, in the smell of his mistress’s hair, in that image, in that object, he moves everywhere, in the poems of that period. He moves everywhere in time and space. I like that very much. I respond to it enormously. I find recognition in that. I’d love to be able to paint a man with a coat on that would be like Greece and everything else, that would reverberate everywhere. You know what I mean. In that sense, yeah, I want to be modern. Rodin said the same thing. In his letters to Balzac. He wanted to paint a guy with the wig coming down, but he also wanted to create the spirit of Greece. Which meant he wanted to create. He wanted to make this metaphysical object, this thing that sends you. Why would you want to draw a French lawyer with a wig? But that’s what your material is.

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Aud: Any idea of what’s modern, as far as the arts are concerned, kind of comes down to doing what you want to do. PG: What you feel. Aud: And somehow being reactive to what happens. It gets to be a very linear notion, what’s modern. PG: Actually, the wonderful thing said about what we’re talking about, is by Delacroix. Boy, I wish I could, not paraphrase, but say it exactly, like a page in his journals. Talk about being modern! He says: “e only way to be modern is the artist’s emotion, not styles or anything like that.” I’m paraphrasing. He says, “Modern is the man. Not style.” You know, that says everything. at’s what you’re saying. Aud: Most contemporary notions of modern are a string of beads, one thing following another. PG: at’s what I want to talk about. at’s why I wanted Steven to be more specific. Because, on one level, the current scene and what’s modern will be old next year. And you can say many things about it. You can say the best way to be modern is to be against your time. Baudelaire was wonderful. He’s a marvelous person to read. He still is modern. His favorite saying was: “Anywhere but here, any time but now.” at was his motto. And it’s almost contradictory to his other statement, but it really isn’t. e truly modern, I think, is the search for the eternal. e eternal is modern. If you do a lady’s portrait in terra-cotta like Rodin, or a lawyer’s wig, and make it eternal, boy, that’s wonderful. at’s marvelous! Like the surrealists used the word. “Marvelous.” It’s truly marvelous, because just think what Baudelaire’s reacting against. He used to review the Salon paintings in the fiies. ey are marvelous pieces to read. All these machine painters were painting mythical subjects. Aud: To be totally present is to be modern. PG: at’s really true. I mean, there’s nothing to do except agree with it. Where do you go from there? e only thing I can do with your statement is to agree with it, but that’s nothing. We all agree about a lot of things. Like, the world is moving. But the problem is: What’s the present? e present is made up and compounded, like baklava, of thousands of layers. So what you say is right. But present-past, present-future? How long has man been on earth that we’re aware of it too? We’re conscious. Just think, a painter working in Florence in the fieenth century didn’t know about the Lascaux caves, the art of China. But we have it all in front of us. We’re a different kind of people, a different kind of consciousness. I oen think that the great problem . . . I hate that word problem. e great dilemma today, given everything that we just touched on, talking about modern man’s awareness in America right now, is whether we can create anymore. Whether we can really and truly create. I don’t mean make pictures or restate Cézanne or restate the problems of the last hundred years. at’s taught. You can teach that. at’s what art

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schools do. I mean really and truly create, so that you shake. Like I was talking about El Greco when he painted all the saints and himself as Christ. Imagine how he felt. Or Masaccio, when he painted the heavy robe and feet. Just think of how he felt when he got off the scaffold and looked at that day’s work. I mean, really create, so that you feel you’re making a super-reality, like there’s no reality except the thing you make. at’s creation. e real dilemma . . . Ah, dilemma! Words! e only thing you can really create is what you shape yourself. Jesus! I’m making a world! You leave the studio and, “Gee, I le a lot of people in there.” at’s creating. e problem is whether you can do that now. at’s the issue. at’s right. Given modern man, living in the world museum, whether you can be a primitive again. To be the Piero again. I don’t know. Mallarmé said something wonderful about that. I had an interview published somewhere with Rosenberg and I was talking about that [see pp. 48–49]. And Rosenberg of course knows all about the French period of that time, and he said Mallarmé says the poet has to be the civilisé édénique. Imagine being the civilized man in Eden. See? Isn’t that wonderful? at’s it. And that’s what we hunger for. To hunger. Otherwise go work for IBM. Why screw around here? I mean, to be the civilized man in Eden, that’s creation. Aud: You’re asking me? PG: No. I say, that’s creation. You say, it’s not possible . . . Aud: I didn’t say it wasn’t possible. PG: Because certain men have busted their butts trying and it’s worth it. What else is there to do? Unless you want to work for IBM. Aud: [inaudible] PG: It’s the same question? Aud: e question of whether it’s possible . . . PG: It hasn’t changed, except it’s got worse. at’s all. But it hasn’t changed, basically. What we call the modern period . . . Aud: More complex. PG: Worse. You fill it in. Just worse. Millions more of everything. Worse. at’s all. Aud: You’re telling me it’s worse than it’s ever been. PG: It’s worse, but it’s better that it’s worse too. ings aren’t worse because they’re worse. Sometimes things get better because they’re worse. ey clarify, clear the air. It’s a relief to have it worse too. You know what I mean. You can breathe. It gets so bad that you can breathe. Actually, it’s easier now, in a way. Aud: [inaudible] PG: Always? I think things were different. To be specific, Rembrandt painting in Amsterdam, Goya in Madrid in the 1700s, Masaccio getting up on a scaffold in Florence. I think it was different. Well, Goya’s like a modern painter already. But I think it was

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different in the sense of being part of a world in some way. Putting it so crudely. Part. Yeah. I think it was different. It depends on what moves the painter, what moves an artist to create. Aud: [inaudible] PG: Well, you can’t talk in the abstract. You have to talk specifically. I don’t like to talk in the abstract. I think of specific creators. I’m not equipped for this kind of . . . You’d have to be a social historian or an art historian. Aud: [inaudible] PG: Well, your question was: Do you think it was always this way? Aud: e man who put the marks on the cave wall, what motivated him to do that? PG: ere are a lot of conflicting theories about that. You’re aware of that? e anthropologists have written many things about it. You make these marks and you do these bulls and bisons, because it had to do with hunting and so on. And that may be true. I don’t know about that so much. But I also think that for man from the beginning, who made the line of this bull, it was a catharsis, a joy, an ecstasy, to make this line. And it had nothing necessarily to do with hunting, you know? I mean, why, to the scientists, would it be impossible that a man would enjoy making a curved line that became a bull? But he’s an anthropologist, so he has to have a motivation for the guy making a bull. Like you read social art historians who talk about modern art, psychological motivations and endless reasons for it. A psychiatrist, for example, who gets involved with why these men do this funny stuff. But the part they miss is that there’s material, there’s you and there’s this feeling, an inchoate feeling, a raw feeling. And what they miss is that you may want to take up these charred bones or colored mud and make some . . . I’m not a scholar. You all paint, you know there’s this feeling. So just because I want to be civilisé édénique, why does that exclude my connection with the man in the cave twenty-five thousand years ago? We’re no different. We’re different in other ways; we don’t have to go into that. But on this basis, that impulse is the same. Maybe it could be that it might have had some magical thing about getting deer and food. So I want to put them up in a gallery, and I want some money and so that’s my deer. But truly at the beginning, rawly, that impulse is to make, do. So why shouldn’t we do it? Aud: [inaudible] PG: Well, we have Art News and Artforum and Art International. And bulletins and press releases from Knoedler’s telling me about Barney Newman’s sublime. He didn’t have that. at’s right. I have the feeling, just like a humorous thought, that one guy had to do it. It wasn’t collective. Twenty people weren’t holding one bone. One guy did it. And the other guys standing around chomping their meat said: “Hey, you call that a deer?” [laughter] I’m being facetious. But I mean, it could be. But, you know, the timing is very funny. e dilemma is, when I get in my car, go on the Westside Highway, I’ve got as little connection with Masaccio and Piero as I

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have with that caveman, really. I’m living in a town of twenty thousand people, maybe, or less. Aud: [inaudible] PG: No. I’m just saying it’s fantasy. You can fantasize about Piero, you can fantasize about the caveman. I realize that one is closer to us. I understand that. But, on a level of creation, I don’t know. Aud: [inaudible] PG: No. I was saying something else. I was saying that the issue there is not what kind of painting, what’s right, if it’s nonobjective, neoplastic. e issue is whether you’re willing or able to accept, tolerate, the burden of the image, the tragic. at’s what I mean. And that’s the interesting thing about Mondrian. Aud: But the Renaissance had images, and if they were tragic they were also sublime. PG: at’s right. I see your point. Aud: at unity. PG: at’s right. You said it in one second better than what I’ve said for two hours. You’re right, they’re together. You said it beautifully. But I talk all the time about this. at we can sit here talking about it means already that we’re conscious of our consciousness. But that’s how we’re evolving. We’re still in evolution, man’s mind and consciousness. And that’s what we’re becoming. We’re in process. at’s what I mean. I’m not getting it “right.” All I’m saying is that then you have to face, that word that’s used today, conont, the truth, the real truth, your own split. You have to face it, then push it and push it. You can’t settle. You can’t just make a decision. You can make a decision that will last for a year, a couple years, a period, or something, but if you’re a questioner it doesn’t stick. at’s what I mean about creating, whether it’s possible to create. You have to deal from then on with the thing we’re talking about. I don’t know any other way out of it. at’s what I mean about whether it’s possible to be an artist today. Whether you’ve got the energy, time, the willingness, desire, need, to confront it. And of course, it will reveal itself to you in time. You’re not going to find it this year. You won’t confront it entirely this year. I sound like foxy grandpa, but it’s true. I’ve just been at it a little longer. As you go on, you’ll find, if you stick with it, it gets deeper. And if it bothers you, if you want to settle in life for something else, that’s fine too. But if it bugs you, it gets deeper and deeper and deeper, that’s all. But you have to do it. I’m not trying to upset your applecart or anything. But the only value of you knowing me is for me to light a fire under you, that’s all. Aud: You’re getting warm. PG: I’m getting what? I’m getting warm. Okay. What I think about most of the time, what worries me, bothers me, is if I see a guy using the same medium, it doesn’t matter if you’re twenty-five or sixty, you can say, “Why is he doing that?” Like, it’s not enough. Or something like that.

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[long pause] Let’s go eat. We’ll talk some more. Aud: [inaudible] PG: Well, as far as I know myself, I’ve had periods. It works in waves and there’s rhythms involved with it. I have a rough period for a couple of years and I reach a certain time when I feel it’s good, for a while. Yeah, that isn’t bad. Is that what you mean? Aud: Yeah. In cycles. PG: It’s cyclic. Aud: Isn’t it possible that these cycles . . . ? PG: Well, yes. I’ve had that now and then. A feeling of peace. I have peace momentarily, like a few days or a night. Aud: [inaudible] PG: Tell you what? How does it feel? [laughter] No, this always happens when I feel I’ve unloaded. Unloaded! I mean, got out of it as much of a load as is there. When less of a load is gotten out, I’m nervous and I don’t like myself. I start cheating. All that stuff. One gets to know oneself. But when momentarily I feel I unloaded the complications, the ifs, buts, yes/no’s, unloaded it and then somehow made it visible to myself, there’s a peace for a while. Maybe that’s just an illusion too. I question that too. at’s how our minds work. Is it there? All that kind of thing. And as a matter of fact that’s what starts you up again. en you sleep well. You go to a movie. You think, “Gee, I ought to have those people over for dinner, I’ve been there twenty times and I haven’t had them over.” So you do things like that. You’re in life. en you go out and look and you say, “I don’t know.” You start painting again and what you do, you’re criticizing the thing you did. I mean, your new painting is criticizing your previous painting. Which is endless. Because, as a matter of fact, I have a feeling that the thing you unloaded, that you think was there, is there. And this is something I don’t even want to go into too much. I don’t want to know about it too much, but I’ll just say this much. at the thing that’s there is there, but under a very peculiar, a particular condition. And the condition is because you’ve wiped out things which were more finished, more complete, in a way, even more satisfying in a way. But what you le there is the condition which promises future conditions of the same condition. You know what I mean? It’s like insurance. You want to be sure that you’re going to come back there again and criticize that thing again so you can continue. Because continuance is life. Finishing is death. I don’t want to go into all that. I think what you want to do is avoid death. You want to continue to create. So you leave a thing for a while, because it promises the continuation of the same condition. Sometimes I think it’s terrible to know about it. I want to forget that too. Because you want to be spent. You want to not know, but you do know. You can’t help it. It works in mysterious ways. Out of your control too. I’ll think about it later. During, I don’t. You work toward losing yourself. Huh?

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Aud: e only way that can happen is not when you’re thinking. PG: Exactly. You’re right. Absolutely. I mean, it’s a peculiar thing about being conscious about something which is unconscious. at’s a fact. at’s nothing new. Everybody’s written and talked about that for some time. Yeah. What’s that? Aud: [inaudible] PG: Well, a lot of pretty good people have written about it. For instance, Breton is marvelous about that, his early writing. Or Jung. Jumping the whole distance between two different kinds of men. A lot of people have written about it. Some more pedantic than others, some closer to the fire than others. But, like anything else, people like to talk about it, like we’re talking now. And then write about it and then you read it. at’s the communion of minds. We’ll always talk about it. Some time ago I was at Harvard. No. Not Harvard. Vassar. And an art historian there, a pretty nice woman, said, “Do you know Osvald Sirén?” He’s a Swedish sinologist, involved with painting in China. And I said no. And she went to the library and loaned me the book for a while. I took it home. And it’s a translation of writings about Chinese painting,* and of course the Sung period fascinates me the most. I mean, probably twelh century. e writings of that time are fantastic. ey’re so current, you have no idea. ey were worried about all the things that we’re talking about. ey were that conscious about everything. It was really remarkable. I forget the title. I’ll try to find it for you and let you know. I think you’d find it in the public library. Simply look up Sirén, Osvald. I don’t think he’s published that much. Simply, his translation. And here I’m stuck. I don’t remember the title of the book. On Chinese aesthetics, involved with the Chinese philosophy of aesthetics. I don’t know if that’s the title but that’s the subject matter. And there can’t be that many. Or, if not the public library, go to the Frick reference library. But I’m sure the public library has it. It’s remarkable. And so you see, it didn’t start a hundred years ago. It’s just amazing to me, a real eye-opening thing. All the business about forgetting, redoing, becoming one with the landscape. Doing it for years, in and out, endlessly. I only remember it vaguely. It was ten years ago. So there’s no more mirroring of that. Just you, the subject, the ink, the paper, it, the object. No separation. Completely. And what it takes to get there.

* Osvald Sirén, The Chinese on the Art of Painting (Peking: H. Vetch, 1936).

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O N P I E R O D E L L A F R A N C E S CA 1971

Philip Guston: I’m trying to think of what to say. ere’s so much to say, I don’t know where to start. Driving in, I was thinking about what I would like to talk to you about, which is what I saw when I went to Italy last October. I came back just recently. It’s about the third time I’ve been in Italy. You know, I’m not going to lecture. I’m just going to ramble, if I may. And if you want to interrupt or ask questions or make a statement, go right ahead. I’ve been to Italy, I think, about four times. And the reason I go there, if I can be autobiographical for a moment, is that when I first started painting, at about sixteen or seventeen, I fell in love with Italian Renaissance painting, especially the fieenth-century paintings. By that I mean, especially two painters. And I can expand that to at least a half-dozen painters I fell in love with via books. I grew up in Los Angeles and you couldn’t at that time see any painting there. I mean, there were a few Sienese primitives in the L.A. [County] Museum. But I would haunt public libraries for reproductions, to see the paintings of Piero della Francesca, Uccello, and Masaccio. ose three painters fascinated me and influenced my work a great deal. I wasn’t able to get to Italy until 1946, aer the war, and stayed in Rome for about a year, and that was my base. Now, I may be saying things you already know, but just bear with me. Arezzo is a hilltown about an hour away from Rome, and that’s where the Church of San Francesco is, where the main body of work of Piero della Francesca is. It’s the Finding of the Cross series. And so I would go there constantly and study. And as I re-go to Italy I see many other things, and what I liked five or ten years ago I’m not so enthusiastic about now. It’s like there’s an infidelity involved. You fall in love with somebody else and then don’t see why you liked that other painter so much. But each time I go, the paintings of Piero don’t seem to diminish. I mean, the effect on me doesn’t seem to diminish. And I know I’m not unique in this. Lots of painters love Piero. He’s one of those figures in painting that everybody seems to adore. And yet when I talk to many painters about Piero, everybody likes him for different reasons. Before we show slides, I just want to say a few things about Piero della Francesca. I’m not an art historian and I’m not going to go into his life. It’s not going to be a lecture on his work. I just want to point out certain elements in his work that have kept me under his spell, which, as I said, doesn’t seem to diminish. On the contrary, it seems to expand and grow. And every five years, or every number of years, aer a body of work that I do, I see his work differently. ere’s something very mysterious

Not previously published. This talk took place at the New York Studio School in August 1971.

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Philip Guston and Leland Bell speaking to a class at New York Studio School (n.d.). Photo © Steven Sloman.

about him, very strange. One thing that’s very interesting about him, and I didn’t know this until rereading a book, I think it’s the only decent book on Piero, by an Italian art historian named Longhi.* It’s now translated into English, and I’d like you to read it if you’re interested in Piero. I didn’t know until recently that very little had been written about Piero. He was a kind of a forgotten master, who was greatly appreciated in his time. You’ve got to remember that he was a contemporary of painters like Uccello and Andrea del Castagno. And he was given full recognition, although it’s debatable now among art historians, as it was also in the past, who influenced whom. I mean, Uccello did see the work of Piero. Piero did see the work of Uccello and Andrea del Castagno. However, that doesn’t matter. ey’re both masters. All three of them are masters. And not until the early twenties were there serious studies made of his work. It’s very surprising because throughout the nineteenth century, with the growth of art history in England and Germany, much work had been done on Michelangelo, Tintoretto, Titian, but hardly anything on Piero. In fact, Bernard Berenson’s several-

* Roberto Longhi, Piero della Francesca (Florence: Sansoni, 1937), translated by Keith Christiansen (Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY: Stanley Moss Book / Sheep Meadow Press, 2002).

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volume book on the Italian Renaissance, devoting chapters and chapters to Raphael, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Giotto, gives Piero hardly a paragraph.* He just says that Piero’s someone obsessed with perspective and that he painted battle scenes. at’s about all. I don’t think he says much more. He gives him credit as an architect. And that’s it. at was published in the twenties, just aer the First World War. And, although I have no proof of this, I’m convinced that it was modern painting, by which I mean Cézanne and cubism and the work of Picasso and Braque and Léger, that caused a whole renewal of interest in the work of Piero. What I’m getting at is that this was my background in painting, my heritage. Although I’ve swerved and taken detours from time to time into getting involved with other Renaissance painters like Titian and Tiepolo, and later Venetian painters and then French painting. Well, that’s endless. I always seem like a kind of pendulum or compass, trying to find true magnetic north. You know, that needle which moves around but finally settles on true north. Every time I start thinking about Piero, whatever else may have been on my mind seems to evaporate and I come totally under the spell again of this majesty of his creation. Now, Arezzo is a very small town. I remember when I was first there, it was very battered up, in 1948. Because Arezzo was a hospital town for the Allies during the recapture of Italy, and so the whole place was a rocky bombed wreck. e Germans had it and then the Allies retook it. And the cathedral, when I first saw it, I thought something had happened to it, because it was unfinished, the façade was unfinished. And the inside, unlike many other cathedrals in Italy, was like a kind of big barn. ere was no plastering. e columns seemed unfinished. I’ve since learned that nothing happened to it, that the cathedral itself was unfinished. And then of course I fell in love with the cathedral because of the rough crudeness of it, the massiveness, the lack of any decoration. It’s just a purely functional fieenth-century cathedral, really a fabulous environment for this chapel, which is in back of the altar. And the subject matter of the frescoes has to do with the finding of the true cross and the victory of the Emperor Constantine. Although it starts on top with the Old Testament, the sacrificing of Abraham. e two lower panels are battle scenes. ere are three tiers on each side. It’s very free in its use of the iconography. On one side, facing the window, is an Annunciation, which is like no other annunciation ever painted. And then the other side is a Dream of Constantine, which is also a very peculiar thing, and the lowering of the Jew into the well. But I’ll never get over my first shock of seeing the frescoes. e excitement that I had when I first saw it, aer looking at many reproductions, was such that I had to go in and out, I was so nervous. Because what you first see, before you even recognize the subject matter, are these big soaring verticals and very full circles. And the color, which by now is somewhat faded but even so, is the color of faded tints, dull * Bernard Berenson, The Italian Painters of the Renaissance (New York: Phaidon, 1953). This book, combining several earlier volumes, was originally published in 1930, although Guston dates it in the 1920s.

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reds, milky blues, liver umber, dirty whites. Marvelous color. And all this in a geometry that I never quite saw before. It makes Uccello, his battle scenes which I had studied so much, seem nervous and fussy, as marvelous as they are. But only in comparison, only when I’m in a certain mood to take sides, to make Uccello seem like problems that are solved. Fantastic problems, though. Problems of spatial projection to be resolved on the picture plane to make this very unique image. But the more I talk about Uccello, I’m always switching sides. Right now I could get excited about Uccello. But this time, last winter, I remember going to look at the Uccellos in Florence, right aer I saw the Pieros, and feeling very disappointed. Piero seems to be some kind of, I have to use the word cosmic. As if all these forms, buildings and columns and draperies and figures, the way in which distances are located, the slowness of spaces moving up and down, the spaces across and at the same time moving in and out like planets, are like a celestial system of some kind, which produces this feeling of wisdom. Or some kind of emotion which is filled with a wisdom that I didn’t find in Uccello. Uccello is of this earth. e armor is clanking, the lances are bristling, people are falling down and they’re going into space. ere’s no interest in the subject matter with Uccello. With Uccello the battle scene is almost, and there’s nothing wrong with that either, a kind of excuse. Not excuse, but a reason to get involved in these problems he was involved with. In fact, that was his real subject matter. And in spite of the fact that we have a Death of Adam in Piero, or an Annunciation, and we know what the subject matter is, the Dream of Constantine, the Finding of the True Cross, that also doesn’t seem to be its subject matter. And yet, the more I look, I don’t know what the subject matter of this is. at is, it’s so indescribable to me. To be more specific, it’s very difficult for me to talk about something that I love so much, except if I convey something of my passion for this. I suppose that’s what I can do. All my life I’ve had two reproductions hanging, as a friend of mine says, on the kitchen walls of my life. No matter where I’ve lived, they’ve always been in the kitchen, because I want to look at them when I have eggs and coffee in the morning or my drinks at night. And they’re not of this series in Arezzo. ey’re individual panels. ey’re not of frescoes. e Baptism, which is in the National Gallery in London, which is one of his first pictures. In fact, I think it’s very early in his career. e second reproduction I have hanging on my wall is of e Flagellation, which is a very late picture. In fact, one of his last pictures. Which doesn’t mean that he died aer that. He was also an architect and a mathematician, and his involvement with painting was diminished aer this point and he got more involved in architecture. And also in writing his book, which was a treatment of perspective. Which he created, I think, although the ideas were current in that period, if I’m not mistaken. Ideas about whether you could make a logical system about the laws of perspective. Well, I shouldn’t go into perspective here. What we think of perspective is not what they thought of perspective. I’ll just leave it at that. I mean, principally and very simply put, perspective of that time was involved to systematically give the illusion of, and

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have rules by which to work with, the projecting of forms into a deep space. But in such a way that all the forms are readably and rhythmically stated on the plane of the picture. And one of the great things, just to talk about this one point of the work of Piero and its inspiration for modern painting, revolves really around this whole thing of what we call the picture plane. I know that that term is taught in most art schools and is always put down as first principles that you talk about. But I’ve discovered that what they mean by that usually is surface. Now that’s the last thing in the world that I mean, that I think we’re talking about. Because, in many minds, in thinking about painting, this rectangle on which we project an image or our expression of a nonimage, a nonobject image, is a surface upon which you can make a fixation of some kind of configuration. Well, that is not what I mean by the picture plane, because the picture plane, as I’ll point out to you later when we show some slides, doesn’t exist factually. Per se. at is to say, it’s not a physical thing. It’s not a material surface. It’s totally an imaginary place, plane, which has to be created by illusions. Now what I mean by illusions is: if you put one color shape against another color shape, you’re making an illusion. at’s putting it very simply. Now, this imaginary plane . . . I like the word place because it’s an illusive imaginary place where forms of this world, trees, people, furniture, objects, momentarily come to rest. No, erase that. Not “come to rest,” pause. I think my great attraction to Piero is a sense of pausing. at is, as if all these forms, these figures, could have an existence beyond this momentary pausing. A lot of other painting, which doesn’t deal with the plane with this kind of intensity or pressure, thinks of the square or rectangle as a kind of a hole which you just pour stuff in, and make it look real. A wax museum or something like that. ere can be abstract wax museums just as there can be naturalistic wax museums. And that means that the forms have no future. ey don’t give promise of any continuity. But in my case, I take detours sometimes. It’s important to take detours because you come back to the main road with much greater intensity. My only interest in painting is really, as I go on and on, just only this interest, on this metaphysical plane where the condition exists of no finish, no end, but infinite continuity. at is, the distributions of forms are in a condition which gives you the feeling that there was a structure unseen previous to what you see. Now, this pause gives promise to future structures never finished, always looking as if they’re going to avoid this total immobility. at’s why I say it’s celestial. And that’s not the condition of the great master Uccello, because there isn’t that promise in Uccello, as great as he is. So I keep coming back to Piero. About five years ago or so, these two reproductions on my wall in the kitchen got me so nervous that I decided I ought to put my thoughts in order. And I was painting very intensely. It was all during the winter, about a six-month period. I would come into the kitchen and see these things and then stay up all the night writing about it. It was a sort of self-commission. And I found that the more I wrote about it the more

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elusive the whole damn thing became. It was like painting. I wrote reams, just literally hundreds of pages,* and finally reduced it down to about a page. I realized that trying to write about this thing, or articulate it in a verbal medium, was as difficult as painting. I realized that what I was really doing was writing instead of painting. It was almost as if I wasn’t even writing about Piero but writing about myself, I suppose. And I’d like to read you what I wrote. In any case, this is what came through that very fine funnel. It’s called “e Impossibility of Painting.” [Reads “Piero della Francesca: e Impossibility of Painting”; see p. 41.] When I was first, many years ago, under the spell of this painting, I was very influenced by it and naturally worked with many verticals and horizontals. But no matter how I paint, I seem to be superficially less influenced by it but actually more influenced by it, if you know what I mean. at is, I think probably I’ll go to my grave puzzling about this generous law. I think, more than anything else, I want to acquire in myself, to evolve into, a space where I’ll really know something about the generous law which must exist. Let’s see the Baptism [slide is projected]. at’s not the true color. It’s not in focus. at’s the most delicious painting when you first see it in London. I don’t know the exact dates, but I think he must have been in his early twenties when he painted it. And it has a fantastic freshness. I think when a painter begins his work, there’s a discovery that informs the work of his whole life. And that discovery always seems to me to be fresher and newer than his subsequent work. I’ve looked so much at this figure which is about to be baptized, taking off his shirt. e reflections on this pond, the gestures of the figures, the angels on the other side of the tree. e way in which the forms don’t collide. ey don’t bump into each other, they move easily through each other. e feeling of that landscape moving, meeting the angels. e way that the tree is painted. A peach tree, I think. When I saw this picture first at the National Gallery with some other masterpieces (there’s a Lippo Lippi, a marvelous annunciation of Botticelli, and a later Piero, a nativity), it seemed so simple compared to the others. In the other masters, everything seems to be full of flourish: Botticelli’s leaves, for instance. But in the Piero each leaf looked like a sign painter would paint leaves, just painted in as if no account, no big deal how things were painted, no flourishes. It’s a great lesson. Let’s go on to the other slide, Steven. ese succeeding ten slides or so are from the Cross series in Arezzo, and they’re in no particular order because we couldn’t get the slides that way. And in any case, that isn’t my interest right now, to talk about either the iconography or the order from top to bottom. I just picked the details that looked exciting. is is a small detail from one of the panels, which is actually a view of Arezzo. Even right now Arezzo looks very much like that when you come into the city from

* These have not been found in Guston’s papers.

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a certain road. But isn’t that magnificent? Now, I ask you, what more did Picasso or Braque do than that, during those cubist years? I think they were trying to come back to that. I’m not belittling their work for that period. Not at all. I admire it very much. But here it is in all its purity, straightness, without expressionism, if you know what I mean? Well, there’s no point in me going through part to part to analyze each form. at always bores me. I get too tired of a picture when I do that. But look at it for yourself. Not just here but later. Get some prints of it. Let it be your pinup and keep looking at it. It’s absolutely a miracle of painting. e cluster of where the buildings are tightly packed in, and then the way the cluster releases itself and moves out so gradually. If dates mean anything to you, and they’re only meaningful in a certain sense, this series of paintings was done over a period from about 1450 to 1460. I think he worked on it for about twelve years with some interruptions in between. And in fact, the theory goes that some of the panels were not painted by him but from his designs. I didn’t believe that when I was first told it by an Italian historian. When I went there I’d gone with some accredited letters, so I was able to get some ladders put up for me. You see, the panels start from about the height of this room and then go on up about thirty-five or forty feet. And they’re very hard to see, because the chapel in its breadth is very narrow. In other words, you’re in a very confined space looking up. So I was able to get some tall ladders and planks and see the lower panels, which are the battle scenes that face each other, and the annunciation, at eye level. And it’s true that it’s pretty mechanically painted, so it might possibly be true. Well, they all say it is true. And the painting is different. But they’re his cartoons and his designs. It really doesn’t very much matter who painted them, because their grandeur and meaning are of course in the disposal of everything, all the forms through the picture. Well, that’s what I could see at eye level. Audience: Did you take the photographs? PG: Oh, no. ese are borrowed. You’d need a complete scaffolding to take photographs. I was lucky this last winter in Florence at the Masaccio frescoes, photographs were being taken. And for the first time I could get on the scaffold and see things at eye level. Touch and see it like you would a painting in a museum. is is the Queen of Sheba. But I won’t talk about the subject matter, because it’s such a complicated work, this series. I blow hot and cold on certain panels, certain parts of this. e last time I remember being somewhat bored by the group of the queen and her attendants, but this time it hit me all over again. Well, first of all, this block is so marvelous, the way that moves right through without interruptions. ese flowing rhythms. And then the way this arm moves out of this block. ere’s something about this figure with the hand, back of the queen here, kneeling. ere’s something about the distance, the spaces here, that struck me. You can’t see it in the slides, but it’s so marvelous here, the mixture of tensions of the space. e way the hand goes right out to that head and the way it’s released again.

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I know this is done quite oen in representation of crowds in Renaissance painting, but it’s always delicious to me, the heads in front of each other, and seeing partial heads revealed through openings and so on. But nowhere, I think, is it as judicious and as immovable, as perfect, as here. I mean, in all the Filippino Lippis . . . I think only Masaccio, perhaps, comes up to this. I mean, this opening and so much head and eyes. is opening, that opening, this opening. Or I’ll put it this way, in a very simple manner, because it’s hard to explain, though it’s always talked about, but the spaces between the forms seem as important, as charged, as the volumes themselves. It seems to me, this particular thing I’m talking about, this equilibrium which makes Piero “modern,” in fact appeared here for the first time in such a way. Marvelous, the way he gets the hat, where the hat is. e saddle. at doesn’t go down. e saddle isn’t here, it’s here. It has to be. I know that this can even be seen in the Sienese wedding scenes and festivals and all of that, but it’s never like this. In other words, he did take and use what was current in his time. is desire to project into space, one form in front of another. But nobody did it like this! I mean, he took the very elements which were used on the wedding chests, but he did something with it. Never in Piero does the rendition of a painting of a head and its features ever lose the volume of the head, the geometry of the head. e drapery, while being drapery, is somewhat like sculptured drapery. And there’s a reason for that, because archaeology was just coming into existence at that time, and painters were very much influenced by sculptured Roman stone drapery, and Greek. Never does the drapery interrupt the mass of volume or area. e big lavender, or dull red really in this fresco, exists as a big mass in spite of all the folds here. And of course, the delicious play of hats and spaces leaves nothing to be desired. I feel completely fulfilled when I look at that. e horizontal edge is marvelous. at pancake hat coming down against the soaring other hats. e color, of course, is much deeper than that. [A new slide is projected.] Aud: What’s the story? PG: You know, I don’t know. I forget what it is. It’s always referred to as the Lowering of the Jew into the Well [also known as e Torture of the Jew], but I don’t know why. Or I did know and forgot. Does anybody know? Aud: ey’re trying to get him to tell where the cross is. PG: Exactly. Now it comes back. I have a bad memory for iconography. e other thing that keeps me under the spell, so that I can look at these things forever, is the sense of ease of the forms. I mean, nothing seems labored. e disposition of the forms and the spaces seems natural, unforced, untortured. But I think one of the most thrilling parts that always stayed in my mind, maybe because I could get it at eye level and the up and down and across here was so striking, is the overlapping of the forms resolved in this particular suspension that I spoke of previously. It’s so magnificent here.

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You see, these pieces, as you might know, are blank areas that had deteriorated and so they were recemented, and that’s why you don’t see the completion of the forms. And incidentally, this also bears out the fact that not much attention was paid to this fresco for some centuries. It wasn’t until the twenties or thirties and even mere recently in the forties, now that Piero is recognized as such a boon to tourism, I suppose. I’m being cynical. Every week somebody’s down there doing injections and putting the stethoscope to it and seeing if it’s going to li. But had they taken care of it in the nineteenth century, as they did other frescoes, it wouldn’t have been in this condition. But there’s a reason that’s always interested me; it has nothing to do with what we’re talking about, but maybe it has. ere’s a fight that’s been going on for some decades between Vatican City, which has its own art department, and the state, which has its own authorities in art. at is, they each have conflicting interests and that leads to all kinds of trouble about preservation of the fresco. Or removing it from the site, from the church, because of dampness and so on. So this fight keeps going on. [A new slide is projected.] You see, a slide such as the previous one, at that size it’s so reduced you really can’t see it. But this, though larger than life, is the way you would see it if you saw it and looked at it slowly to see the magnificent rhythmic disposition of everything. You understand, nobody posed for this. He made it. He created it. I mean, he put that horse there, that helmet, that spear there, that hand there, that tunic there. Someday I’d like to talk to you about fresco painting, because the very medium of fresco had a great deal to do with, or at least met, the artistic demands. ere was a fusion between the technique, that is, the physical media of painting, and the concept. In fresco you work in sections, as much as you can paint in eight to ten hours, because you’re painting on fresh plaster and it calcifies aer eight or ten hours and refuses to take any more water. And when the oxidation of the lime, which forms a skin, happens, which is usually about eight or ten hours, you can’t paint on it anymore. e lime skin is the binder. erefore in early frescoes such as Giotto or some of the Sienese frescoes, they’re painting huge sections in a day. But as the generations went on, up to Piero and Mantegna, where there was more and more interest in the realism of a form or the particularization of a form, the sections of the day’s painting get smaller and smaller. So in Piero, if you would examine that, very likely the head itself might be a day’s painting. at is, let’s say from here to here. Maybe including that, I don’t know. Maybe that would be one day’s painting. Aud: How big is that? PG: at figure here, I’d say that’s double the size. Perhaps a little more than double. About half that size. And so you see, you finish your day’s painting and then you, or your assistant, cut around the edge of the form, and then the next day he plasters right up to it. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle. But obviously it has to go from top to bottom. You can’t drip paint. You can’t go up. I’m sure it was great fun.

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In the Uccello battle piece [e Battle of San Romano] that’s in the Louvre, everything is so closely packed, all these forms, that you really don’t know which leg belongs to which horse. It doesn’t matter, because it’s just a sensation. And there’s one panel of Uccello’s where right at the edge of the picture, I think it’s the le-hand side, you only see about two horses but there’s about a dozen horses’ hooves. And you just feel the joy, the pleasure, the painters had in doing that. I wish we had a detail of this. You should look it up in a book. is warrior plunging the dagger into this man’s neck, his head against his chest, and way back with the aid of some kind of half-moon circle, you get interested in that movement. I remember a group of painters who were working at the American Academy in Rome, and even though they had been there for a year and a half they hadn’t taken the rapido for an hour to go to Arezzo to see it. And they were painting as if they were still in Detroit. Minimal paintings. So I took them up there in the Academy station wagon. And I was talking about it, somewhat the way I’m talking now, and they were interested in it. I mean, they saw my interest. We were able to see it rather close because we got up on stools or chairs. So I was talking about that man stabbing the other man in the neck, and this one man said, “Well, he looks so placid, you wouldn’t look like that if you were stabbing somebody.” And I was just struck by the remoteness that so many of us have from art. We have such a direct way of thinking that it’s like a movie way of thinking. at is, if a man is killing another man, he’s supposed to grimace. But in fact, here, one of the great things about it is that he’s killing this other man as if he’s picking a piece of grass in the earth or liing up a button. I mean, the greatness of it is, it always gives me the feeling that man will always do that. Like it’s an eternal man eternally stabbing another man. A timeless stabbing. So he missed the point. He wanted him to look angry. Look at that clump down there of horses’ legs and hooves. Isn’t that marvelous? And isn’t that a hat? Tilted like a disc, the movement of that against the towers. You could look at that hat and that vertical forever, but I think you need a hat and buildings to do it. at’s not Christ carrying the cross [pointing to slide]. at’s the carrying of the wood. If you look down at the figure that’s carrying the cross, there’s one testicle showing outside of his panty there. At first, years ago I thought it was Christ, but certainly you wouldn’t do that to Christ. So I think it’s a carpenter or something that’s carrying it. at detail of the city is in the upper part of the picture [in e Discovery of the ree Crosses]. It’s that small compared to the whole panel. Let’s go on. We could look at these a long time. I think my intention is to tell you what I’m interested in, and to arouse your excitement to look at these things on your own. ere are a number of very good picture books. One is Kenneth Clark’s book.*

* Kenneth Clark, Piero della Francesca (London: Phaidon Press, 1951).

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I don’t like the writing, that’s my prejudice, but the reproductions are excellent. So, you look at them for yourself and study them. Also there are a number of small pocket books. You can find them across the street for just a couple of bucks. I have one with me to show you, which has a lot of reproductions in it. Aud: [inaudible] PG: Well, I think the attempt is to make what you might call a nonindividualized face. An ideal face. When you see it, you don’t feel this is Susie or Uncle Harry. You know what I mean. at’s not Arezzo but a close-by town. In fact, it’s the town where he was born, Borgo San Sepolcro. is is a painting, in a chapel there, of the Resurrection. When you see this, the color is much more somber. Practically umber and ivory, a dull red. I remember this time I was struck by the bleakness, the landscape looks so barren and remote. is risen Christ against these sleeping soldiers, sleeping guards, produces a feeling in you that you cannot ever forget. I wish we had a detail of his face. at’s the Annunciation. On the le you’re seeing the edge of the battle scene. In fact, the man stabbing the other man in the throat is in that corner, this side right here. at’s a kind of chair form. But this annunciation is really like none I’ve ever seen. Piero has a way of displacing a picture, quartered like that, each quarter almost being a separate picture. And yet the whole unity: the projection of God, and this window, Mary there and the angel, the way he’s coming in here. He’s so, I don’t know, so slow. And so plain. No distortion anywhere. is he painted himself. You can tell in the painting when you see it. ose areas he painted himself seem to be more liquid somehow, less dry. Well, we’re switching here [as slide changes]. We’re going back, now about 150 years. Giotto is what? About 1300, I think, although this was late. He painted this about 1306 or 1310. e other painter that I was struck with and thought about all year was Giotto. e main Giotto, really, is in Padua, the Scrovegni Chapel. He has a whole chapel. e chapel has a whole building for itself. We’ll see a few slides from it. One wall is the Last Judgment. One side of the chapel is the Old Testament and the other side is the New Testament. But this is not from that. is is from a church in Florence, Della Croce, and it’s the Entombment of Saint Francis. I have to explain to you that in the early twenties, in Assisi and in Della Croce, they repainted the Giotto frescoes. I suppose a rich Chicago Catholic or something came and said, “We’ve got to do something about this.” And they were all repainted about twenty years ago, and they looked terrible. ey looked like posters. en, about 1950, they decided to take the repainting off so we only see what he painted. And that’s the reason you see these splotches. But of course it’s better to see what he painted, and have big blank sections, than to have some kind of a job done over the whole thing. Do we have a detail of this next? No, we don’t. But I was going to say something. Can we go back to that other one? Am I running late? Aud: A half hour le.

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PG: Oh. I think I had something to say that I haven’t formulated in my mind yet, about some feelings I had this time in looking at this Saint Francis painting of Giotto. In other chapels next to this are some of Giotto’s contemporaries, and they’re pretty good fresco paintings. You admire them, but when you come in here you’re drawn in a fantastic way and you start thinking about what the differences are between the others and Giotto. I wish we had details of the brothers who are weeping, gesturing, kissing Saint Francis’s hand, and so on. You feel, when you look at it, that Giotto wasn’t painting a picture, that he wasn’t deciding a space. Which some of the other painters do: the figures are in there somehow to illustrate the story or to fit in a certain compositional scheme. But here it’s a sort of a drama which is going on. I started to feel that I could identify with, or be drawn into, the drama which is taking place. I mean, they’re not being watched. e brothers aren’t being watched. ey’re not being looked at. It’s a real scene, a real thing happening. And I came away feeling strongly, both from this and the following paintings in the Old Testament series, that Giotto had somehow in a magical inspired way entered into what he was painting. Into what he was painting. ere wasn’t the detachment that we see in Piero. I’m showing you Giotto because it’s another thing completely. And I don’t believe in historical progress. at is to say, I wouldn’t agree with the theory that art advances, that Giotto did this because he couldn’t do the other, and then you have, of course, a series of advances, one thing leads to another. I don’t think that’s the way it works. I think that each artist is himself. In that sense, I would take an antihistorical position in relation to creation. But, go on. Well, that’s the Last Judgment. We should have many details here. at’s all right. We can see well enough, no? Somehow, at this scale it may seem to you very schematic, and it is schematic. But somehow, when you see the original, it seems very grand. And of course, down below, especially the underworld, hell, the demons in hell, and in purgatory, are really magnificent. You must get a book with details of all the tortures that are going on with these figures. It seems that hell is always more exciting than heaven, for painters anyway. I looked a great deal of the time at the apocalyptic frescoes of Signorelli. Giotto’s very Sienese. And the minor Sienese painters of the Apocalypse. Fra Angelico, for instance. Heaven is always very boring plastically, just a lot of verticals and forms. But hell, oh, they went to town with hell. Because there you could turn this around and upside down and chop people up and have lots of stuff to paint. Look at that. I never noticed that branch. at’s the Annunciation [by Giotto]. ese are in the Scrovegni Chapel. Aud: [inaudible] PG: Yes, only two painters, Piero and Giotto. I couldn’t show more. We’ll do it from time to time. at’s a marvelous painting. You know, you have to realize that when these appeared, around the 1300s, this hadn’t existed before. No one had seen anything like this. No one had seen such three-dimensionality of bodies, volume of

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figures, the weight of draperies, gestures. When you see Duccio, you see a bridge, you see vestiges of Byzantine, of icon painting, the drapery is done in lines. is is realism, but more than that. When you see this . . . I came out in a daze of weeping. Because you’re so moved by belief. I mean, this belief. And nothing can be a substitute. Nothing can be a substitute for belief. And there’s no point in analyzing it, in the sense that you could analyze and talk about Piero. And this is what puzzles me right now. Aud: [inaudible] PG: Looks like what? Oh, they all look the same? You want them to look different, each one different? Sure. It’s humanity, you know? It’s not individual persons. Again, you’re so moved, as I was saying earlier about the frescoes of the recumbent Saint Francis, that you’re just overwhelmed by Giotto’s involvement in the drama. You can feel that in the painting of the heads, in the way the three figures are massed up there at the upper right. You feel that as he was painting he was feeling it, each thing, each form, each strand of hair. He wasn’t designing a picture. It would be fascinating, if we could, to make a comparison between this flagellation of Christ and the Piero flagellation of Christ. How totally different. Different ends of the spectrum. at hand. Just the hand is there. Aud: What’s this painting about? PG: e sacrifice of the lamb, I think. I’m trying to recapture my feeling in contrast to Piero. You come out of the chapel and you’re dazzled, I think, finally by the tenderness of Giotto. Just the human tenderness, because there’s not one shred of flamboyance or form for its own sake. It’s the other end of the spectrum from Piero. e disposition of the forms and spaces is not to produce any other sensation really, except to tell most clearly this narrative, this story.

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TA L K AT YA L E S U M M E R S C H O O L O F M U S I C A N D A R T 1972

Guston was first invited to the Yale Summer School in 1961 and returned from 1970 to 1974. His daughter, Musa Mayer, describes one of these occasions in her memoir: “Only once can I remember actually being present when my father was teaching; that was one summer, while I was still in high school, when my father went to lecture and critique student work at the Yale Summer Art School at Norfolk (Connecticut). I remember a beautiful estate with croquet lawn and big barnlike studios, and a mixture of feelings I could not untangle at the time. My father spoke informally, in a very relaxed yet intensely personal way. The students, initially shy, seemed to absorb his enthusiasm as the afternoon wore on, and the session ended with laughter and a barrage of questions. Clearly, they had found his talk stimulating. I had, too.”*

Philip Guston: ese slides that I’m going to show you are kind of a mini-retrospective of work. I begin somewhere about 1941. About ten years ago I had a retrospective show in New York and some slides were made up, so I have a selection of those that continue to pretty much about a year and a half ago. I haven’t had any slides made of what I’m working on right now. And some of you may think, “Well, why all these changes?” Or note the fact that there are many changes. It’s taken me years to come to the conclusion, or to the belief, that probably the only thing one can really learn, the only technique to learn, is the capacity to be able to change. And it’s a very difficult thing. But as modern artists that’s our fate, constant change. I don’t mean novelty or anything like that. What I mean is that this serious play, which we call art, can’t be stamped. I mean you have to keep learning how to play in new ways all the time. It’s always good for the first time. ere’s a popular Italian song, “Per la Prima”—“For the First Time.” It’s about a love affair, but it’s the same thing. It’s all good for the first time, and then somehow that has to be recaptured constantly. So, shall we start showing slides? And we can continue to talk. is [Martial Memory] is about 1941. I could say a few words about my interests and preoccupations in painting at the time. When I painted this I was very involved with certain fieenth-century Italian painters like Uccello and Piero della Francesca, and at the same time studying the cubist paintings, the cubist period of Picasso and Braque and Léger. And I think I was trying to make some kind of integration between these two interests. I was very much preoccupied, as you can see, with overlapping of forms in illusionistic second-dimensional space. And at the same time,

Not previously published. This talk took place at the Yale Summer School of Music and Art in Norfolk, Connecticut, in August 1972. * Musa Mayer, Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997), 79.

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placing them so that a surface of two-dimensional rhythms would occur on what we call the picture plane. I was very involved with horizontals, verticals, diagonals, a very structured chunk of three-dimensional sculpture realized on the two-dimensional plane. From here I went on for two years in what I suppose you would call a very romantic period of painting. I began getting interested in the Venetians a great deal. is [Sanctuary] was painted while I was teaching in the Middle West: the city in the background, that kind of storefront, and so on. Painted during the war, about 1943, 1944, something like that. David Pease, you know your old friend Steve Greene posed for that? David Pease: I know. He told me. PG: You know that? I thought you’d be interested in that. I mean, I wasn’t making a portrait. is [If is Be Not I] is about 1945. I’m just giving you sort of high points, or what to me are high points. is is sort of an opus, a large painting I worked on for about a year, in which I tried to summarize everything I knew about painting. You know, one of those opuses you can get hooked on and stay on for a long time. I have some details, so you can see how it was painted. e background is Iowa City actually, literally so. I was teaching there at the time. You see, previous to the first picture I showed you, I had been working as a mural painter on the WPA, the Federal Art Project in New York, and I’d worked with fresco and casein, all sorts of mural techniques. Cement paint, rubber paint. is was the first time I really had the leisure time, when I went out to the Midwest to teach, to use oil paint. So it was a great joy, moving it around and working with atmospheres. I’d also become interested in a whole series, perhaps only about twelve paintings, dealing with children, the world of children. e world of make-believe and masquerade and so on. I never drew from reality. ey’re all imagined. I was glazing too at that point. First discovering the use of oil paint. For myself, that is. at’s about a year later. I started to become dissatisfied with what I had done and started to move on. I think a strong influence on me at that time was Picasso in the late twenties, those rich still lifes of his, where representational forms are compressed and made into new combinations, new shapes. And that excited me. is was a series I called the Porch, where I had these groups of attenuated figures. I lost the interest in them as children. is was in 1946 or 1947, aer the films of the concentration camps started coming back, and photos and stories. I think I consciously thought of these children not as children but as lost, agonized beings. Using the porch idea as a kind of confine, as if these figures were all compressed. e figures and legs of chairs and columns and horns and so on all became like flat pieces of paper just pressed against each other. I did this in 1947 or 1948, and then I probably reached the end of this subject and this preoccupation. en followed a year of destroying everything. Everything seemed unsuccessful to me, and I couldn’t continue figuration. How to explain that? e forms I wanted to make couldn’t take the shapes of things and figures. In other words, a sort of a split occurred, a very unhappy

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thing that happened. And, aer about a year of destroying paintings, this picture [probably Tormentors] happened, which I felt okay with. Although there were still remnants of figuration in there, but I felt that I had to drop figuration. I mean, it just had to go. It was a very lengthy struggle to do that. I felt torn, you might say, between conflicting loyalties, which some people go through. e loyalty to my own past, and the other loyalty of what you might still do. Or what you might still become, which is of course unknown. at seems to be the pattern of my life as a painter. I don’t seem to know any other way. I went to Europe aer that last picture. I stopped painting for about a year and just drew in Europe. at’s [Drawing No. 2, Ischia] a typical sketch of the island of Ischia, a portion of it, which pleased me. ose little dots are windows of this town. Down below is a stone wall which you can’t see very well from a distance. I started then in Italy and finished in New York. It didn’t feel real to me to make a figure from bottom to the top. I felt like making dissolved things, fragmented. en I went on. is is about 1949 or 1950 [probably Red Painting]. I’d come back to New York and got to know most of the painters that are now called the New York School, or what was later called the abstract expressionists, although nobody used that term at that time. en things started happening in my painting that I felt more comfortable with. I might explain it this way: working with paint, having the least preconceptions of what I was going to do when I started putting on the paint. I mean, treating the act of painting very much as a process of interaction between you and the paint and the surface in front of you. A give-and-take, I mean to say, between feeling an urge for gray, an urge for red, just a blind urge, and putting it on. And then not knowing whether it’s right, or not even caring about whether it’s right, and doing something else. And then it spoke to you, and then you reacted. at kind of thing. In which case, you might say I gave up the idea of the masterpiece, you know? And began to see that taking out (many parts are simply erasures) was putting in. at’s a drawing from about that time, a big ink drawing [perhaps Drawing No. 4, 1950]. Again, the feeling that you’re making marks, and leaving yourself open enough or nimble enough so that things happen as you work. at is, I found it very exciting in contrast to my previous way, my former pictures of the forties, where they’re very consciously structured and planned. So this was a great refreshing, stimulating way for me to work. And also, another great lesson was the lesson of extreme attention while you’re doing it. I mean, split-second timing. Like the whole field becomes an electrified field where every mark is magnetized. I did a lot of drawing, hundreds and hundreds of drawings, as we all do. I look back on this work and realize that the last five years I’ve just reverted back to structuring and making many drawings. And now I find that refreshing. Process is very important, but I have a great nostalgia for this way of working. I may have to return to this discovering business. I was once on a panel with a group of artists: Ad Reinhardt, Motherwell, and so on [see pp. 29–31]. And Tworkov was on it, and we were all talking about how we worked, and Jack said he liked to leave the studio when he felt he had something to

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work on the next day. And I was shocked by that. I thought it was horrible. I was very critical of that attitude. I thought it was like promising yourself a goody. I mean, then you clean up and go out with friends for dinner and you feel good because you know you’ve got something to work up the next day. I was shocked because at this time either you did it at once or not. e thing you did then at that moment, that was it. So that the painting or the drawing was in fact an evidence, you might say, or a document or a record really, if you want to look at it that way, of the creative moment. And that’s what I was really excited about. It was also a discovery that there was no such thing as accident. ere was no such thing as being erratic, really. ere was no such thing as a mistake. Sometimes I’d start drawing and, you know, the mind is quicker than the hand, and I don’t like that. I want the hand to be, if not ahead of the mind, at least simultaneous. And so the impulse is to go to the right with the full pen of ink? I would go to the le. And then something would happen, like a sensation of a mistake, so I would follow the mistake. But then, when you’re through, there’s an image that you’ve always wanted to see but you didn’t know it. ese things weren’t planned, you understand. at’s the way I would do a still life at that time. A can, open. A pear. I don’t know what else. But the discovery that lines are energies, lines and spaces are energy. Chiefly, and it is still true now, my own demand is that I want to be surprised, baffled. To come in the studio the next morning and say, “Did I do that? Is it me? Isn’t that strange!” I enjoy that. It’s some kind of need I have. I don’t know what to say about these [for example, To B.W.T., 1952], except just to show them to you. I’m showing you the drawings and paintings that were done concurrently about 1952. Very heavily painted, very much overpainted and erased, covered up, repainted, so that a lot of the brush marks are simply erasures. I wasn’t even thinking about what the picture was looking like, just getting certain things out of the way. I mean, the reds that you see in the middle would be over there, or up at the upper le, and they were wiped out with some dirty white. at’s why it looks like that. ese [for example, Fall, 1953] were mostly done with bamboo. Slit bamboo sticks and India ink. So I began becoming interested in drawing in terms of masses rather than linear. I seem to alternate between linear drawing and getting color in a drawing by having masses of strokes. And that reflected the painting at that time. Masses of color. Vibration of masses of color. We’re going over the years here very quickly. About 1955–56. As I got interested in masses of color rather than spots, you might say, there was a growing interest in forms. I remember having a strong desire to come back to more solid forms. ese pictures are about seven feet high. Strange how one views one’s own work. It changes over the years. ere have been times, like four or five years ago, when my work changed very decidedly into a figuration, and I couldn’t look at this. I was reacting against my own work. I thought it

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was terrible. Too general, too diffuse. Not committed enough. And now, I haven’t really seen them until today, they’re sort of pleasurable. I mean, I feel detached from them, but they’re pretty nice. It’s possible . . . at’s another very plaguing problem or question: how one sees one’s own work. at’s about the time I wanted to become more solid, heavier with paint. More positively placed, positioned. ese were the drawings I was doing at that time. And the drawings became more figurative. at’s one of those little throwaways that you find later in the sketchbook and you say, “Look at that! Interesting” [referring to For M (Drawing No. 29), 1960]. So you keep it. I remember starting with just some drops of ink. You see where that ball is? And below there’s a sort of heavy accumulation of lines. So that first happened, then it grew into that membraned ball. And then I thought, “Gee, it feels like a balloon. I’ll release it from some forms down below.” I was very definitely involved with imagery, even though the imagery was unrecognizable to me, bordering on fantasy. I suppose you’d call it fantasy, fantastic form. I can only tell you that it’s very difficult to talk about one’s own work. But naturally I can only talk about what I remember consciously. What they look like is not for me to say. I mean, I can’t control that. But I remember being very strongly aware of forms acting on each other. Putting pressure on each other, shrinking each other, blowing each other up, or pushing each other. I mean, affecting each other, as if the forms were active participants in some kind of plastic drama that was going on. I think I was aware of and strove for that. In other words, if a form or a shape or a color, pattern, seemed inert to me, wasn’t acting on another form, out it would go. I felt uncomfortable with it. It wasn’t paying its way. It wasn’t doing its job in the total organism. And they’re doing all sorts of things. ey’re walking, they’re holding each other up, they’re supporting each other. All sorts of situations. And I felt them to be true to my feelings at that time, in that they reflected, in a metaphorical way, human emotions. Sometimes they became various combinations of different animals together. When I got to the red head of that thing, it felt like a trunk and I wanted to pull it out, pull it longer and longer. I didn’t plan the eye, but the eye somehow got in there. ese are gouaches, rather small in size [such as Actor, 1958]. I had been very involved with the paint too in this period, about 1958 or so. By that I mean not just forms acting on each other, but the black seemed to be swallowing the red, and another form of the red swallowing the black. Almost as if the very colors, the very paint, the very matter, were doing things to each other. en there came at this time, the early sixties, a real desire to paint heads. Figuration. So many of these forms come from still-life forms. I mean, I would start with a couple of objects on the painting table. Cans even. And then that’s how they ended up. From here on, there’s a whole period of work missing, from about 1962 to 1968, which I don’t have slides of, in which these head and still-life forms were dealt with. Very stark, not any colors. ey’re mostly black, gray, and white. And so I have to

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Philip Guston, For M, 1960. Ink on paper, 18 × 24 inches. Collection A. J. Pyrch, Victoria, British Columbia. Photo: Rudolph Burckhardt.

jump into about 1968, aer about a year of vacillation. I remember coming up to Skidmore, the previous summer when I had done this, and I remember telling how I was doing drawings with a ruler. And I was, practically. I wasn’t painting. About a year and a half of just drawing, and this tug-of-war. I mean, I became very reduced. Some of the drawings are just one or two lines. And they’ve never been shown. I wish I had slides of them. And then reacting against that, with a very deep desire to paint tangible things. And it began with just the forms around me. I mean, my shoe on the floor. at’s just the underpart of the shoe. Books. I did lots of shoes and lots of books. What’s the matter? It’s a book. I must have done about a hundred paintings of books. And lots of shoes. I focused on shoes and books. Lightbulbs. Just common things around. I wanted to wipe the whole slate clean. Get rid of art. In your office, Bob, there’s a slogan that says: “Forget about art, we’re busy . . .”? Bob Greene: A Grandma Moses quote. PG: Grandma Moses, pretty good. BG: “Art means nothing. It’s keeping busy that counts.” PG: Keeping busy. I have a quote to match that, almost as good. By another primitive, John Kane. Remember John Kane, the Pittsburgh painter? He said, “ere’s only one problem with painting and that’s the ants.” Because when you paint, you’d be up on

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the hill painting the Monongahela River and the open-hearth plants, factories, the steel mills, and the only problem was the ants. So at this time, I really felt like: e hell with art—pay attention. I mean, I would say, “Just pay attention.” And somehow I went through the mirror here. And then followed about two and a half or three years of just ecstasy. Just pure joy. Aer this period of struggle, this awful period of tug-of-war. Oh, yeah, that hand. I called it Paw [see p. 185]. en I started having romantic fantasies about when, in evolution, the ape became a man, and he had this hand. And then the first line he drew, you know? I’m very romantic about the whole thing. So, of course, I started having fantasies about how I would paint if I never saw any painting. Doing it for the first time. e first line drawn. at paw. Somewhere in Egypt near the Nile. e Ur Valley or something. e first line. It started over on the right, and in a couple of days it moved over, way over to the le. What happened was, I was painting common objects and so on, and the Democratic Convention took place, in 1968, and like everybody else I was very disturbed about it. It seemed to connect with way back in the thirties when I was just beginning to paint. In Los Angeles I had done some pictures of the Ku Klux Klan. e Klan was very powerful in L.A. in those years. ey were used to break the unions which were starting to form. And I was leist in my thinking, I mean politically, in those years. So I did a series of pictures of KKK and somehow it all came back in a circle. I did this painting, a bunch of KKK in a room [possibly Discussion, 1969]. It’s sort of in a nice pink Sunday comic color ground, peach pink. And when my nephew saw it he said, “It looks like the school where they’re learning how to be KKKs.” So this is like the school. en I was off. You couldn’t catch me for two years. I was off. And that’s what I did. en they started becoming very real to me. Stories of what they did. I couldn’t keep up with the ideas. Like a novelist, I had to write down memos to myself: Paint them! ey’re eating. ey’re having beer and hamburgers. ey’re out in the car. I mean, ideas kept coming so fast I really should have hired some assistants and tripled the production. at’s a kind of abstract, a little too much Uccello. en, of course, who wants to paint a head? What’s nicer than having a hood to paint, and stitches? Also the desire to make dots. ese are in progression in time, up to the show. Audience: How big is that? PG: About five feet. It’s one of the smaller ones. Aud: How long did you work on that? Do you remember? PG: On each one? Aud: On this particular one. PG: It was done in an hour and a half, two hours. Or thirty years. Either way you want to look at it. I remember when I did this [Book and Hand, 1969], very compulsively.

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It’s a big canvas, about an eight-foot canvas. I wiped out another canvas with white, and real juicy pink oil paint always looks good on a tacky white ground. But that’s what happened one night, that pink fat hand. And it went very quickly. An hour. Like a big billboard. at became the size of the book, the little book. at’s what that is, a little book, a red book. And I wanted to see how long I would get a kick out of the scale. And it lasted, so I put it in the show. And I still get a kick out of the little book. at’s the city [City, 1969]. Well, as I told Arthur last night, I felt as if I’d opened up Pandora’s box here. Everything came flowing out. Because that’s what we ask for, isn’t it, really? To have this thing happen. at’s why most of the time I say, “Gee, the last thing to be interested in is painting.” Per se, you know. I think other things release you to make paintings. Now they’re outside the city. at’s a big ten-foot picture [City Limits, 1969]. It felt so good to make that car, and then put them inside. In fact, as a kid, I went to Mexico in a Model T just like that. Yeah, you could put a wristwatch on one guy, smoking, he’s got a little blood on him. ere’s marvelous things you can do. I think a story is the most marvelous thing in painting. I mean, to have something to paint, to have a story you particularly want to tell. I call them very laconic titles, like Driving Around, Looking Around, Edge of Town. Very out-of-pocket titles, nothing fancy. Out of the pocket. at steering wheel becomes like a hot dog on a big poster or something [as in Edge of Town, 1969, or Caught, 1970]. But that’s what happened. at’s a big one. Like a ten-foot picture. Ten and a half feet. is title of this is Remorse, like sad. ey became very real to me. And it was a great pleasure. I didn’t go into New York. Or I went to New York but I wouldn’t go see a show. ere were a lot of retrospective shows when I was in, but I hadn’t the slightest interest. I would have to send elaborate telegrams to de Kooning about why I couldn’t come to his big show at the Modern. I just didn’t want to look at any painting. I was really living in this world, and I just didn’t want to look at anything else. I remember Barney Newman called me, he was having this big show at Knoedler, and I said, “Barney, I really . . .” I lied. I said something was wrong with me and I couldn’t come. I just simply couldn’t. I didn’t know what I would do or say, if while I was doing this stuff I had to go in a room with these big striped pictures. And I like his work, but I just couldn’t. at’s a nice picture. ey’re talking. All sorts of possibilities. ey’re philosophers. ey can have ideas. at’s a good small little panel, a quickie. Well, then, of course, a back view of an unnamable, anonymous man. And he appeared through a number of canvases, just a back view of him. I like this one, the way his head is rolling on his shoulders. Sheriff, I call that. Somebody said that looks like Ad Reinhardt from the back. And I guess it does a little bit.

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at’s one of the earlier ones, I think [possibly By the Window, 1969]. I got a big kick out of the stylized helmet and the realistic hand, of course. Smoking. With a cigar. And then, of course, once I had the characters, then I knew what kind of rooms they are in. What kind of furniture, lamps, chairs. at’s a big long one. I always got a kick, imagining how big the figure would be. His hands, his arm, that is. at’s called Dawn, and I painted it all night and then it was dawn. I live in the country. And the birds started. And those are the telephone poles outside the studio. at was the last touch when I put the birds in. It felt good to put something in that was right outside happening. at’s a big one. A big pleasure. e size of the seat, shoes, compared to characters in the car. Like Gulliver, you know? A guy throwing bricks. at’s it. When I started painting bricks, I thought, well, a brick fight. I never saw a brick fight. It’s marvelous to paint something you never saw. And all the pleasure of the bricks going every which way. Another big pile-up. at’s another opus. As I was saying, in many of these pictures, like this one, I would work two or three days on drawings. A whole bunch of drawings, not finished drawings but germinating drawings. And then start painting directly. Just pin up all the drawings. I hadn’t done that for years, and it felt very good to do that. at’s called A Day’s Work. You get very confused. When I started having them smoke cigars, I wouldn’t remember how you hold a cigar. I don’t smoke cigars, I smoke cigarettes, of course. In many pictures, people would say: that’s not correct. But, as I was doing it, I couldn’t remember which way the cigar goes. I mean, you want the cigar, you’re painting, you’re thinking of shapes and spaces. So I thought, “Oh, the hell with it! He can hold it any which way. What does it matter?” Just so it gives you the sensation. And of course somebody said, “How do they smoke?” Well, that did occur to me, but I gave that up. How do you smoke through a hood? at’s one of my favorite paintings, called Bad Habits. Where that green bottle is in the middle, that was a real happy thing. Some pictures weren’t all planned. ere were lots of surprises, too. For instance, right in the middle of the two figures was a sheriff. I was going to do another sheriff picture. Well, it didn’t look right. I’d seen it before. I did it before. So I swished him out with white, scraped him out, and swished white on. And then somehow I thought it needed a little green, and then I started laughing. I thought, I’ll make it a huge whiskey bottle, a big bottle between them. So things like that happened. at was a very ambitious structured picture, which I did a lot of drawings for, positioning. It’s called Cellar. A lot of figures just going down cellar, diving into a cellar through a trapdoor, and bricks flying in the air. And then naturally a big deluge picture, a big end-of-the-world picture. ere’s a whole series I don’t have slides of, I didn’t send down. ey’re still up in the studio. A series where I had parodies of art. I mean, I had them going to an open-

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ing. I had some looking at a Rothko. Just parodies about art. ey became artists. Having discussions, with a palette. Guys pointing to the window talking about nature. en, in between, the other guys pointing to a palette where all the colors are, just a full spectrum of paint on a palette. And then, of course, they’re painting. Naturally, he’d be painting hoods. I mean, if horses painted, they’d paint horses, no? at’s a good painting [e Studio, 1969]. Very tightly organized. at’s the artist’s model, yeah. All that. Of course, as I went into this I was very grateful that I knew how to draw, that I had years of drawing. Because it’s based on drawing, actually. I wanted to call this Oy [possibly Daydreams, 1970]! Remember, those of you who love the early cartoons, Mutt and Jeff ? at’s my greatest love, the early Bud Fisher, not the guys who imitated him. Who is the small one? Mutt. Jeff is the tall guy. Mutt was the short bald-headed one. Well, I think they were both bald-headed. But Mutt in consternation would grab his head. Two fingers always appeared beside his bald head. at’s great, the early Bud Fisher is really great art. Well, that’s the one [Red Picture, 1969], looking at the Rothko, yeah. He’s looking at field painting. I just loved him. Like: What the hell is that!? at’s painting. And it’s amazing how this formula, the slits for eyes, became so expressive. I’ve done a few others since then. Well, a number. I’m kind of leaving this subject and moving on to other things. But there are a few I’ve done since the show. And the range of expressions you can get with those two slits is incredible. ey can look tender, they can look angry, surprised. It’s stylized like in a Noh play, the stylization has a range. Well that was a big canvas [Flatlands, 1970], about the last big one I did before the show, where I didn’t do any drawings. I just really started from one end. I started on the le end, like in the pictures from 1950, I don’t think I even stepped back to look at it. I just worked my way from le to right. And I even got to the sun. I think what I wanted was what a friend of mine said: “It looks like you put all forms, all the props, in a paper bag and then spilled it out.” I wanted that feeling. Well, I think that’s about the end of it. I’d be happy to talk with you, if you want to talk. Or make statements, anything. Aud: [inaudible] PG: Well, Chuck Close and I were talking. He was telling me his story about his change. at’s how it started. You were telling me about Europe and you were beside yourself, forgetting about art and finally getting to the point where you were doing what you wanted to do, or getting close to what you wanted to do. So I told a story about, I guess, about 1967. I’d had a fairly full career as a painter, but I couldn’t accept this new stuff. at was the problem. Months would go on, and I couldn’t accept it. In the house are hanging some few things I kept, some of these pure abstract things—they looked very good. And then in the studio I would do these things, the guys in cars and all that. While I was in the studio, they were done with convictions. at’s what I meant. I did them, then I’d come in the house to eat and whatnot, and I’d look at

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these beautiful things from the past and I’d think, “e hell with that stuff in the studio, that’s terrible! I can’t really stomach it.” I’d get sick, I’d stay up all night. en I’d run back in the studio, and then the things in the house looked terrible. ese three beautiful lines which are so satisfying. So, you can fill in between the lines. ere was one point in the middle of this stuff, I wanted to roll them all up and hide it, not show it. I mean, you have no idea. ey were so worn with pushpin marks. Up would go the pure things. Big sigh of relief. “Whew, I can live there.” Come in the next day—“I can’t stand that, it’s got to be dirt.” Down they’d come. Up would come the drawing with cars, this stuff, books, shoes, everything, ahh! e only way I could get over that torture, as I was telling Close, was one night, solo drinking, I thought, “ere’s got to be a solution to this.” So, I thought, “Okay, I’m dead. I died.” And that idea stuck to me. It started like a playful game, but it became sort of serious. What if I had died? I’m in the history books. What would I paint if I came back? You know, you have to die for a rebirth. And so that released me. And not just released me, it gave me a beautiful extravagant sense of irresponsibility. at’s what I wanted. Because I’m full of the culture of art. But I had to throw over my own past. at was it. And of course, my very old and dear friend, Morty Feldman, I’d been telling him about this stuff when I’d come into New York, but he didn’t want to come up to see it. en finally he came up, and he was, I think, pretty upset. So, you lose friends. But I think Baudelaire said, “Second to the pleasure of surprising yourself is the aristocratic pleasure of surprising your friends.” And I think I wanted my close friend Feldman to say, “You mean that’s you?” He was close to my work for twenty years. And I wanted to feel as if I was saying to him, “You think you know me? You don’t know me.” It’s curious. We could talk for hours about this whole resistance. I mean, we all have one or two people. Van Gogh had eo. It doesn’t matter. It can be one or a million. But you need one or two. at’s who you paint for. And when they come in the studio, there’s a certain look in the eye. And if they say it’s beautiful, then you say, “What do you mean it’s beautiful? Why don’t you say it’s lousy?” But if they don’t say it’s beautiful and there’s a certain look in their eye, that look is what you want. So, you don’t just paint for yourself. You’d be insane if you just painted for yourself. I mean, that’s insanity. So Van Gogh was not insane, really, because there was eo. I mean, he might have been sick or something. He was an artist. So, there’s always that problem of one or two dear people who are close to you. In love, aesthetically, in friendship, it’s all the same, it’s all connected. ey get so close that you have to say, “Get off. You don’t know me. ere’s parts you don’t know.” And so I’m just waiting for the day that Morty comes up and says it’s fantastic. He will. We’re talking about something very important really. Because it has to do with change in yourself and everything. And the willingness to move, to make a move. I’m very careful. But then, we’re all constituted differently. Some people are more audacious than others. I think Pollock was audacious. I’m not that way. Pollock was

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like a spider that Musa and I were watching the other night. It was coming down to the dinner table from the lamp and we couldn’t figure it out. He’s going this way? No, he’s going that way. A spider throws out a secretion, no? And he follows. I mean, Pollock had the temperament to throw this thing out like a lasso and . . . Well, courage is a bad word, really. I mean, none of us are really courageous. It’s necessity. Sometimes it’s the only thing you can do. So, he would throw this thing out and follow wherever it went. I’m more of a Kaaian, Kierkegaardian. I’m more careful. Everybody has different kinds of temperaments. Aud: is is probably minor. I was curious that all of a sudden I started seeing you sign the paintings P. G. with a circle around it. PG: Very strange, yeah. But the strangest thing is that most of that is a very practical thing. ere are certain paintings I keep, won’t sell. And the ones I won’t sell I sign P. G. But this winter I was working on a still life, or just some pieces of wood really, not a still life. A ball and some grainy wood, just lined up like that on the table. And there was a whole area below on the canvas that I really didn’t know what to do with. I didn’t want to just fill it up. Well, the picture hung around a week and I kept looking at it. And one morning, automatically I just, almost unthinkingly, made a big yellow ochre nameplate, studded, and an enormous P. G. And I didn’t want to necessarily keep the painting. en I followed with a number of paintings which do that. I don’t know what it means myself. e only way I can think of it is, like in some of those paintings I’ve done since this where I put my mailbox number, 660, on it. You know, you write letters to people and on the back you put your address. 660 stays in the mind and so it creeps into a painting. at happens. But this idea of signing a painting seems funny to me. e whole idea of signing a painting is funny, so I think, “Well, I’ll make it enormous.” en I thought, and I haven’t done it yet, “What if I made a whole painting with just P. G.?” You know, the way you see a detail. In a Goya, say? A big painting. Well, it’s a passing fancy. I went to Europe right aer this work. e show opened and we went to Italy for about seven months. I’m an Italianate. at is to say, I love Italy. I’m not Italian, but I love Italy. I’ve been there many times, just loving it. And I wanted really to see early frescoes of Last Judgments and end-of-the-world paintings. Particularly Romanesque paintings and Sienese fresco painters who paint huge marvelous frescoes of the damned, all the tortures in hell, and so on. Heaven is always very dull, just a lot of people lined up. Like trumpets, they’re all lined up. ere’s not much to look at. But when they’re going to hell the painter really goes to town. All kinds of marvelous stuff. at’s when they really enjoyed painting. So I feel we live in comparable times. Oh yeah, and I want to paint that. I don’t want to copy, but I feel that’s the big subject matter. I don’t know how it’s going to come out. Well, I’ve begun. I’ve begun with this story.

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CO N V E R S AT I O N W I T H LO U I S F I N K E L S T E I N 1972

Louis Finkelstein (1923–2000) was a New York painter and teacher.

Louis Finkelstein: On some occasions I’ve had talks with Philip in front of people, so I try to think out how I could act as a foil for Philip’s ideas, and I always end up playing some kind of catch-up football, really. Philip Guston: Well, you shouldn’t do that. LF: So tonight I made an agreement that I would not choose the theme. I would speak on a theme of Philip’s choosing. And then somebody who maybe is here says, “Well, both of you speaking together, you must be very disparate in your personalities.” Or something she said about the points of view we represent or the way we think about things. I told her, “We’re supposed to be a foil to each other.” PG: May I interrupt you? [laughter] LF: Yes, please do. PG: No, I mean talking about talking . . . LF: We’ve been talking for two hours. PG: Yeah, that’s right, we talked it out. But there’s a friend of mine here, I was at his school this summer and I had to give a talk. And it occurred to me that I read somewhere—if you don’t mind my repeating it, Arthur?—that the philosopher Wittgenstein taught in the following way when he was at Oxford. He didn’t have regular teaching schedules. ey gave him a place to work, kind of an austere quarters. It’s always been sort of an ideal of mine—I have a real image of this. And he worked, he did his thinking and writing. And outside in the hall were some folding chairs like these, and at a certain time of the week or day, students came in and silently picked up their folding chairs and went in the room where he was busy writing. I mean, this is the image I have of it—I just read about it. He was aware of the creaking of the folding chairs unfolding, and then he started talking, thinking out loud, just where he was at—you know? So, in a way, I think I would like to talk like that. You can’t pick a subject and talk about it. at’s silly. You can only talk about where you are, yourself, and your own thinking about all the things you think about every day. So why don’t we continue where we were? I mean, these people have just picked up their folding chairs and have sat down and they’re listening in. at’s about all it can be. Not previously published. The conversation took place at the New York Studio School in October 1972.

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LF: What I was thinking was, about an hour and forty-five minutes ago you were saying that you were in a room full of philosophers up in Boston who were treating you like a guinea pig. PG: Oh well, yeah. LF: And how wide they were of the mark. And then I think you’re going to turn that on me. at’s what I’m thinking. [laughter] PG: Oh, I see. You’re afraid of that. Well, I was. Yeah. LF: Going to turn it on me? PG: No, no. I mean, God knows how or why, but I was there because I like Boston, and when the trip is paid and expenses are paid, I go to Boston on the slightest call. And it was like a think tank. It wasn’t public. It was about twenty people, all philosophers, aestheticians, even from the Sorbonne and West Germany. And sociologists. ere was a sculptor from Boston, Harold Tovish, and he and I were the only artists there. But the subject matter was: avant-garde art, is it dead? ey were going to analyze it. And I didn’t have a chance to talk. Most of the time was taken up defining terms. You know how that is. It was new to me. I had never been in a think tank like this. Do you mind if I tell this story? I had accepted this, what they call an honorarium, which means they can’t afford very much money but it paid the hotel and the trip, and I was anxious to go to museums and walk around Boston. So I thought, “Should I be quiet and let it go or should I talk?” And I couldn’t help myself, I couldn’t take it anymore. Very apologetically—I mean, I used terms like “permit me” and “may I be personal” in this discussion. But because everybody was so objective, I said, “May I be subjective?” I said, “You’re all talking about this object, the work of art, and you’re forgetting the man who makes this object.” Like it was a new idea. So I said I felt somewhat like the monkey in a zoo. All the anthropologists are talking about this gorilla, and the gorilla doesn’t have a chance to say anything. So I talked about what it feels like to make this object that they were analyzing. And they listened very carefully, but . . . at’s the only story I have. I wasn’t going to hold that against you. But it’s very strange to be with aestheticians and philosophers. e first time I ever had this experience. LF: at company of people aside . . . PG: Sure. Forget about it. LF: How much can you say from outside the person? Which is not only talking about the object in any kind of immediacy, talking about the object in a literalistic way. ere is a reality which anybody is very sure of while he’s making it, a very intimate subjective reality. I was listening on the radio while I was squeezing grapes for wine today actually. I was listening to Odetta on WBAI, and she was talking in very much the same kind of personalist stance that any kind of artist would, being most conscious of the immediate situation, of one’s activity. In fact, she was very vehement, Odetta, about stating that the external view, whatever anybody else thought of you,

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was by its nature destructive of reality. is very adamant stance. e only reality is that which the artist is immediately confronting when he or she is arting. [laughter] Oh, yeah. Doing it. Whatever you want to say. But I also know by a kind of sad afterthought about myself, the illusion of my friends, associates, students, and even frequently people I respect, that there exists some disparity between that direct picture, which is so convincing and overwhelming in its immediacy and so urgent to be regarded as exclusive, and that other part of it which is what philosophy is supposed to be. A love of wisdom, stepping back from the thing, one would hope through getting out of that beautiful Dionysiac bag, to describe the reality. at is, with the hope for the two things. e artist trying to grasp and speak for and urge the claims of that which is immediate, to go toward the real, the what-is. But per contra, the aim of philosophy is not to do something other than that, but to be supplementary according to the requisite fashion, because it may err, it may delude itself. You can become the victim of your own persuasion. And one of the things I know about artists when they are arting, which I know from the outside, is that what they have as artists is the sense of accuracy. But then the discourse is: How can we check on that? How can we lay that bare? How can we find ways not simply to distinguish but to show the reality of the equation having those two sides? PG: I’ll try to go back to Boston, then I’ll leave it alone. I just came from there, so it’s on my mind. So aer two days, it seems they all agreed that there was, in this art object, a residue. ey all agreed like sages nodding. ey all agreed that there was a residue in this object which was unexplainable. ey all seemed to agree, since we live in this liberal age, there was some kind of mystery. ey even used the word mystery. And I was very interested in that. Anyway, I’ll leave Boston alone. I’m just still sort of raw. LF: Well, I like a little bit that kind of method book conclusion to that dignified gathering. PG: It was a dignified gathering. LF: Huh? PG: It was. But there’s a residue. No, I was really interested in it, because that’s the first time I’ve been physically witness to very good dialectical minds attacking . . . I mean, not attacking but focusing on this phenomenon. Let’s examine the thing. LF: My experience is that maybe it’s just a question of competitiveness or rivalry or something like that. Soi-disant sophistication . . . PG: ere was that. LF: . . . is really quite dull and unperceptive and doesn’t have the fine grasp, isn’t philosophical enough, in my judgment, most of the time. PG: Well, anyway . . . LF: A lot of people talk about the mystery of experience in various ways, but if it stops

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short of the capacity speculatively for investigation then it kind of cheapens the notion of mystery. PG: Yeah. Well, I don’t really have much to say tonight, except to be very personal. LF: All right. You be personal and I’ll be . . . PG: Okay. No, no. You be personal. But as a respite, or as a reaction I suppose, to all this, I couldn’t wait to get out. We were kind of closeted in a place, well, every university has a Tudor building on the campus. It was a strange experience. I had the feeling that outside bombs were falling, the world was in ruins, but here were these twenty men discussing the definition of . . . It was like what’s-his-name’s book, Master Lobi? LF: Magister Ludi.* PG: Magister Ludi, yeah. So I couldn’t wait to get out, and it’s been a long time since I’ve had such a strong reactive feeling to walking on the streets. It seems very simple and maybe stupid now, but I don’t really think so. I wanted to see faces. I took the trolley, the subway. I just wanted to see things and buildings, and I wanted see the way people walk and look, without any ideas. I mean, normally my life is very balanced. I feel things and I talk ideas with friends, et cetera. But closeted as I was for two days in a very raw state, I just had a great desire for, and I didn’t realize how much I need, tangibilia. Sensate life. I realize, and I guess it’s true, I’m a painter. I’m not a thinker, so much. I think, but I think in terms of the way the tangible world feels to me. My thinking comes out of the way things feel. And this demonstrated to me that I could never be an ideologue. Just to stay there without constant contact with touch and smell and feel and look and all these things. Not that I needed this demonstration again. I’m just babbling about how I felt. But we can leave Boston and go elsewhere. LF: Yeah. I don’t mean to refer explicitly to Boston, but the kind of range that you put there between general ideas and immediate sense . . . PG: Sensate experience, yeah. LF: is seems to me to be a very critical kind of . . . PG: It’s also a common thing. LF: It’s the kind of thing that we all understand. But I think that the way issues appear to be set up now, this past ten–fieen years, to set the relations between the two on a rather distorted scale, the only way I can say it is one way or the other. Now, I’m not making a personal remark about anybody, any particular school of thought, but just to observe that there is, in general art world parlance . . . PG: Art world what? LF: Parlance. Lingo. Evaluation of an object in virtue of the conceptual scheme that’s * Herman Hesse, Das Glasperlenspiel (Zurich: Fretz and Wasmuth, 1943), sometimes translated as Magister Ludi and sometimes as The Glass Bead Game.

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been around it. And then, antithetically to that, and again I’m not speaking of any particular people, but just net accumulation of experience about people that are, for whatever good reason of wanting to concretize their experience, so much into or preoccupied with the physical elements of what they do. e tangible immediacy. e still life on the table. PG: I don’t mean that by tangibility. By tangibility I mean the sensate . . . LF: I’m not accusing you of any . . . PG: I mean things you bump into, you know what I mean? LF: Walking into a lamppost in the dark? at kind of bumping into? What I’m complaining about is that people take it to mean, whether they recognize it or not, very oen radically different strategies on either side of this equation. I just feel that to be so preoccupied with the concrete is not to have a clear idea. at’s what I mean by bumping into a lamppost in the dark. And what they do very oen, and this is a typical plight, for example, of a number of art students and a number of painters and a number of critics and teachers, is to walk into the same goddamn lamppost one day aer the next like some animated cartoon. is is part of a certain kind of sickness maybe provoked by the inadequacies of the other point of view. ere’s a piety on each side of it with which I’m kind of disgusted. Again, I’m not talking about personalities. PG: Why not? LF: Oh, I didn’t mean it that way. If I meant it that way, I would have said it that way. PG: Oh, I see. LF: It wouldn’t have had any point if I were talking about particular people, so much as to try to see that these are implicit in the argument in an interesting way. Maybe I can pursue this to you a little bit further, and say that very oen when people imagine they’re pursuing an idea, they are pursuing rather a concrete limitation with respect to the idea. ey don’t imagine the whole scope and intention of the idea, but just certain little parochial sensuous immediacies about it. PG: I’ve been thinking lately about certain things that I’d like to bring up with you. I haven’t seen you for about a year. We’d just as well talk about it, you know? I teach sort of sporadically. I go to various places throughout the country, mostly in the East, and see what’s going on. Give a studio talk and so on, and see the work of the faculty that’s teaching there and generally have a pretty good time talking about things. And one thing that’s been on my mind is this, about painting today. And of course I have to be personal. Everything I say, naturally, is just drenched with my own desires and needs in painting, and what’s happened in my work in the last five–six years. I was teaching this aernoon and somebody asked a very interesting question. I was talking about a younger painter working with visual material. I mean, you have to start somewhere. I’m not going to say anything astounding to you. I just want to introduce something, an idea. One of the reasons for working with visual matter, with vi-

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sual references, it seems to me, is that a more complex situation develops. at is to say, you have your self, your own feelings, your own subjectivity, and there’s the canvas, which is a reality. You’re making a concrete objective object there. And then you have the third thing, whatever it can be. It can be an imagined idea. It can be visually something in front of you. And that trialogue, if I can coin that word, seems to me to be more unpredictable and astounding than merely a dialogue between you and the canvas. And further, it seems to me, that when I look around anywhere, not just schools but I mean my own work, my contemporaries’, and so on, it occurred to me that when painting exclusively involves itself in being subversive to art itself, like say the anti-art movements (we were talking about John Cage at dinner, the Duchamp idea, the American inheritors of Duchamp) that seems to me to lead to ever-diminishing returns. ey can’t go any other way except attenuate, become super-refined and didactic, primarily didactic. LF: Are you talking about didactic as opposed to creative? PG: at’s right. As opposed to the unknown. I’ll use that phrase. I think you can’t make faces about any words. Someone on this panel said, “Let’s not use the word creative.” And on the way from the airport there was a big billboard that said “Senator Brooke,” the senator from Mass., “is,” and then in red letters, “a creative Republican.” Well, that’s not going to stop me from using the word creative. Language is debased, I know that. But I’m going to use the word creative. LF: No, I wasn’t going that way. I mean, clearly they wouldn’t put up a sign saying Senator Brooke is a didactic Republican. [laughter] PG: Which means that I can’t use the word creative. LF: No, no, no, no. You go on talking. I’ll get my innings. PG: Get your innings? LF: I mean, I’ll explain myself more in detail. But, you finish off. I think didactic is not a bad idea, but I’ll get to that later. Don’t let me disturb you. PG: What do you mean? You hit me over the head and then you want me to pretend that you didn’t hit me over the head? I wanted to make a point, goddamn it. LF: Sorry. PG: No, it’ll come back. I was going to make a very simple point. LF: Cage and the heirs of Duchamp. PG: Oh, I know, but attacking Cage is so boring. I think it’s a simple proposition, a simple thing that I want to propose. And that is that it seems to me that when the process of creation, of making, takes upon itself all the burdens of X, something else, an other, when it’s not involved with the history of modern art, the idea that if such and such has happened then it follows that such and such should happen, when it simply doesn’t even concern itself with that and goes by another route, new principles arise. By new I don’t mean novel, of course, but unpredictable structures arise. Chaos arises,

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but a very fruitful chaos. I mean, chaos is very crucial here, but a fruitful chaos, a chaos to grapple with. A dumbness, an innocence is possible. We’re pushing into another place, another level of experience, where you’re forced to think about subjects, and very subtle meanings are possible. I’m arguing against reductive art. at’s what I’m doing here. But I’m not even so much doing that. I’m really proposing the reverse of thinking about art itself. Remember the excitement and the unpredictability of the surrealist idea in film and painting and poetry, German expressionism, the painting of Picasso, Léger, Orozco, Giacometti, I could go on and on. at is to say, through some leap or some bypass, if I take a detour from art, I get involved with something else that makes me want to paint, actually. It makes me want to make these images. I’m not only proposing it, I’m advocating it, obviously. Not only that unpredictable things can arise, unpredictable meanings, but paradoxically it’s the only way to ensure the continuity of creation. e other way ensures a constant diminishing thinness. Okay. at’s it. LF: Well, I see what you’re saying, but . . . PG: Obviously, I’m arguing from my own point of view, and the paintings which I like. So you don’t have to answer it. LF: I want to answer it. I don’t feel under any sense of obligation. I want to talk about it, if you don’t mind. PG: No. But I mean, I’m not proposing this so that you have to . . . LF: Oh, I don’t feel put upon. PG: Okay. LF: We’re talking and . . . PG: It’s a valid subject. In fact, we never really talked about this before. LF: All right. Okay. PG: As a matter of fact, I just want to . . . Well, go ahead. I’ll say it later. LF: No, no. Say it now. PG: Well, I’ve been struck, because of certain developments of my thinking and painting which have occurred over recent years and the reception of this work, with how bigoted, which maybe isn’t the right word, or how doctrinaire the so-called modern movement is. Like there are certain shibboleths which are not at all provable, nor are they necessarily true. ey’re shibboleths. Or in Yiddish you say bubba meisas, lady’s tales. Like: “Painting is flat.” We could make a whole list of these things. Like: “You don’t use subject matter.” Do not use overt subject matter. “e painting is a concrete object.” I mean, who says? As if these things had been handed down from Mount Sinai or something. e original impulse in modern art, of the masters which we enjoy—it’s so difficult to remember but we have to remember that what was once truly radical and subversive to art itself, and it was discovered later to be simply a continuity of art itself—we don’t have to be stuck with. In other words, I am prob-

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ably basically proposing that painting and sculpture must, to continue, be continuously radical and question modern art itself. at’s what I’m really saying. And I’m distressed. e most distressing thing is a kind of deep, deep ennui with the domestication of this, the middle-classness of this, the fact that it’s swallowed up so readily by society. It’s absorbed. It disappears. LF: Well, some of these things I think are a little extrinsic. PG: Nothing is extrinsic. Everything is a sign. Everything is part of everything else. What do you mean, extrinsic? LF: It’s not real important to say what quality of art is making all that money at the galleries. PG: Oh, I’m not talking about that. You know I’m not talking about that. LF: You were talking about it. en make it clear to the audience that that’s not what you were talking about, then. PG: I’m not talking about that. Look, we all sense that something is wrong. LF: You said that. I didn’t say that. I want to dissociate myself from that viewpoint. PG: Okay, dissociate yourself. No, there’s a lot wrong. We all know there’s a lot wrong. LF: I think I agree with you about the dogmatism or the excessive concreteness with which a certain popular vocabulary seems to be . . . PG: Well, we don’t have to . . . LF: at’s something. But at the same time I am not quite that appalled at all the kinds of works that in fact have flourished under the aegis of what is called spuriously based criticism. And I can take issue with the criticism and still like some of the painting which that criticism endorses. ose are separable points. In case I don’t like the arguments I won’t look at the paintings. If you say it’s a crummy argument, you go look at the painting, the physical object, your tangibility, your walking in the streets to get out of the think tank. PG: Well, I consider myself very open, but you put me in the position of being doctrinaire myself and I won’t accept that. I mean, you’re putting me in a position of holding certain beliefs and refusing to look at certain pictures simply because they’re espoused by certain writers or critics, and that’s not true. LF: Pardon me. at was an illegitimate sense. I should not have said that. PG: Take it back. LF: I take that sentence back. PG: All right. LF: But I would say, while differing from the scene, nevertheless I don’t . . . PG: I mean, I may have irritated you about something, but you don’t have to . . . LF: No, it didn’t irritate me. Mark Twain has a phrase, I don’t quite know how to twist

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it into this, but it goes like: “I do not deny the allegation, but I can still defy the allegator.” [laughter] ere’s a disparity to the reasons things are said to be done by some kind of establishment. at goes without saying. And then there are the reasons which are vouchsafed by the articles themselves, the objects. So it may be that even some kind of punk criticism and punk socialism . . . PG: I wasn’t talking about that, actually. LF: But you were saying that everything is bad. You used the word debacle of modern art, I think. I don’t agree that it’s a debacle. I think it’s about as healthy as it could be expected to be. PG: Well, don’t get me wrong. I like working now, very much. LF: Yeah, all right. So then we don’t have to call it a debacle. You’re working, I’m working. [laughter] PG: Well, I guess I have to withdraw that word. ere’s no way out of it. LF: It’s not that which is deplorable. But since you mentioned Cage, and this is only to bring it up to the present point, at dinner we both expressed a severe disapprobation of the role of Cage in the art world, yeah? On the other hand, I think that the propositions in Cage have a kind of first-approximation merit. Let me give you an example of what I mean. A basic kind of statement of Cage’s, and this is as near to a quote as I can remember, is: “Everything I’ve said tonight is a concert if you’ll hear it as such,” or words to that effect. Now, what he is saying is to find other ways of being able to structure experience. I believe that in his own usage of that proposition he had tended to undermine language and debase the possibility of useful discrimination and the useful pressures which I think art and art objects and artists’ activity should be involved with. But the proposition and its possible effect, and I don’t know all the possible effects yet, is basically an admissible one to be tested in a number of cases, not to be approved of before the test comes home. In other words, you make a painting not to show whether the proposition is true, but to test whether it’s possible to understand the depths of the proposition. So I’m back on your side, that the concrete case is always more persuasive, more defining, than the arguments around it. PG: Yeah. Go ahead. LF: No. But, among other things, I just wanted to precipitate that there are such things as the consciousness of history, the redefinition of roles. I don’t say these have been well done. PG: at’s open to question. e consciousness of history, you mean art history? e culture of painting? LF: Yeah. I object that currently fashionable formulations of this are overdetermined and shallowly determined, fallaciously deterministic. But I don’t deplore the technique of looking at history to try to arrive at a determination which can be a spur,

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which can be a definition, which can be other angles in a proper universe of discourse to get at the art object. PG: Except that we all know, I assume, that looking at history is a very debatable and problematic thing. at is to say, history isn’t there. It’s not like an object we can analyze, because it keeps changing. In fact, we change it all the time. You know that. So that it’s not still. It’s not a cat that follows you around. We’re always redefining it. In fact, it’s the most difficult thing to even understand. It seems to me, in the reading I’ve done of current modern art historians, that they write as if history is a static object which has been defined once and for all, from which we can then proceed to make certain summations and deductions and analyses. In fact, that’s not so. It isn’t so about modern art. It isn’t even so about Renaissance art. Past masters seem to me constantly changing and for this reason very difficult to understand. In fact, it’s not even available to us except in certain terms. at’s why my unwillingness to accept certain doctrines of modern painting. at’s all I meant. LF: We’re not apart on that. But I felt that I had to examine what seems to me a kind of ready willingness to dispense with that kind of consciousness, as if you could attain some kind of productive innocence as a consequence of that. PG: What do you mean, productive innocence? LF: Well, it’s a phrase I’m using to characterize a couple of words which you said, meaning that if you put all this schlock behind you, thinking about the doctrinaire, then you could truly be part of the consciousness . . . PG: If it’s an innocence, it seems to me it’s a very particular kind of innocence, which is very crucial. In fact, that’s really what we ought to talk about, this innocence. Since most of us who do paint or sculpt, create, make something, have experienced at times this kind of breakthrough of innocence. And maybe it’s impossible to talk about. In fact, the only real thing worth talking about in art is impossible to talk about. And yet sometimes it’s incumbent on us to talk about it. It’s very private, I suppose, but I have seen, in teaching and in my own work and in other artists’ work, occasional breakthroughs. Breakthrough, that’s a funny word. But I had a pretty good conversation with Harold Rosenberg years ago, and he interpreted what I was saying by using a phrase of Mallarmé’s. He said, “What you want to be is un civilisé édénique” [see p. 48]. To be the first man in Eden, right? Mallarmé used that phrase, meaning to be a civilized man in Eden. And when I heard that, I found great recognition there, because Mallarmé is a modern artist. I mean, we’re going on for some time now, and it occurred to me that, in spite of or together with the world museum that we all live in, there has to be a way to, and I interpret Mallarmé’s phrase as meaning this, an occasional breakthrough to a kind of innocence. A state where, with all your knowledge and constant analyses and thinking, something happens as if for the first time. It’s an unconscious experience, obviously. at is to say, something moves through you. You are, perhaps, a medium through which this rhythm moved. A debacle? Maybe that was the wrong word. It seems to me that modern art, for a least a hun-

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dred years if not longer, but I would say a hundred years, has been, for various reasons that we don’t have to go into now, in a very particular and special kind of dilemma. LF: A hundred-year span. PG: at’s right. I would say a hundred-year span. LF: Which dilemma are you talking about? How would you categorize the dilemma? PG: I was coming to that. Well, that’s so complicated I don’t know where it starts. I know I think about it daily. I’m sure other painters do too. Well, I’ll come at it from another way. inking about painting and illustrating my thoughts about painting doesn’t seem to satisfy me. Maybe somebody could say, “Well, he’s got a problem.” Maybe I’ve got a particular problem. at’s possible. It doesn’t satisfy me. What I look for, what I’m always looking for, whether it’s my own work or somebody else’s work or in the past . . . I mean, if you travel through Europe and you look at painting, you’re really looking for your own painting in a way. Because I’m not such an art lover. I’m looking for something else. My mind is ahead of my speech here. LF: Can I play on this seeming dilemma of the hundred years, and maybe we can find . . . ? PG: Well, I was going to say one thing. It strikes me that in most of the authentic painting, sculpture, poetry, music for these hundred years, its content seems to me to be precisely about the dilemma of whether it’s possible to create authentic art. And by authentic I mean an art which is as moving as the art we adore of the past. Rodin, who was a very crucial figure here, I think, made the remark, and I’m just paraphrasing, that it’s not difficult to make a work of art. What’s difficult is to get to a state where you need to make it. To get into a state of creation, that’s what’s difficult. It seems to me that either one must have a powerful concept like Mondrian certainly had, or Brancusi, and other painters . . . I mean, why paint? What is it that propels you? LF: I was thinking yesterday that that might be a topic we might talk about tonight. PG: Yeah, well, maybe that’s the only topic worth talking about. What propels you to paint. I mean, why do it? ere’s no point in adding objects to the world. I mean, Jesus Christ, the pyramid’s high enough. LF: Well, clearly it’s a serious question. PG: Serious? It’s crucial. LF: Well, not many people ask it productively. I’d like to try to ask it in a way which might form a guide to technique, self-education, and other things. I think it’s not only a difficult and important question, but I think it’s a question the answering of which can furnish a number of guides to conduct at various levels of specificity. PG: Guides? LF: Yes. Didactic. As I said, I always come back to the same dynamic again. PG: Well . . .

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LF: I’m very serious. I didn’t come here just to enjoy the waters. [laughter] I think the question and the ways of answering the question, I’d like to lock them into being peculiarly modern. at is, I would like to start it with Manet. PG: Right. LF: To me, personally, it’s the watershed. I’ve said this to some people here, so some people have to bear with me repeating myself for the continuity of the argument. e revolution in Manet, the equivocable position of Manet in relation to his public, his bad reception and all these . . . PG: No. Let’s talk about his painting. LF: Yeah, but this is part of it, you see. I want to start from there, and then bring it into some things which are concrete. But I think it’s proper to also pose its historical frame as part of its definition. And that what he did was cast loose . . . PG: What he did was what? LF: Manet found himself cast loose, by temperament, by biology, by syphilis, by the times, I don’t know what, from the prior agreed-upon, received, uniformly shared notions of value and meaning. And it was this which is the result of his having to find a more immediate form of address to his subject and to himself with his subject. And this made it unintelligible, except to . . . PG: Well, can I say something on that point? Just to interrupt you a minute. Of course, we all have our own ways of looking at Manet. To me, one of the most crucial moving things about Manet in his later work, when he was really hitting it, and his middle period too, is his willingness, and perhaps it’s a decision, I don’t know, to stop. When his run ran out, when his feeling ran out. I mean, he’s looking at a nude, he’s looking at a woman, he’s looking at a street, a man walking, a still life, whatever it is, and when his sensations, his spontaneity, if you will, had its run, he had that capacity to stop. In other words, it’s not padded, its not finished. At least, this is what is the most inspiring thing to me about Monet. LF: Manet. PG: Manet. I’m sorry. I can’t talk about Monet. I don’t know anything about Monet. LF: He’s good, too. PG: Well, I don’t know Monet. I’ve looked at it. I don’t know anything about it. I’ve studied Manet. I mean, Manet’s been my inspiration and Monet hasn’t. I just haven’t looked at Monet. ere’s always a misspelling there in articles. Well, anyway, I find the most revolutionary, the most fantastic thing about Manet is this gamble, this risk. It’s not a risk or gamble, the hell with that. His willingness not to pad. When his sensation ran out, when his run was over, he stopped. Well, go ahead. LF: Well, this is very well said. PG: I mean, I just wanted to make the point.

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LF: Yes. I think this is very distinctive about Manet, what I was saying about breaking down the prior structure of meaning. PG: at’s right. LF: To use what was most unique. PG: I was putting mine another way. LF: We’re talking about the same thing. PG: Also his use of material, his use of matter there is crucial. at is to say, with that spontaneity, with that run, was this powerful sense of immediacy. LF: Yes. PG: Of paint and image jamming up, occurring at the same split second, which is very exciting. LF: Unpredictable. PG: at’s right. Exactly. And this is why I think Manet is a crucial figure in modern painting. LF: Well, then I think everybody is the heir to Manet. PG: Absolutely. LF: And the challenge and raison d’être of all subsequent art. Because before this, the artist, in some sense, and of course you could pick a couple of artists in the past and say that this characteristic is working there and throw in Michelangelo. We’re not talking in exclusive categories. PG: I also think, to go further, to thicken the soup, to thicken the plot, and this is just a guess on my part but a feeling guess, that to do that means also not to see the picture so much. at’s very important here. LF: I find that a little different. What do you mean, not to see the picture? PG: Not to see your picture. LF: You mean, not to care about its completion? PG: No, I didn’t say not to care. LF: Not to see it? I don’t see what you’re driving at. You’re clearly driving at something, but I’m not sure . . . PG: Yeah. LF: Say it another way. PG: How the hell can I say it another way? LF: No, this is serious. You have something there and I want to know . . . PG: By the way, this doesn’t have to be just a two-way thing. I see a lot of painters here I know. Anybody have anything to say, say it. Audience: I think it’s the appearance of it.

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PG: e appearance of it! at’s what he was blind to. And that blindness is a necessary ingredient there. at is to say, he was absolutely . . . Well, I’ve said it. Why is that so difficult? What did I do? Aud: at’s enough. You said an awful lot. LF: I don’t like that idea. PG: You don’t like that idea? [laughter] LF: You might be trying to say something, but that misleads as much as it informs. PG: Well, that’s possible. at’s possible. LF: But, what is the picture but its appearance? PG: No, I’m saying something else. No, no. You’re looking at it aer the fact. I’m talking about the man making. I’m not talking about the appearance. I’m saying that the man, to himself, Manet, making this, must have . . . And this is an educated guess. I read this into it and in this sense I may be very subjective in reading into it, I don’t know. But I think he trusted to that sensation so much . . . Well, it’s too paradoxical, goddamn it, you really can’t talk about painting! He saw it but he didn’t see it. It’s almost as if he had not to see it, in order to continue painting the way he painted. Now, I know I can be accused of being a paradox fiend, but . . . LF: No, I think your heart’s in the right place. PG: What do you mean, my heart’s in the right place? LF: You’re pointing toward a very real phenomenon about Manet which I respect, and I respect your insight into it, but I don’t think you’ve found an adequate verbal formulation for it. at’s all I’m saying. PG: Well, maybe I can formulate it verbally more clearly. Maybe you don’t have to verbalize about it so clearly. LF: Could I approximate it? And then you tell me if I’m wrong. I’ll try to approximate it another way. at he wasn’t being precious or self-protective about fulfilling some particular kind of expectation to the look of the picture. PG: Warm. Warm. [laughter] LF: We’re speaking in approximations of these things. I just don’t want to be overwhelmed by . . . Aud: His feeling . . . PG: Well, everybody feels, but that’s too . . . at’s not exactly what I meant, however. Works of art aren’t as mysterious as we think. I mean, they’re really mysterious, but on a certain level they’re not as mysterious as all that. You can tell from his work and also from evidence that’s le of his letters and so on, that he knew what the hell he was doing. But he knew so much what he was doing that he was willing to suspend another kind of judgment and gamble on his feeling. He knew that. at’s more than just saying he felt. Every artist feels. Every human being feels. But he’s a crucial figure here.

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LF: Well, I did bring him up for this purpose, which I still would like to extract in terms of all that you’ve been saying about risk. PG: About what? LF: Risk. PG: Gamble. LF: Gamble. PG: Well, I don’t know. LF: You see, we could say, going the other way from Manet, at least behind Manet, earlier than Manet historically, the artist was dealing with a more condensed, a more shared body of knowledge, values, aims, uses even. PG: is was shattered at that time. LF: So, you see, Manet was a watershed. Not only did he introduce his risk and his sense of personal confrontation, but also the purpose of the work of art, its value, to mention a dirty word, flips over, becomes arbitrary, irrevocably, until another form of society [comes along]. PG: at’s right. I agree. Right. Value changes. LF: We would have to accept that something happened because of the extreme . . . PG: I get it. All right, so where do we go from there? LF: Where we go from there is to try to describe, and I’m still having to extract this from the conversation. I have my own axes to grind. PG: Well, sure. LF: Like, what is it that emerges as the conceivable utility, socially, historically, personally, shareable/unshareable, but speculatively there as utility, value, worth? Besides “I want to do it,” or “All the kids are doing it,” or “I’m going to art school and making money,” “Sidney Janis likes it . . .” PG: Sidney Janis wouldn’t like it. LF: Well, somebody would tell him to like it at the right time. Where was I? I have a proposition here. It’s something that I’ve taught for a long time and I tried to articulate it in a variety of ways. at if, aer Manet, the actual universe experienced by anybody sentient who realizes the difference of living aer rather than before . . . PG: Yeah. Go ahead. LF: If the universe does not betray the clarity of shared structures, then each work of art, besides saying what you said before, testing the possibility of making . . . PG: Testing the possibility of . . . LF: Making a work of art. at’s your point. PG: Yeah, the possibility of making it, that’s right. By that I mean whether it’s possible to do it or not. Yes. Exactly.

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LF: Besides being that it is a restatement, maybe minuscule in scale, but aims at being a restatement of a possible structure of the meaningful world. Based upon the fact that it is no longer shareable, based upon the fact that it is infinitely more pluralistic in its nature, and consequently has to be more pluralistic. PG: I see what you mean, but I don’t want to think about that. at is, I know what you’re getting at. I don’t mean to put you down. I don’t mean it that way. But I mean to say, there you’re getting into the realm of a kind of cultural historian. I don’t think that’s the painter’s province, domain. LF: I’ve been speaking in culturally historical terms because it’s one way of framing the problem. But I think it has a literal and immediate concomitant in the immediate and literal thing. PG: How? In what way? LF: All right. To position oneself, to stand in a, let us say, physical situation, where you have to get back to your triangle, the third thing, the paper or the canvas, the person . . . PG: And the other. LF: And the other, which is the presumed object of attention. en to make even one mark knowingly on that rectangle, which brings the issue up-to-date . . . PG: What’s that mean, up-to-date? LF: Up-to-date. Like where you are then and it’s not like it was a pretext for working yesterday. is is what you can do with a pencil and an eraser, and it’s very hard, inch by inch. at is, the whole issue can be laid out in a very direct way. at the strain to recognize . . . Again, I have to use words that kind of indicate the cerebral process. PG: Don’t. LF: But I’m not talking about the cerebration only. PG: Yeah, I understand. LF: I’m talking about checking the response to see whether it’s adequate to what the situation actually is, as opposed to what its presupposition might have been, based upon other precedents of acting. at was the thing that Manet could do so capably then, and that’s the herring thrown in the face of everybody else. PG: Okay. Now, even though I realize that we’re not up here painting, you’re talking about painting. So when you’re talking about painting, you’re talking about painting. Nevertheless . . . LF: No, but I don’t want to be accused of it only having a cerebral . . . PG: I’m not. I didn’t do that at all. LF: I’m not mad. PG: I didn’t realize I would run into somebody as paranoid as I am. You’re more paranoid than I am! I mean, I wasn’t saying that at all. [laughter]

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LF: Okay. PG: I mean that if we’re talking about the process of what we can imagine about the process of Manet, we don’t even have to imagine because the work is a document. It’s an evidence of a way of thinking and feeling, and we assume the pride of feeling that we know what this evidence is. In other words, we can read it. LF: Well, it helps to know something about it. PG: Well, a number of us do. So that I think my difference with you would be that I am more concerned with what state he was in. I mean, I have an appetite for knowing what state he was in when he did this, because I find recognition in that state. I’ve tasted that state. I’m not talking about copying Manet, any more than what the ramifications of this evidence is. I don’t really care about the ramifications. LF: Oh, I see what you mean. PG: You see what I mean? Now that’s not accusing you of being cerebral. And it’s not a dirty word anyway, cerebral. LF: No, I just meant that I’m physical and direct. And here I have to part company with you, in that I am really more interested in the specific focus on that other thing. PG: Well, we’ve discovered our differences. LF: I can hypothesize it, but I think it’s tenuous and dangerous, and I could think up some more pejorative words, but we needn’t go into that. I think, myself, that I have to deal with the sensuous specific as a whole lot of interlocked signs which I relive as proposals for meaning. Sure, I know there was a person behind it. PG: I’m not even saying that. LF: But I don’t really enjoy and I don’t really want to and I don’t gain much sustenance from focusing on his state so much as on the life of the symbolic language itself. PG: Oh, I see. LF: Which then I recapitulate or judge. PG: Well, maybe this is the difference between us. LF: And I’m very much interested in those particulars. I’m very much interested in learning techniques. PG: I don’t know what you mean by techniques. LF: Like how to get my hand to move this way when it wants to move that way. PG: Let it move that way! Let it move the way it wants to move too. LF: Well, sometimes I can’t do that. Sometimes that’s just where I have to raise the question. Where I say that I’m involved with a certain structuring of the sign. Looking at the specifics, seeing if I can pull together things, I find that I don’t know all the patterns. I think I was thinking about an eventual end very similar to yours, but I seem to have to go into specifics rather than imagining a whole state in another human being.

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PG: I like to be specific. Let’s be a little more specific. LF: All right, I’ll try. How do we be more specific? PG: Well, for instance, talking about specific paintings. I mean, we’re talking about painting. LF: I have to say I’m trying to be specific, because the phrases I’m using are in recall of specific problems, like at any ten seconds what I’m doing in a painting. PG: I don’t think that you weren’t being specific. I was just thinking about a certain image of a picture I have in my mind, and I wanted to talk about that picture. at’s all I meant. LF: All right. PG: In fact, over all the years we’ve known each other and talked, I think for the first time maybe this is a real difference between us. e only way we can get there is by splitting hairs, you know? Not long ago I was looking at a painting by Lautrec, who I’m beginning to adore more and more. Well, I rediscover certain masters. ere’s a painting at the Institute in Chicago of a circus. It’s oen reproduced, and I was looking at it the other day in reproduction. A picture of two or three people in the foreground, spectators, and they’re looking into the ring of the Medrano Circus. And one woman, she has a lot of flouncy stuff, those lamb-chop shoulders they wore in the nineties. LF: Leg-of-mutton. PG: Leg-of-mutton sleeves. And deep in space is a bareback rider, a lady bareback rider, and the collision of this bareback rider way back, like fiy feet in depth, in illusionistic depth, appears on the surface of the painting as if the horse is passing right on this leg-of-mutton sleeve. And so we get a kick out of it. Now, when I saw this years ago I thought: It’s one of those marvelous things where forms in the foreground and forms in the background bump into each other and make all kinds of unpredictable relationships. But lately I’ve been looking at it and I’ve been wondering about all these things which occur on the so-called picture plane, whether the painter himself didn’t have an enjoyment of this. I am now positive that Lautrec had a double activity. e double activity being that he gets all involved with this bareback rider fiy feet in depth, and at the same time it’s like prancing on this woman’s leg-of-mutton sleeve and it’s done just as sharply as that incisive Lautrec drawing, and it’s a very enjoyable experience. Lautrec, whom I think about more and more, I think is an absolutely fabulous involved artist. Forget about all the popular stuff. at has nothing to do with it. And the fact is, he has absolute attention to what he’s seeing and what moves him. I mean a face, a figure, a gesture, a movement, and so on, and when the feeling runs out he stops too. Manet is not the only one. So you’re faced with the curious mystery of a fix, like a momentary fix, or a record, an evidence of a man observing something with such intensity. Many times, more intense than Manet. Aud: [inaudible]

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PG: Well, I mean I have to be specific. I bought a book the other day, for a present. I think it’s called A Bestiary. You probably know that book. It’s a book of drawings by Lautrec of animals. ey’re illustrations for a contemporary French writer, I can’t think of his name. Renard?* I think that’s the man. And these drawings are of animals and how they move and look and so on. And I was just struck by how he sees. Just fantastic, what he sees. Every kind of animal is there, a goose, a swan, a frog, etc., etc. And there’s a bull. And that bull is, to me, one of the most remarkable drawings in the book. It really looks like a vast landscape. As if the bull was right in front of his nose, he started drawing the tail and the hip, and he goes on this back and you can just feel it going on and on and on. And finally somewhere way over on the right are a couple of horns, and the whole feeling about this bull, this vastness of it, is that he must have been so close. He doesn’t bother to define the bull so much. e legs kind of peter out. But what he saw was this back. at’s what I mean by stopping. e sensation was of this vastness, you know? Well, I don’t know how else to put it. LF: Yes. I think I can relate. PG: What’s he going to do, draw a bull? Who wants a bull? What we’re looking at is his experience in seeing this particular animal. Aud: [inaudible] PG: Yeah, something along that line. Aud: [inaudible] PG: I’m saying something even more than that. I think what I’m saying is that the immersion in the bull finally produces the most unpredictable thing, that he wouldn’t get either if he had thought of making a picture or of drawing a bull. I mean, he somehow lost himself, was capable of losing himself, immersing himself, in a very special way, in visual phenomena. I think that’s all I’m saying. Again, like that Wittgenstein story, I’m just thinking out loud here. I’m not giving a lecture. I just am proposing that this kind of immersion, whether it’s being driven by some concept or by visual phenomena, somehow seems to me to be, to my eyes and to my feelings, more fruitful, more chaotic but fruitfully chaotic, more unpredictable, than what we can conceive of when we become interested in painting itself. In other words, I am proposing that painting needs more than itself. I suppose it’s a very traditional point of view. LF: Stanley Kunitz, a while ago, said that the artist is always a romantic, in the sense that he’s never working with the previous structure. PG: You’re saying I’m romantic. LF: No.

* Jules Renard, Histoires naturelles (Paris, 1888), illustrated by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec; translated by Elizabeth Roget as Natural Histories: A Bestiary (New York: George Braziller, 1966).

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Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, The Bull. Lithograph, in Jules Renard, Histoires naturelles (1888; Paris: Henri Floury, 1900). Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Gift of the Reva and David Logan Foundation, 2000.200.18.22.

PG: I’m willing. I don’t care. Aud: e mystery seems to require something besides it, which I think you would agree with but haven’t actually spoken of. LF: Well, I don’t think method gets anywhere by itself, but I have to use method. You have to do things in between what Philip called the breakthroughs.

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PG: e runs. Well, we all know that. Sure. LF: ere’s a resistance to problems and you do things. PG: e problem is what to do in between. Sure, but we all know that. It doesn’t happen every day. One day we feel a certain way, another day another. Aud: Talking about Lautrec, you give the impression that one can arrive at that proper moment by the right kind of feeling, being ready for it, being creative. But Lautrec made monoprints, made tracings, repeated the same thing over and over again, to get that look of something. PG: My God, I’d be the last person to dispute you. But why even bring that up? I thought that was assumed. LF: Oh, no. It’s not necessarily assumed. PG: Well, nine-tenths of the time I feel like I’m a carpenter. I would say, though, in relation to what we’re talking about, that I’m aware of the fact that there are quite a number of painters here with many years of experience of painting, but there are also a sizable group here of people who attend this school or other schools who haven’t had this experience. All right, now, talking not to them but with them, I’ve observed that in teaching you have to work toward this state. We all know that. However, it’s a human quality, this spontaneity, this seeing things freshly, newly. And I’m always aware of the fact that these things happen all the time but people don’t see it, you know? ey don’t see it, and concepts are formed about what to do. Aud: at’s the biggest human feeling, stopping. I mean, there’s always a desire to pick the answer and stop. PG: Yeah, but it depends on what level, though. But I would say this, about teaching or about working with people. I think I would be just as involved in noting these outbursts as I would be in showing them slides of Piero or Giotto or Picasso and talking about structure. In other words, a big part of learning is learning how to regard this rhythm that moves through us. e way we see things freshly and so on. Well, that’s all I want to say about that. What I mean is, I don’t like the idea of putting this thing we’re talking about, this Lautrec breakthrough or this Manet thing, in terms of, you know, you’ve got to eat so much spinach and then if you’re a good boy you’re going to get there and then you can break through. I don’t believe that. I think it’s inherent right from the beginning. I just believe that that should be seen and valued. LF: You said civilized in Eden. But now you put that civilized-in-Eden image right in the middle. PG: What do you mean, “put it in the middle”? LF: In the middle between . . . You said it’s always available, this access of spontaneity. PG: I didn’t say it was available.

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LF: You said you don’t have to do your pushups. PG: No, I didn’t say it was available. Did I? LF: I think you said that. PG: No, no. I mean, it’s a present thing. It’s not always available. In fact, just the contrary, it’s very unavailable. But occasionally it breaks through, spurts out, and I think it should be valued.

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CO N V E R S AT I O N W I T H C L A R K CO O L I D G E 1972

An after-dinner conversation in the Guston living room on Maverick Road in Woodstock. The routine of my visits was usually that I would come down in mid- to late afternoon and we would have drinks and a leisurely supper collaborated on by Philip and Musa. Philip seemed to like to delay going out to the studio as long as possible (“as you’ll see later in the studio,” etc.). But then, when it had become unavoidable, at 10 or 11 p.m., he would open the studio door and we would go in among the often thirty to forty new pictures. There, in my memory, the talk would become much more wild and interesting. But, of course, by that time the tape recorder was long forgotten.

Clark Coolidge: Well, you were thinking about what I said about the image. Philip Guston: When you looked at that picture [Paw, 1968], you were saying that it’s incredible what it takes to make an image, no? CC: How close you could come to having it not be an image and yet still be one. PG: Oh, I see. Well, when I’m painting it, if the image locks itself in there too quickly, or if I’m aware of it too much before I do it, then it’s boring and I wipe it out. I mean, who the hell wants that? You’d rather have the image in your mind than just have to look at it, isn’t that so? I’d rather think about something than actually see it. CC: How much do you think, how much do you see, before you put that down? at’s the gap that’s interesting. PG: Well, it’s very vague. It’s not nebulous, and vague isn’t the right word, but it’s like hovering, you know? It’s not solid in your mind. CC: I mean, did you think of a hand? PG: No. CC: How did you start? I mean, since that’s there. PG: Well, I’d been doing some hands previous to that, those pointing fingers and all that stuff, and then I was through with that. I didn’t want to do it again. I think there was some repainting on that paw. Whatever was there previously, I erased it. CC: Was it a hand before? PG: Some kind of a hand, but it wasn’t a hand with a stick, drawing. at I didn’t think of. In other words, I just started with some white on that pink ground, and roughly, vaguely, I know what it isn’t going to be. It’s not going to be an elephant or a tree.

Not previously published. This conversation took place in Woodstock, New York, on December 8, 1972.

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Philip Guston, Paw, 1968. Acrylic on panel, 30 × 32 inches.

CC: You saw a hand somehow. PG: A hand, yeah, but I didn’t know how it was going to appear or anything like that. But it came, as my images always come, very rapidly, and that rapidity has to do with the image and what it is as you’re doing it. Which has to do with when you stop, because you stop the moment you recognize it. I don’t mean recognize it as a noun, or as an image either, but recognize the minimum of what you need of what’s there to make this thing exist. I’m always excited by the thin line which divides the image from the nonimage. What’s exciting about an image is that at any given moment it would take so little to wipe it out completely, to have chaos, to have nothing there. CC: What about the time it takes to physically put that paint on? PG: Quick. It’s very quick. CC: ere isn’t any drag at all between . . . PG: No, because if it feels right, if the pistons or cylinders are going right, you can’t predict that or control it. When you’re in that condition, many things happen. First of all, you don’t see yourself painting. One way to test that you’re not there is when you

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constantly see yourself doing it, and that’s a drag. I mean, you might as well be wrapping up Christmas packages or something. I mean, you just see yourself doing something, like hammering a nail in a door, screwing something to something else. CC: Sure. You’re not in the activity. You’re out, watching the activity. PG: at’s right. You’re watching the activity while you’re doing it. So that’s when you know you’re not there. But at that very exciting moment when it all comes together, you’re not even aware that you’re painting it. You don’t even see the brush. I don’t know how in the hell it happens, but the brush just seems to go by itself like it has its own life. And of course it’s what I meant by the third hand. ere’s a third hand at work here. CC: Well, I was thinking about the enigma, starting with your middle-sixties pictures where you’re painting it up out of the paint and there’s a lot of erasures, and that’s the point where you said something like “e recognizable image is intolerable because it’s too abstract.” And I was thinking maybe there’s an equal if not greater enigma in wanting to see the thing that you even have imagined in some way as an image actually in paint. I mean, that might be something that wouldn’t necessarily be thought of as enigmatic. But the process of going between a mental image and painted image . . . PG: Can become enigmatic? Yes, I’ve done that, too, what I’ve described as process I didn’t mean to imply was the only and exclusive way I work. I’ve also, to test myself almost . . . You know, boredom can set in pretty rapidly, boredom of one’s processes. Something you do can become a way, can produce predictable results. It doesn’t work and you get bored with that. And I became, in some of those pictures of 1969, 1970, fascinated with whether it was possible for me just to do the opposite of what I had been doing. at is to say, to work in an opposite way. CC: You thought of it that way. PG: Exactly. As you know, you’ve seen in the studio many sketches and so on, that I would do before I started painting. Well, I’ll take away mystery and enigma. at comes later. You don’t start with that. What you start with is a kind of itch, a desire, a strong desire to see what you imagine, or preimagine. CC: I remember you said that once. PG: Just to see it! Like you might think: wouldn’t that be fantastic to see a hand eight feet long! CC: Because it can’t be the way it is in your head. PG: Exactly. Because the moment it gets into physical matter, when it gets onto the picture plane, in this flat mysterious thing we call the plane . . . CC: It’s all different. PG: It’s all different. It gets warped and it’s billowed and shrunken and pulled and . . . CC: It’s a different physics.

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PG: Exactly. I’ve thought a lot about this and it may border on a kind of voyeurism in a way, because it’s almost a desire to see what the hell this would look like. I’m going to make a very extreme silly example, as if we were in a room with a party of people we all know, all friends, a social evening, and suddenly you start imagining, what if they all started screwing each other? What would it look like? And I would imagine these scenes, not screwing scenes, but these characters and figurations I was working with. In a room, in a door, there’s a window, there’s a light. And if I put that all together in a natural spontaneous way, in my way of working, I wonder what the hell it would appear to be like, you know? CC: People in positions you never see them in. PG: Exactly! And even though the work has become, what’s a stupid word, “figurative,” and so on, “nonfigurative,” that’s not the point. Because I was never trying to duplicate visual data or anything. I was making a total construction of some kind. So there is that kind of itch and desire just to see it. And then the enigma becomes what I think you in the past have called a “clear enigma.” I’ve always liked that combination of words, because the enigma is sometimes thought to be something fuzzy and mysterious and misty. But then the enigma consists, in my case, of having pulled aside a curtain, almost like taking away the fourth wall of a room and looking at its contents. CC: Right. Like opening up the side of a building in New York and seeing in each one of those little cubes. PG: at’s right. I once had a conversation with Harold Rosenberg where we were talking about the enigma, and unfortunately I feel he got my intention all wrong. Because he brought up the subject of Magritte and I said no. I insisted on saying no, because I think there’s a world of difference between fantasy and enigma. CC: So do I. PG: Because I think to have a table’s legs turned into claws or paws, or a shoe ending up into toes, is fantasy. CC: And that, to me, means it’s understandable. PG: at’s understandable. And I don’t mean I’m against it, because I like Magritte. I just wanted to locate it. I mean, Magritte’s fine up to a certain point with me, but I don’t think I could enjoy that forever. CC: Well, enigma, to me, oen has to do with common objects. I think of fantasy as something almost embroidered by the mind. You start out with something and you make something fantastic out of it. Which probably has to do with your sexual or whatever drives. I mean, you elaborate on it. And that’s what Magritte looks like to me, like ideas fantasized. PG: at’s right. CC: Taken one step further.

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PG: Like, it could exist. Which is good fantasy, in writing and certainly in painting. I believe Magritte is not really traditionally a surrealist. I think he’s a fantast, basically. CC: I think he’s close to writing, by the way. I think he’s very verbal. PG: Yeah. I think one reason why he paints in as tasteless or styleless a manner as possible is to eliminate anything that would be in the way . . . CC: Like sensuality. PG: at’s right, sure. Or any paint technique. In other words, he’s painting in a dry commercial manner, like a sign painter of the old days, so that this object that he makes should look as clearly as possible, and in the light of day, as if this is what it would look like if it existed. CC: Yeah. PG: Well, that’s fantasy. CC: Just simplified a little bit by the process of painting. PG: Well, that’s in the technique, in the nature of the medium. CC: Almost cartooned, in a way. PG: at’s right, sure. Well, what the hell is enigma? CC: Enigma is totally baffling, for one thing. PG: Chirico, in that marvelous self-portrait at the very outset of his career, painted himself in profile, in a box, and around the box, lettered in around the frame, he says in Latin, “What shall I paint if not the enigma?”* en, sometime later, in reaction against the cubists, and he painted these things at the time of the cubist revolution, he said that he didn’t want to reconstruct the world, which is what the cubists were doing. He said he wanted to paint the world in such an aspect, and in such a light, as if it had never been seen before. Now is that the enigma? It’s not a fantasy. CC: No. Reconstruction of the world is fantasy. PG: In other words, you might say that the cubists were fantasts. A kind of genre fantasy. I mean, it was a fantasy about café life, bottles of wine, and Le Journal, a kind of genre still-life painting really. CC: Because, to me, enigma always comes with the feeling that it came from out there, somewhere I haven’t ever seen, or ever been. A fantasy I identify as being internalized. Like a reconstruction of things you’ve seen and taken in. PG: Yeah, but even if it comes from out there . . . CC: Well, I don’t know if it does. It probably doesn’t. But it has that feeling of otherness, although it might just be this [object on table].

* Chirico’s Latin translates as “What shall I love if not the enigma,” but this is how Guston phrased it.

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PG: Yeah, I know what you’re talking about. But, even though it has a feeling of otherness, it seems to me there must be this kind of pull, like an umbilical cord, to an image, to an object. And it could be, as you say, a banal or everyday object, but it has to have, somewhere along the line, a feeling of a certain kind of recognition. CC: Yeah. PG: As if you’ve never seen it before. CC: Now you’re putting your finger on it. It’s very difficult to talk about. PG: e recognition must be as if you’ve never seen it before, and yet you have seen it before, perhaps something forgotten. CC: Maybe that’s why it has that charge. It’s not something consciously known, but it is something you have seen. Or maybe it’s two things you’ve seen that are then put together. PG: In collision, uh-huh. CC: I mean, I have this feeling about collisions and juxtaposing. But I don’t like the word juxtaposition because it sounds like art history. PG: Yeah. CC: I mean this, or this, or wherever it happens to be. And I don’t mean me manipulating it. See, ’cause why I said “outside” is because the feeling of enigma to me is always that it came to me, beyond my doing it. I believe what you say about the umbilical cord must be true, but nevertheless the image has that feeling of unknownness. PG: I know. CC: Not your own familiar fantasies recombined, but something that just absolutely stops you. As if we looked out the window and saw something that we’d never seen. PG: Yeah. To be specific, to go back to that painting of the paw, and we were talking about the state I was in when I did it. I remember very distinctly that it happened quickly, maybe five or ten minutes of painting. e right accent in the right place, and then the dots on the paw. Because the proportions it took began to push it away from the human and it became an animal’s hand, or partial . . . CC: Beast’s . . . PG: A beast’s hand. And against that salmon-colored plane, indefinable, you don’t know what the hell it is, there’s no horizon line or anything. And when it was done I looked at it and my heart started beating and I started to get very excited, and I said, “Gee, that’s like the first hand that ever drew.” In ancient Egypt or in the Valley of Ur or something like that. And then I started thinking about man and about the missing link, since we really don’t know what happened. I mean, what did the man’s hand look like, who first drew a line or wrote something or made a mark on a rock? Now, was it like a paw? Didn’t it look like a beast’s hand? It must have. Maybe it was halfbeast, half-human? I’m going way off here, but . . .

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CC: You know what that makes me think of, though? e enigma is the first time something happened, too. PG: Yeah, tell me about that. CC: Well, I just happened to think, if you’re thinking of the first time a man ever made a mark on anything, then somebody seeing that, or the man himself doing it, and realizing it had never been done . . . PG: Oh, I see. CC: He’s having the experience of enigma, maybe. Because that had never happened before. PG: Oh, I see what you mean. Of course. CC: Which leads back into art, and why we do this. PG: Sure. CC: Every time we do something we’re trying to make the enigma. We’re almost trying to “produce” enigmas, which may be an impossibility. But the first time of anything may be . . . PG: Of anything. I know. CC: at could almost be a definition if you wanted. PG: Well, that gets us into the whole area we were talking about in the kitchen, when we were bitching about other artists and being very bitter about the scene, both in poetry and in painting, being very disenchanted with certain artists. And I was talking about de Kooning’s show, and you were talking about certain writers and what they were doing. And it just occurs to me now that you’re saying that the trouble with the work is that they’ve stopped doing things for the first time. So therefore it has no enigma to it, no mystery, and all they’re le with then are their own mannerisms. CC: Right. PG: So then it means that to be an artist you always have to do something the first time. CC: Yeah. It also means you always have to be discontented, probably. PG: at’s right. CC: Which is the rub. PG: Yeah. CC: But you know what? I think the reason I get so pissed off when I’m talking about other failings, the limitations of other poets, let’s say, is not so much them. It’s that they keep bringing up to me my own limitations. ey keep reminding me of the times when I didn’t do it, when I held back or when I repeated. You know what I mean? PG: Oh, I see what you mean. Of course. CC: And I don’t want to be reminded of that. When I look at art I want to be pushed in the direction of, let’s say, the enigmas. I don’t want to be reminded of what I did.

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PG: at’s right. ey make you see what you hate. CC: Yeah. In yourself. PG: Hate about your own work. CC: Exactly. PG: So that’s where the discontent comes in. CC: Yeah. I think really that’s the discontent. It goes beyond people and friends or whatever. I mean, that’s just the basic discontent. PG: So then, if one were to make a principle of it, you could make a principle of discontent. Discontent is a very difficult thing to learn. CC: e other thing I was thinking about: Some of these newer paintings, contrasted against the mid-sixties dark paintings, are mainly an image in space with no history. ere’s nothing around them. e sixties ones, they’re surrounded by their history, right? PG: ey’re surrounded by their past. I mean, where they’ve moved from. CC: eir states. PG: eir states, that’s right. CC: And I just wonder how the process changes, from working up through states which are then le there . . . PG: Into these images, you mean? Like that book [Untitled (Book), 1968]? CC: Yeah. It seems, like you said, like a reverse of what you were doing before, a reverse of a process. PG: Well, if you concentrate on a single object, or something somebody has made marks on so it looks like a book . . . I had no idea it would become so bent. I think I wanted to make it feel like pillows, or not like pillows but like a kind of ancient stone carving. In fact, some of the books, as you remember . . . CC: Are absolute slabs. PG: . . . are like stone. ey become like tablets. CC: Yeah. PG: Well, what can I do? I didn’t feel like putting it on a table. I didn’t want to make a wall in back of it. I didn’t want it to be on a specific plane, or located in a space. ere is no space, because the whole space is . . . CC: e space is within that book. PG: . . . is within the book. CC: I mean, all those little lines, that’s the history, right? PG: Yeah. at’s right. It’s there, it’s in the image itself. CC: In the past, which is what a book is.

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PG: Sure, exactly. CC: But then it’s will, actually. PG: Will? CC: Well, the decision to start with an image . . . PG: To focus on the object, yeah. CC: . . . and put an image on, rather than starting with paint, as in the mid-sixties, and see how it comes up. It seems like the process really did change. PG: Did change totally. Absolutely. CC: It’s really interesting how that could happen. PG: Well, one of the things that plagued me in that transition . . . I mean, don’t think that during the sixties, in those black and gray pictures, or even the fiies, there weren’t repeated attempts to make specific objects. ere were. But I couldn’t retain it. ey would have to go. And then a picture would finally come about because of the removal of the images. CC: You think it was a struggle to do this [new pictures]? PG: Yes, I think so. As I remember, at that time I resisted because of a fear I had of specificity. And if I were to speak critically of myself from this vantage point now, I feel I made an aesthetic of, or was too open towards, the idea of ambiguity. inking then that if I didn’t allow myself to be specific with images, by working then with exclusions, there resulted a certain kind of ambiguous thing where it almost was something but wasn’t something. e brush seemed to make the form and so on. Well, a lot has been written about that, about the powers, or the effect of one area on another area, acting on each other and so on. I think what happened was that I became weary of that kind of ambiguity. CC: Because that wasn’t what you were trying to do. PG: Exactly! CC: at’s really ironic, you know . . . PG: We never even talked about that before. CC: at whole aesthetic came up out of erasures. PG: at’s right. CC: A whole “beauty” of . . . PG: Yeah, I know. CC: Some sort of horrible . . . mistake. PG: Misunderstanding. I just had my fill of it and I reacted against it in the most violent way. And that’s the reason I turned and then started these very pure drawings. I couldn’t even paint for that year or year and a half. Just like clearing the decks and saying, “Well, let’s see what one line and another line do to each other.” Just that, you

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know? And that’s a very important period because, even though it’s objectless, in a real sense it’s very close to, and led directly into, painting a book, a shoe, a hand. e everyday common objects I started painting. And it wasn’t just a desire for tangibilia, though that too was there—almost counter to the whole idea of the flatness of painting, which I detested. Because I think there’s a hunger for touchability. It’s touch. To feel a form. CC: Sure, because paint is tangible. PG: at’s right. So that I felt that maybe there’s an ambiguity that I haven’t even dreamt of. In other words, what would happen if I did paint a simple object like a book or a hand or a shoe? at finally became to me the most enigmatic of all. It seemed to me like an even greater enigma. Or, rather, a deeper ambiguity. It’s a different kind of ambiguity I wanted. I was weary of that whole thing that had gotten so accepted, which made it repulsive to me and thrown back to my face again and all that. An ambiguity that became so diffused and generalized that there was nothing le of it anymore. CC: at’s really clear. I can see your sense, in the sixties, that those paintings were like dragging your own sludge with you. PG: Yeah. CC: And then to have that sludge held up as a great abstract work . . . PG: at’s right. CC: at must have been really a tough thing to . . . PG: Terrible. I know it. CC: Because you want the clarity. You want the discrete, in the best sense. PG: e discrete? CC: Discrete is a word I like in the sense of, not social discretion, but discrete objects. Bounded edges. e edges aren’t ambiguous. at’s another thing, that you could have ambiguity of edgelessness or you could have an ambiguity of absolutely edged . . . I don’t mean objects, but bounded . . . PG: You mean monolithic? CC: Well, some of the last paintings that you did really got into that area. Aer you spewed everything out of your mouth and there was stuff in the air. PG: Just floating around. CC: And it was all tangents. And absolutely discrete images, and the fact that they were so clear made the gaps between them and their relation to each other even more enigmatic or ambiguous. You wanted that clarity, I think, to get back to being able to deal with them at all. Because otherwise I think maybe you had your own smokescreen going. Is that a possibility? I mean, those gray pictures might’ve begun to seem like you had too much of your past still hanging around. I mean, you’d have to say that, but . . .

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PG: Oh, yes. But that has to do with what we were talking about previously. CC: And that’s a whole fascinating process in itself. PG: Oh, sure. Well, as you know, in the sixties the final form that appeared, a black shape, a head, a form of some kind against a lot of overworked dense surround, I became fascinated with that form having lived in other places before it came to rest in this one place. is absorbed me very deeply for many years. But now, in these recent pictures you referred to, with these fragments floating around, none of those were overpainted or repainted. It’s almost like open-eyed dreaming, you know? As if I were in front of the canvas, dreaming and almost knowing what I was going to paint. CC: How about where those things are? PG: I didn’t worry about it. I didn’t worry about where, and more oen than not it worked, that I just trusted my instinct for location. So maybe I had to do all that, ten years of that sixties painting, to feel like, well, I don’t want to repaint anything anymore. I mean, let me just put it there, put that shoe there, put that bottle there, put that guy’s mouth there, and that stick of wood there, and that brick there. Yeah. And in fact, I don’t even think it’s trust. I think that’s an artificial way, a kind of conservative or academic way, of talking about it. Actually, I discovered over a period of time that there are two elementary or basic ways my forms work anyway. Either they’re coming together or they’re going apart. And I think that’s about all that composition is anyway. CC: Never still. PG: at’s right. ey seem to want to clump together and stay there, and that’s okay for a moment. But then they want to move apart, and then want to go back to the center again, like a control center, as if that’s home. And home lets them out, magnetically, for a little while, just to enjoy themselves. CC: A rest period. PG: Rest. And then they want to come back again. So there isn’t too much accident involved anyway. I think that’s a myth. CC: I think so, too. PG: I find I’m so intimately involved with these two movements that I don’t think I’m risking anything. e only thing I really have to do is get myself to paint while I’m dreaming. at’s about all it amounts to. Does that mean anything? CC: Yeah. It makes me think about how the positions of objects, or arrangements of things, have always fascinated me. Like these objects on the table. You might call these accidental arrangements, but, I mean, not the artistic, this-balance-that kind of thing. PG: No, we’re not talking about that. CC: Maybe there’s a way of getting objects to exist more like they exist, not the aesthetic ways you have in your mind. Maybe that was what was meant by “accident” in a sense? PG: Well, accident has no real meaning anymore. It had a momentary meaning in the

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early years of the century, when Duchamp, or Man Ray, or maybe it was Max Ernst, one of the early dadaists, dropped a string on some setting plaster, and of course the string made an interesting and fascinating surface. But I doubt whether that was even an accident, because there are physical forces involved. CC: Well, I’m just sort of hammering against the aesthetic history of manners of arranging elements in a painting, which are so well known that you know them in your sleep. And you don’t want to do that, because it’s done and done and done. PG: Well, there’s no desire to. I mean, there’s no surprise. CC: And yet you want to see things in relation and nonrelation, but you don’t want to see them that way. at’s why I’d rather see this [table objects] than a painting that’s all balanced. PG: Well, look, anybody would rather look at life than art. I mean, I would much rather drive my car to Saugerties [near Woodstock, New York] and just look at all the buildings and rocks. But the fact is that when you put down some paint on a surface, let’s say it’s a red shape of your pack of cigarettes, and then you mix up some gray and put down the table that it’s on, it’s not what you see in real life anyway. It becomes itself. We all know that. But the question is: What does it become there in this field that you’re creating on? ere’s meaning in everything. e question is: What kind of meaning? Let’s see. At this point, what were we talking about? Control, as against no control? CC: I guess I was talking about habit, actually. Learned methods of relations. e kind of thing that is so nonenigmatic that it’s just past history. And yet there is a fascination with the way things are arranged, in a painting or here, regardless. As long as it isn’t the same damned old way of relating. PG: ings that you’ve seen again and again, yeah. CC: And I was trying to get through that to your method of painting now. e fact that you no longer follow where a thing has been and . . . PG: I’m not so involved with process. You mean, actual physical process? CC: Yeah. I mean, where this shape has been in these various places and now it’s here. And you say: “It’s done when it’s been everywhere I can think of.” PG: Yes, and comes to rest momentarily. CC: But just momentarily. PG: Just momentarily. at is to say, that it must then feel as if it could go somewhere else. It’s just pausing. Which is, of course, the promise of continuity. It means not death. It means promise of continuation of life. But actually I’m more fascinated now with something different than that. I almost want to call it the Egyptian feeling. at is to say, I don’t want something to look as if it can move and be somewhere else. I want it to feel almost, not entirely, as if it’s just there forever that way. CC: So therefore, what you said before has changed? About your forms always going

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together or coming apart? Now that you’re talking about this Egyptian sense of the thing always being there. PG: ere. Well, I know that sounds different, doesn’t it? It sounds conflicting. Well, I guess the answer to that is that I’m fascinated with both, really, at different times. In the work I did last winter, I was very involved with the feeling of forms moving apart and coming together. Forms feeling as if they had le home and then were coming back to this control center, eventually. And of course, to be psychological for a moment, what is this center? e center is me. at’s what the center is, right? CC: Right. PG: But then in this summer’s work, in some of those panels you were talking about, I became fascinated in another way with not that, but with forms just being there. Almost static, not movable. Why, I don’t know. CC: Well, I think that’s probably because that’s a quality of the act of painting, to get something down. Everything that’s in the sense of that phrase. To make it stay there. To stop it, in a sense. Like that book, to make it be there. Maybe that’s part of the original impulse for making a mark at all. To have a part of yourself, an act of yourself, be on the world. PG: at’s right. Well, there’s something I think I’ll probably constantly keep vacillating or wavering between, movement and no movement. I think it’s true of my whole past, as far as I know my past, to be fascinated by the one and the multitudinous. Sometimes I’ll put a lot of forms into a picture and think: Why do I need all that? I really don’t need this multitudinous feeling of forms. e world is filled with multitudinous forms. I really am looking for one form, a static form, from which the multitudinous forms come anyway. Like that bulging book we’re looking at now. It’s a sculptured book and yet it’s done very simply, in a very minimal way. It’s one of the best books of the series. ere’s just something about having a single form which is there in a space. ere’s no movement to speak of, visually. It’s just there, and yet it’s shaking, like throbbing, or burning or moving, but there’s no sign of its moving. Now that book, I may be reading my things into it that other people don’t see, but I don’t think so. CC: No, I see what you mean. It’s vibrating. PG: It vibrates! In other words, it’s like nailing down a butterfly but the damn thing is still moving around. And this seems to be the whole act of art anyway, to nail it down for a minute but not kill it. at’s what I mean. Whereas in the act of painting sometimes, when I don’t feel so all together, and I want to keep in motion, I’ll paint movement. I mean, I’ll just put down a lot of things. And finally that doesn’t satisfy me, and I always wonder why it doesn’t satisfy me. But it doesn’t sum it up for me. ere’s no need for it. at is to say, instead of painting all those forms moving around in the pictures—what the hell, I could just as well pull up the shade and look out the window on the street. Why do I have to do it? I don’t have to do it on canvas, but I

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want to do what nature doesn’t do. I mean, I can look out and see trees blowing, wind moving, and things are happening. I don’t have to duplicate that. But what I don’t see is a single form that’s vibrating away, constantly, forever and ever and ever to keep vibrating. And that seems to be magical as hell, enigmatic as hell, really. Gee, I never said that before, that way. Now that book is really moving. CC: at goes back to my feeling that we’ve talked about before, that in art you always work between opposites. Between stopping and going, stasis and movement, abstraction and figuration. PG: Yes, that’s right. CC: I think it’s like a machine that keeps us going, like electricity. PG: It’s a tension between the two. CC: Between gaps, between poles. Which causes a lot of our dissatisfaction, because we go more to one side. PG: You mean, a necessary dissatisfaction. CC: Yeah. Because at any one time it’s more one or the other. PG: Veering. CC: When we’re toward this, we think maybe that one’s wrong. PG: at’s right. CC: But we don’t realize that we’re constantly moving. You never really stop anything, unless you die. Wherever that is. PG: But even that I think should be accepted. Well, it’s been a bad couple of months, as you know, but nevertheless I did a couple of very small oils. at’s all I’ve done in these two months. Each one is a head of a guy with a cigarette in his mouth. He’s just smoking. An off-profile or something like that. Now those heads look like they’re dead. I mean, they don’t look like the thing we’re just now talking about at all. I did them both in one day, or two days, and because of other things I haven’t been able to work, but I do go in the studio to do this and that, and I see them, and those two heads have kept me going. And what I think about in my thoughts around that, and I know I’m going to burst out in these new pictures very soon now that my pictures are back and the racks are built and all that stuff, is . . . Now don’t jump, because I’m contradicting everything I just said. CC: Well, we always do. PG: We always do. I’m thinking about death. at is to say, I don’t mean about me physically dying, I don’t mean that, but about forms that absolutely don’t move at all, that are just dead forms. CC: Well, dead forms and live forms, that’s another two poles. PG: e only life in these forms is the smoke. ese two heads are like dead stone, dead mummy heads, glazed and dead. e only movement is the smoke going up.

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Philip Guston, Untitled [Head], 1975. Ink on paper, 19 × 231⁄2 inches.

CC: Of course, I have a feeling that nothing is really static anyway. I suppose physically you can always say there are atoms spinning around, but I like to think about geological time. Slow erosion, gradual moving of strata of rocks. Incredibly slow time, to us, because our time . . . PG: Our time is different. CC: Yeah, and everything is like that. I was looking at my cat the other day and wondering about the sense of time the cat must have, since it only lives maybe fieen years or so. PG: Or less, yeah. CC: A day must be an incredible expanse of time. PG: Oh, I see what you mean. Yeah, sure. CC: To us, it’s like “Ahh, the damn cat came in again, he just went out, why doesn’t he . . . ?” But to him it’s a whole sequence. PG: at’s right. And to us, we can waste days, knowing that we have the span that we do have. CC: Which is working against yourself, I think.

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Philip Guston, Untitled, 1974. Ink on paper, 14 × 17 inches.

PG: I know, yeah. CC: To lay back on that, and we do it all the time. PG: at’s fascinating, yeah. CC: Another thing, back a ways you were talking about how important those simple lines are. To me it seems like one of your really basic things is line. I mean, just drawing a line. PG: I agree with you. CC: And these new paintings are getting back to line, right? PG: Well, that’s getting back to what you call the bones of the whole damn thing, which is line. at’s right. CC: Because the mid-sixties was hardly line. It was mass. You got so into mass that you had one big mass. PG: Exactly! In fact, I wanted to eliminate line. One of the great excitements of those black, dark pictures in the mid-sixties was to eliminate line, to eliminate contour and work with mass.

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CC: Which you had done in drawings in the early fiies. PG: at’s right. And I swung just the other way aer that, with line. Well, one of the things about line is that it’s the most direct, primitive . . . CC: It’s the mark. PG: Mark, of a division of space. When you come in the studio, because of the photographs that Steve [Sloman] is going to take, I picked out about twenty-five or thirty of these which you haven’t really seen. And some of them are only one line, or at most two lines or three lines, dividing the space. And I realize now that I had to do that, and why I did that. CC: It’s the bones. PG: It’s the bones of the whole thing. CC: Because you can look at a line and it’s fantastically ambiguous, too. At the same time as being the most solid thing you can make, you could see it so many ways. You can see it as a cut, you can see it as a stiff iron, you can see it as a division . . . PG: Well, at this point, however, I must say something about that year of drawing, when I did hundreds, literally, maybe even into the thousands. CC: In Florida, right? PG: at’s right. And up here. CC: It strikes me funny that that was in Florida. PG: I know. Well, for many reasons that we don’t have to go into now, I was cut off, you know. CC: I know. And it’s because I always think of Florida as a good-for-nothing place. PG: It is! at’s exactly what it is. It’s nothing. CC: Where rich people go to do nothing. PG: I know. It’s just a nothing place. CC: And you go there and you do that. PG: I know. Well, I didn’t work there for some weeks or months and then finally, out of desperation, I started this. And, in fact, when I was doing these line things, I suddenly got a call from [Morton] Feldman, who was in Texas making that show for the de Menils, in Dallas? Or Houston, I guess it was. And he said, “I’m in Texas, come and see me.” No. He said, “Can I come to see you?” And I said, “Please come.” He said, “What are you doing?” I said, “I’m down to one line.” And he said, “I’m coming right away.” And he appeared two days later. I met him at the airport and I showed him all these things. ey were all over the walls, the floor. e whole studio was just bulging, hung with these drawings. ey were just brush ink on paper. ey were all over the floor—you couldn’t walk in. So we looked at them. And that night, aer dinner, we took a walk along the beach, and I started kind of weeping. Not weeping but sort of shaking. And I said, “Well, I’m really down to nothing now. I’m just down

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Philip Guston drawing in Sarasota, Florida, 1967.

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to, like, one line.” I mean, there were literally dozens of drawings with just one line. And, you know, Feldman always has a kind of obtuse way of talking, and he said that the last great trick of Houdini’s was to put himself in a trunk, the trunk was locked, the key was thrown away, and they threw the trunk over the Brooklyn Bridge into the river. You remember that famous trick? CC: Yeah. PG: So he told me that story. And that was all I needed to hear, that story. CC: What does that mean? PG: Well, he said that’s exactly the state, the situation you’re in. CC: Wow. But I bet he secretly loved that . . . simplicity. PG: Well, that’s Feldman. Anyway, look what happened from that line. But here’s what I want to tell you about that. You know, you do things and then you get critical and you become not so enchanted with the gesture anymore, and you begin seeing what it’s doing in the whole field. And the ones that were thrown away were where they were just lines. Who the hell wants lines? Any more than you want mass or color. I mean, they talk about color field painting as if we’re all panting and hungry for color. Who needs color? Or who needs line? Who needs anything? CC: Right. PG: What you want is . . . something. is enigma is what you want, this mystery. Right? CC: By any means. PG: By any means. So that the ones that worked and that I kept, and by worked I mean kept on exciting me, kept on vibrating, kept on moving, were the ones where it is not just line. When it becomes a double activity. at is, when the line defines a space and the space defines the line, there you’re somewhere. CC: Right. And that’s not balance or anything. PG: Not at all, but that’s the mysterious part. So this was just as mysterious to me as an eight-foot painting. I mean, this one line on the right is gently pushing that other line. e second line feels like a wind is blowing it into a totally open space. CC: Right. Or partially open. PG: Yeah, I mean partially open space, that’s right. You mean, it’s defined as to where it’s going to go, that one line? CC: Well, it’s just breaking loose, too. PG: Breaking loose. CC: You got it at the moment of detachment. PG: at’s right. Exactly. It’s like in physics, an elaborate concept could be contained in a simple symbol, you know? CC: Yeah.

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Philip Guston, Statement, 1968. Charcoal on paper, 171⁄2 × 23 inches.

PG: at’s like a symbol of a very elaborate system there. CC: Like an infinity sign. PG: Exactly. CC: It’s ridiculous. PG: Exactly. Exactly. CC: I mean, there’s something endlessly . . . PG: Which has to do with that area being open all around. CC: It’s just an endless action. PG: at’s right. CC: Because it never stops. PG: It keeps renewing itself. But then, you see, that same phenomenon can happen with a more tangible . . . CC: Ah! PG: . . . form. is is what I wanted. Now, I may be all wrong. Maybe the whole thing is a catastrophe, and there are many days of doubts as to whether I should have stuck with that other thing. I mean, there have been people in this house who said, “Why did you leave that?” But the idea of just staying with that kind of disgusts me. If I had

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stayed with that, what was I going to do—make a show or a whole aesthetic out of that? I think I wanted to know whether with objects in the real world, just as we talked about, everyday objects, whether that phenomenon isn’t true there, too. Well, then what’s the difference between that book and that [one-line drawing]? You tell me. It’s not doing that, is it? Well, what is it doing? And is one better than another? Is one more valuable than another? CC: You know what happens: You look at it and you make an identification in your mind. PG: A recognition. CC: Yeah. And you do it with anything. You try to make it identified. You try to name it, and when you do that it’s not interesting to me. I mean, the moment where it’s identified is like a shrug. But what’s going on aer that, aer that’s happened, the way the thing won’t die, you know what I mean? e way it won’t just stay a name. It’ll keep on going like you said, the vibration. en, I think it’s doing the same thing that’s doing. PG: You do? CC: Yeah, it doesn’t matter. Well, not exactly the same thing. PG: I don’t mean just optically. CC: No, I don’t mean that either. But what makes it vibrate? What keeps you looking at it? PG: Well, this [book] is more mysterious to me than that [one line]. CC: What kept you looking at it long enough to paint it? What makes that more interesting than just a book? In other words, you said, “Paint a book,” and you went like this [shapes rectangle in air]. So what? You obviously didn’t just do that. You said: “Each one of those little things is a whole world.” PG: Yeah, the writing in there. CC: Okay, that’s that act, which has a similarity to this act. I’m just talking about process now. But you’re going to say: “Yeah, but how come I’m more interested in that?” PG: How come I’m more interested in that than this? CC: at’s what I’m trying to . . . PG: is has been going on now for five years, and I’m just as puzzled by that. Why couldn’t I have stayed with that? ese lines, this reduction. CC: I think it has to do with a sense of tangibility and physicality. PG: Can you enlarge on that? CC: Well, I had this thing I thought of where for some reason it seemed to me that I got a stronger feeling of the paint as material from looking at a painted image rather than a less defined one. And that seemed to me odd. Why? It would seem like the paintings of the mid-sixties would leave you with paint, with material, a lot stronger. But

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the more I look at these, like that little book you gave me. I’ve got it in front of my typewriter. PG: You wrote something wonderful in a letter to me once about that book. CC: What was that? PG: Well, to paraphrase you, you said that you’re constantly mystified by how a mark or marks become an image. CC: at’s what I’m trying to get at. It’s like we want to be all of our work. We want to bring to bear everything. You want the name and the thing. PG: Sure. CC: And the movement. at’s still vaguer than I want to say, but it just seemed that the longer I looked at that book the more I was aware of it as a book and as paint. Equally, maybe. PG: To go back for a minute, one thing you just said in talking about that book, that the recognition puts you off: book, shrug, so what? But then, aer the recognition, come all these other feelings. Well, what I think, in my own back and forth between the pure thing, the essence thing, and the figurative thing, that tangible object, is this: it’s as if I want a mask. And I think this is important, significant. I’ve thought so much about it, that one of the difficulties with this essence thing is that it is not hidden. CC: Too open? PG: It’s too open and too evident, for me. CC: Okay, well, what about artifice then? PG: Well, wait a minute before you use the word artifice. It seems to me that when you paint an object, when you talk about the recognition, a significant value or ingredient is the hidden and the masked. And what I mean exactly is this: Now, all good painting, and I think my painting is good, has always dealt with forces. But that’s a generalized statement. By forces I mean you’re dealing with movement and magnetism. e magnetic pulls of one form on another. e things which happen in the spatial field that separate. And also the psychological overtones and so on. All right. Now, it seems to me that an important ingredient here is that I don’t think we want those forces to be so evident to us, that when they are somewhat masked they seem to last longer for me. In fact, I think that’s where the enigma is, in the hidden. And when it is not as hidden, there are hidden things there, too. It’s not an either/or situation. I think the reason I couldn’t live too long in that place of that essence thing is that what was happening was too immediately evident to me. So I thought, well, okay, so I’m not a modern artist. I can live with that, too. Modern art being that which is most direct, most evident. It speaks to you with nothing hidden, everything exposed. I mean, modern art has to do with . . . CC: Taking things apart?

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PG: Taking things apart and exposing. And traditional art, the art of the past, is a hidden art. And it could be that, temperamentally, the source of my difficulty here, if it is a difficulty, is a constant pulling, veering, between exposing and hiding. CC: Well, there’s another one of those polarities. PG: at could be. Because I think a guy like Philip Pearlstein doesn’t have a problem. He just paints those stupid elbows and knees. I mean, I’m not talking about realistic painting. But when a formal painter like myself starts dealing with objects, these elements do come into it. And by the way, it just occurs to me that one of the reasons for the resistance to my recent work was that it couldn’t be placed easily. at is to say, it was neither abstract nor figurative. “If it’s figurative,” many critics wrote, “why doesn’t he paint the way things are and look, like Pearlstein or Alex Katz?” But you know, if you deal with objects with a great heightened sense of form, of forces and abstractions of forces, you’ve got something that looks mighty peculiar. CC: Right. at’s why I said that thing about recognition, because you can recognize that [one line] as something, too. Not as an image but as a certain kind of art. I mean, you can have that flicker and say, “Ah, that’s . . .” PG: at bothers me. at bothers me. CC: I must say, though, Philip, that goes beyond that, and you know it, too. PG: Yes. I know that, too. CC: But let’s not get off the argument. You’ve got something good going here. PG: You mean about the hidden? CC: e exposed and the hidden. PG: Well, then if you deal with objects, you are hiding . . . CC: ose artists of the past believed in spirits and gods and magic, right? More than we do. We’re a pragmatic age. We’ve got this fucked-up Greenbergian take-it-apart school. So, here’s a guy who just does the backgrounds; he’s a color field painter. And here’s a guy who makes actual objects. PG: is is great. We never talked this way about it. But you see, to me, and I think to you, too, art is still a primitive magic. And the artists of the past believed in art as magic and art as exorcising, et cetera. In other words, this was the original function of art anyway, from the caves onward. CC: e spoken word, too. PG: And the spoken word, too. So that it seems to me the only hope for art, at least the only thing that excites me and makes my heart go pitty-pat, is the magic, the imagery. At dinner you were talking about Melville, Moby Dick. Well, for God’s sake, I mean, as you said, that’s a cosmos there, no? e whole thing is about magic. CC: You know what’s interesting about that book, too, is that in that book he believed in Jehovah. He believed in the Shrouded of Ages, or whatever you call it. Only at the

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end of his life he weakened and took up what Olson called the so hermaphroditical Christs of his later work.* Like a man going down the drain, you know? But before that, he had the fucking forces of the world in his hand. e pyramids. Did you ever read that magnificent description of the pyramids that he wrote? PG: No. CC: It’s in a notebook. He said they neither seemed to have been built by man or God.† PG: Isn’t that fantastic? CC: He said the more you look at them . . . And there’s the enigma. PG: Well, that is the enigma! CC: He absolutely put his finger on it. PG: at’s the riddle of the sphinx. CC: You see, and let me just take it into words for a second. ere’s the recognition of naming with words, which has become so facile that it’s the shrug. I mean, we’re in an information age. What we want from words is the information. To me, the word is magic. If you say book and then you keep looking at the word, or sounding the word in your mind, you realize that the word has a lot of qualities that aren’t just a matter of a simple exchange, you know what I mean? In early times, we’re told that there were only certain men who were allowed to speak certain words, because those words were absolutely evocations of something that only existed at that moment. ey had this magic quality. And that’s what I want to get. PG: I feel so much what you’re saying. at’s what I want, an image to contain that, to be as fraught with that danger and evocation and risk. CC: We don’t even know what it is, right? PG: No. But, it seems to me, that’s the only hope for art now. Otherwise it can just be information art. CC: Absolutely. And that’s what most of it is now. PG: You see? Or optical art or . . . CC: I mean, back to words, an art that you can call, that you can name and shrug off. is art, that art, all those little modules. PG: ere’s something else that fascinates me, and I’ve thought a lot about this: that when movement substitutes itself as a form, that’s fascinating. at is to say, it puts on clothes, so to speak, becomes bodied, rather than disembodied. CC: Right. Like that book picture. ere’s a kind of graspability factor that should be brought up, too, which isn’t just a matter of identification.

* Charles Olson, Collected Prose (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 90. †

“Man seems to have had as little to do with it as Nature.” Herman Melville, Journals (Evanston: North-

western University Press, 1989), 78.

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PG: It has to do with kinesthesia. It has to do with being blind. I mean, I wanted that book to feel as if you were blind in a dark room and you came in and you felt an object. How would you paint something that you only felt with your hands? CC: Painting a book in the dark. PG: Yeah. Or you grab that paw and feel its pulpiness, or its tendon, or whatever you’d feel. So, it’s not just a noun, not just recognition. CC: You know what, though? e words themselves are masks. at’s another interesting thing. PG: Yeah, tell me about that. CC: e word book, let’s just say that. What has that got to do with the real book really? PG: No. It’s a separate thing. CC: It’s booooook. Like in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, he takes the spool of tape and he says, “spoooooool,” and he says it over and over again, so it’s like an incantation. PG: You’re talking about the space between the thing and the word, which we have invented. CC: Yeah. When we’re naming something we’re really masking it, in a sense. PG: Of course you are. CC: Because we’re using this word which doesn’t relate to it, except by acceptance of a meaning. But this thing, this mask, what is it? It’s absolutely fascinating. PG: Well, then would you say art is a mask? CC: Yeah. PG: Art is a mask. CC: Very strong. Yeah. PG: And furthermore, to confound this more, frustration is a very crucial ingredient here. e frustration of not being able to make them identical. at is to say, the word book is not the book, because you can feel the book and tear it or cut it, squash it or crumple it. But book is a word. And so my painting of an object has to do with the frustration of not being able to paint the object, either. CC: Which, to further confound it, isn’t what you want to do anyway. PG: Of course not. I know it. But I would say that the frustration is a crucial ingredient here. CC: Absolutely. at’s the resistance. PG: It’s the resistance. It’s the frustration of the desire to not paint altogether. at is to say, art is the frustration of the desire not to make art, you know? CC: Wow. I’ve got to hear that, myself. PG: And the trouble with that . . . I’ve had my lonely winter nights worrying about that, those two lines . . .

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CC: at is the desire to make art. PG: at’s right. And that’s why I had to give it up. at makes art too available to me. And that’s where my fight with Feldman is, and he knows it and that’s why he won’t call me. He wants me to do that. CC: Well, that’s what I meant. He loved that, right? PG: at’s right. And he wants art. CC: You were in hell, and he was loving that. PG: He was loving it. And he wants art. And I don’t want to be an artist really. But I am and I’m going to be and I want to make these forms. CC: Well, that’s what you said in your letter, “the irresponsibility to art.” PG: at’s right. And talk about Melville, boy, he burst those bounds. CC: He was illegal for all time. PG: at’s right. He was somewhere else. CC: I mean, no wonder nobody liked it. It was a punch in the mouth. PG: Well, you’re not supposed to burst the limits of art. CC: He was supposed to write travelogues. PG: He was supposed to make literature. CC: You’re not supposed to be able to create. PG: at’s right. CC: It’s like the original sin. PG: Exactly. CC: Don’t touch it. PG: at’s right. CC: Boy, this goes a long ways. PG: You know, I never thought of it before. I’ve got to hear this again. Why don’t we have ourselves a drink? CC: Okay. We’re about to the end of the tape anyway. PG: Just let it run out. CC: I have the feeling I’ve dealt with these things but I haven’t thought about some of them, you know what I mean? I guess you feel that way, too. PG: Sure. Well, you talk about discontent . . . I think discontent precisely has to do with, and I guess I must put it sort of blatantly, it has to do with the disgust with art. CC: Yeah. PG: I think the greatness of Beckett, really, is that deep and lifelong profound disgust with art. And, paradoxically, that’s why he became a great artist. But if you go into this devil’s work, and it is a devil’s work, there’s no insurance you’re going to come out.

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CC: Yeah. Right. PG: And the reason that there are hundreds and thousands of good, safe artists is because there’s a threshold which some are perhaps aware of, others not. And those that are aware of it don’t want to pass that threshold. CC: at’s why I say, it’s not that I’m so discontented with my friends who are poets. I’m just discontented. PG: Yes, I know what you mean. CC: And therefore I’m discontented with their lack of discontent. PG: Of course. CC: I feel like: I’m discontented, what’s the matter with you guys? PG: Yeah. Why aren’t you discontented? CC: What did you say, “devil’s work”? You know what Melville said, that famous quote? He wrote to Hawthorne, aer he’d finished Moby Dick, and he said, “I’ve written an evil book . . .” PG: No! CC: “. . . and feel spotless as a lamb.”* PG: Oh, that’s fantastic! As spotless as a lamb. CC: Yeah, he saved himself somehow. PG: at’s right. at’s marvelous. CC: He went there and he came back. It’s like going into a deep psychosis and coming out. PG: I know just what that feeling is. Oh, that’s marvelous. CC: Which is what [R. D.] Laing and those guys believe, that you go through your psychosis. You go all the way into it and you come out. You don’t try to stop it with psychoanalysis or drugs or something. You go through. PG: Well, isn’t that true? Like we once talked about, artists who settle somewhere. I once made an analogy that, in painting, creating, it’s a court. But unlike a court, you’re the plaintiff, the defendant, the lawyer, the judge, and the jury. And most artists want to settle outside of court. No trial. CC: It’s a perfect image, because that’s how you do make money in court, you settle out. If you don’t, you lose all your money in the process. PG: at’s right. Well, in Italian, trial is processo. It’s called process. Or in German, it’s prozess. And in French, it’s procès. e trial is process.

* “I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as a lamb.” Herman Melville, Correspondence (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 212.

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CC: Sure. I suppose that’s even true in English. Like trial by fire. Going through something. PG: Going through, sure. So that Kaa’s book in Italian would be called Il Processo. CC: Fantastic. PG: Yeah. [laughter] CC: at all makes sense. It’s perfect. PG: I like what you said about Laing. How some people, in going into psychoanalysis, prefer to stop. CC: Treat symptoms. PG: Sure. CC: at’s what our medicine is all about. PG: Is to stop somewhere. CC: Float. Float for the rest of your life.

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TA L K AT YA L E S U M M E R S C H O O L O F M U S I C A N D A R T 1973

Philip Guston: Well, that’s a very nice introduction. I feel very much at home here. I feel at a little disadvantage aer criticizing all your work this aernoon. Now I’m going to show you my stuff. And I’m not a professional lecturer, just to reiterate, so I’m going to show you my paintings. I made a selection of paintings starting from about 1940. Probably the most difficult thing to do is talk about your own work. I don’t know if I can do it. It’s far easier to talk about somebody else’s work. I think I’d feel more comfortable if I were giving a talk on Piero della Francesca or some of the loves I have of the past: Mantegna, Masaccio, or Cézanne. So I won’t attempt to explain my work. In fact, I’m still involved in what I did thirty years ago. I’m not through with it yet, so that I see my own work as a process in time. I don’t know that I fully understand what I did. I don’t think one understands what one does, ever, completely. I mean, it’s always changing. Yet I want to tell you that since this is not a lecture, I wonder if you’ll cooperate with me, not cooperate but feel free to talk or ask questions or make statements, at any point during this time, about the work or about painting in general or anything which puzzles you or that’s on your mind, so that we can have a kind of colloquy here instead of a lecture. e first slide I’m going to show you is what I consider to be the first personal painting I painted [Martial Memory]. And by that I mean, previous to 1940 I was on the WPA, which was the Federal Art Project in New York, and was involved in mural painting mostly. I did many murals—some of them fortunately have been whitewashed or are gone, but parts of them were good—and so on. I did a mural for a housing project in Queens in about 1938–1939. It’s quite an experience for a young artist to be given a big wall to paint on. e model work was lousy, but it was an opportunity to learn. In other words, you were learning while you were doing it. I did a portion of this mural, the subject matter of which had to do with something which is still current today, poverty and slum clearance and so on. And part of this panel was a section of children fighting in the street with garbage cans and various props, and it somehow fit. I thought it was a recognition there because of the subject matter. And this started a series of paintings of children, which I continued for about eight years. is is what I’m first going to show you, a portion of that period of work. When I say paintings of children, I didn’t go around the streets drawing children or anything like that. Nor did I even mean them as children. I meant them to be more of a symbolic thing, as you’ll see. ey’re purely imaginative constructions. My interests at that time, and just a few years previous to that, were certain fieenthNot previously published. This talk took place at the Yale Summer School of Music and Art, Norfolk, Connecticut.

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century Italian Renaissance painters whom I studied avidly in reproductions and what I could see in museums in this country. I hadn’t yet been to Europe. So, particularly Uccello was a strong influence on me, especially his battle scenes. I also studied avidly at that time the cubist paintings of Picasso and Léger, those two in particular, in the period of what art historians now refer to as synthetic cubism. at is to say, without going into it at great length, I was very involved with forms overlapping each other in a very dense manner, with almost a kind of shallow depth. And I think that, as I recall in my own mind, I was trying to make some kind of reconciliation between what I saw in Picasso and Léger and what I felt a kinship to in a painter like Uccello, for example, and Piero della Francesca. I don’t know what else to say about this painting. Except that it was a pleasure to paint it, and when I did it I hadn’t done many easel paintings. As I said, up to this time I’d been working on murals and so on. Audience: How old were you when you did this? PG: Let’s see. About twenty-eight, twenty-seven, something like that? I started painting when I was about fieen or sixteen. I had done a lot of drawing from the figure, the model. I studied anatomy and so on. Not formally. Pretty much by myself. When I finished that previous picture, which I called Martial Memory, I went out to teach for the first time in my life. I had never taught before. I went out to the University of Iowa as an artist in residence. And I had a small group of about twelve or fifteen graduate students, and we worked very close. We never formally had classes and so on. So I painted this in Iowa. I’d never been to the Middle West before. I come from Los Angeles, and I was reared in L.A., and then came directly to New York when I was about seventeen or eighteen, something like that. And the reason I bring all that up is that I was influenced by a lot of the atmosphere of the Middle West, especially of Iowa City or small middle-western towns. at’s why there are those buildings in the paintings. I mean, they exist here too, in the East, but somehow I didn’t see them here. But there are many pictures in between. is [Sanctuary] is like two years later. e moonlighted buildings in the back are actually a street in Iowa as it was then. In fact, those are the skylights of my studio to the le of the church steeple, those two little light dilations there. Aud: [inaudible] PG: at’s right. In fact, a number of people that I worked with there, who were students of mine or we worked together, have become very fine painters. So I did drawings of Steve Greene, but I didn’t paint from them. I just worked with the drawings. I think mainly I wanted a certain kind of business going on with the folds of the blanket, a sort of restless thing. is picture is called Sanctuary. It was painted during the Second World War, 1943.* And I just wanted that feeling of moonlight coming in to a young man sleeping in the bed and having tossed a lot, which you can see by his * It is actually dated 1944.

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legs sticking out of the pajama at that corner and so on. And I don’t know if you can see it or not, but I actually had a dog tag around his neck there. About a year or two later, and I had done a lot of painting in between, I did this very large picture [If is Be Not I, 1945]. In fact, it’s about the size of this, almost. I tried to do a very ambitious picture, which I worked on almost a year, in which I wanted to put together all the things I had felt or that had accumulated in the painting. And it’s just this crowded scene of kids playing masquerade on a porch. e idea of a porch fascinated me. You know, it was the first time I lived in a little town with porches and so on. e way people are on porches, the whole idea of figures sitting on porches. ey’re enclosed and yet they’re looking outside. It’s something about them being encased in a world that started fascinating me. And you’ll see that from then on followed a whole series of pictures which I called Porch. Porch Number 1, Porch Number 2, and so on. ese are some details of this picture so you can see. I was investigating the use of oil paint. I’d been painting in these murals mainly with fresco and casein glue. Painting on gesso grounds. Very dry medium, egg tempera. And I was just beginning to use oil paint. I was luxuriating in the use of oil, what it could do. ese details give you an idea of how I plotted everything out from area to area, very carefully constructed. at’s actually my daughter. She was about that age at that time, so I just put her in the picture, with a little crown on. is column, the porch column, was somewhere on the block, which in winter had some rosebush thorns with a cloth around it. Somehow it seemed very significant to me. A bandaged post with thorns. When I completed this picture, it was about a year’s work, I felt through with that whole period. is was about 1945. I felt there was no more I could do with it, except paint more of them and somehow that never interested me. I’m interested in painting as exploration. Both in painting and also exploring facets in myself or my potentialities. And I thought I made a pretty complete statement in this picture and was anxious to move on. It’s always painful. I never know. en follows, I’d say, a year of drawing and a lot of failures and a lot of disappointing painting. Well, this is one that I kept. Also I was living in St. Louis at the time—I was teaching there. And I guess I was anxious to lose this atmospheric state and get a harder state. I mean, a state which was more . . . how shall I say? is is one of the Porch pictures about two years later. ere’s a whole series, and this is about the last one I did, from 1947. When I reached this point I almost felt that I didn’t want this figuration anymore. I was becoming, if you look at the bottom or the very top, very upset at just the pure form and face relationships themselves. And it was a difficult period. Right aer that, I again was going through a change. It was like, the process seemed to be speeded up for me. I destroyed a lot of work and was very anxious to lose figuration altogether. And at that time, I should mention, I’d come back to New York in 1947 and had met . . . Well, de Kooning I already knew from the WPA, and Gorky. Pollock I knew from high school years in Los Angeles. But I’d lost touch with what was going on in New York, and I’d met

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various painters who were going through changes in their work. ey’re all my age. I mean, we’re all contemporaries. Some of them a little older, like Rothko. Motherwell and I are about the same age—I think he’s a year or so younger. Bradley Tomlin became a close friend. And I felt the need to abandon representational forms and the construction of the picture altogether. I wanted to see what would happen if I just started painting again almost from scratch. is [Tormentors] is 1948 and in fact it was the first. Well, it started out with a subject, with hooded figures like KKK figures, but they got lost somehow in the process of painting. I know that I was on this picture for months and months and months but actually painted the picture in a couple of hours, and it felt like a breakthrough to me. is followed that other picture. It’s always wrong to apologize about slides, but they don’t do it justice. e light is a little bit weak and the picture’s a little more brilliant than that. is [probably Red Painting] is about 1950. I was very anxious and pushed to the extreme that I was capable of, at this point, to come to painting, to come to the canvas, with the least preconceptions that I could possibly have. Vaguely they would start from still life or something like that, not literally. But to work with the rectangle, I like the feeling of what you might call the grid. at is to say, the horizontal and vertical feeling. I always have. I guess I never lost it, no matter how I work. And so I wanted to come to a canvas and see what would happen if I just put on paint. I know that sounds strange to some of you, and to some of you it may not sound so strange. is was a period of great discoveries for me. And I was very active at that time, of course as I’ve implied, in what later became known as the New York School and the abstract expressionist movement, although at that time it had no name and nobody thought of himself as an abstract expressionist. As I implied here this aernoon, most of us felt that the whole thing was a voyage and an exploration in painting. Pretty much wanting to start from scratch and see what you could discover, where you could go. is is 1950 [possibly White Painting, 1951] and this is a large canvas with umber gray paint, brushstrokes, and I remember that I was most anxious to break all my habits of construction. It’s amazing how one builds up certain habitual responses. I mean, you put down something and then the mind says, “Do this,” and then you do that, and that, and so the picture can become a whole series of predictable responses. Well, this bored me pretty much. I had the desire to be as spontaneous as possible, or to not criticize one’s acts so much, never move back from the canvas. You know, a very frequent habit that we all have is putting on something and then stepping back and looking at it. I mean, we all do that. But in this case I put the palette right in front of me, instead of on the side where palettes usually are, and just kept painting for about two hours, something like that, without moving back. And just feeling that when the run was over, it was over. ere was no more to do. It was a very significant discovery for me. Other painters had discovered it previously, certainly, but for me it was a new thing. To discover that no matter what I did there would be structure. In other words, it was like a proof to me that what we call structure in a painting is

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innate. is is a very significant discovery for me. I don’t think I could ever have planned this thing out. Again, if anyone wants to say anything during the showing, please do. I can only say so much about these pictures. I can only tell you what my conscious intent was, as I remember it was. Aud: [inaudible] PG: I think, as I remember, I didn’t feel the need to go to the edges at that time. I felt that what I wanted to do was to make some kind of living organism in the picture, as if it existed, without having to go to the edges. Because going to the edges, then I’d have to start constructing again. Aud: Did you have ideas of icons or something? PG: No. It was never in my mind. Aud: Or just the idea of placing an image in the center? PG: Did you say placing? Yeah. With locating. I’m always obsessed with what goes where. It seems to me that one of the most valid situations in painting is where, in this field, in this world. For instance, this complex that’s occurring somewhere below center toward the le was elsewhere and it was erased. And the other thing I found out, which was significant to me at this time, was that there was no such thing as erasures. at taking out was putting in. You know what I mean? Frequently we take out something we think doesn’t work, and we think, “Oh yeah, later we’re going to put something else in there.” But that taking out is really a part of the whole process itself. Aud: [inaudible] PG: It got dirtier and dirtier. Aud: How did you decide what palette you wanted to use? PG: You mean in this series of paintings? Aud: Yeah, when you changed. PG: How did I know what colors I wanted? Aud: Yeah. PG: Well, I know that I’ve always liked certain colors that don’t seem to change. I mean, I like black and red and different kinds of gray, warm and cool grays. Aud: You use what you liked. PG: Of course. I wouldn’t use what I didn’t like. You don’t mean that. No, I meant what I said, that I like certain colors very much. I feel attached to certain kinds of red and pink and grays and blacks and ochres. I’ve always liked those colors, and I find I keep using those colors. One can’t psychoanalyze oneself about one’s attachment to something, like a flavor or something. I’ve always been attracted to those colors. Sometimes they get lighter. I had a period where I went into blue and it was very difficult. I don’t understand blue. Some day I’m going to go back into blue. It’s a different state.

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But red I like and orange and black. So the kind of color to put on didn’t present any difficulty for me. ere are other difficulties, but . . . is is about 1952 [possibly e Bell or To B.W.T.]. Aud: [inaudible] PG: You mean painters in New York? Aud: Like de Kooning or Stephen Greene. PG: Well, I didn’t see Steve at that time much. De Kooning I saw a lot, and Kline I saw a lot of. Rothko I saw a lot of. Aud: What kinds of discussions were going on between you? What kind of things did you talk about? PG: Well, different people talked in different ways. De Kooning knows the history of art very well, so frequently we’d talk about painting. Kline, too. I mean, about the painting of the past. Would we talk about our own painting? Not so much. We went to each other’s shows a lot, visited each other’s studios a lot. Never analyzed each other’s paintings, other than to say, “Gee, that’s terrific!” Aud: [inaudible] PG: Hidden images? Well, I don’t know. It’s probably one of the barest canvases I did at that time. About this time, aer about three years of this way of working, I felt the need for more solid painting. Or rather, using more masses of color, rather than these spare pictures which I’ve just shown you. And this was the beginning of that [e.g., Beggar’s Joys or e Room, 1954–55]. Aud: Were you interested in anything like calligraphic-type . . . PG: Never. No. I liked Chinese painting, but I never thought about it as calligraphy. But Sung painting, for instance, I liked a great deal. e tenth or twelh century. Is that what you mean? Aud: Yeah. PG: I never thought of that as calligraphy, although those men were trained in calligraphy. Aud: e ones before this seem very structural. ey seem like Mondrian seems. PG: Well, I’ve always thought about Mondrian. Aud: [inaudible] PG: No, I never thought of it consciously. I know it’s been referred to as that, and I know that in the writing on my work at that time they said I was an abstract impressionist, but I never knew what that meant. I’d never exactly been interested in impressionism, French impressionism, although I like some of the painters of that time very much. But I never cared for Monet terribly much, the late Monet. I like early Monet, when he was very crisp and hard.

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A great deal of these paintings depend on their actual physicality. ey’re very heavy in paint, very heavily pigmented, mainly because of many changes that have been gone through in the painting, so the paint piles on. Aud: [inaudible] PG: Of the previous picture? Oh, this one? Yes. We’re now in about 1955. Aud: [inaudible] PG: More painterly than de Kooning? I don’t know what you mean by that, what painterly means. Aud: [inaudible] PG: Well, we never talked to each other that way. You wouldn’t come up to a painter and say, “Gee, that’s painterly.” at’s art-critic talk. I never heard painters talk like that. Aud: [inaudible] PG: Well, the paint was a living thing. It was living matter. It was not inert. To me, a painting coming off meant that every part was active in the picture, contributed to a large general scheme. How large were they? About seven feet. Not too big. Six and a half, seven feet. Something like that. Aud: [inaudible] PG: You mean in the early figurative pictures? Aud: Yeah. PG: Yeah, that it was somehow innate in me. at I didn’t need, at that time, to plan it out as I did earlier in the figurative pictures. Although, in retrospect, I don’t think I could have done this without the earlier work. It’s hard for one to completely understand one’s processes, you know? Aud: . . . grouping of flowers or something and then to show like a reflection on the water down below. PG: It never entered my mind, I can assure you. Aud: Is that canvas showing at the top? PG: Yes. Very oen the bare canvas shows in parts. About 1950, I began using the bare canvas as a part of the picture. at’s right. Aud: [inaudible] PG: What does the bare canvas mean to me? Part of the picture. Aud: You like to work on certain parts of the canvas rather than . . . PG: I know what you mean, but I haven’t thought it out that much. I started using black—this is about 1957 [probably Fable I, 1956–57]—and my desire was to get somehow heavier, more solid and rockier in the painting. In the succeeding paintings you see the use of black a great deal. About your question, it would be untruthful for me to give you a definite answer. ere’s no way to answer that. Except that I

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have to rely on what’s called feeling. It feels right to me. ere doesn’t seem to be any way out of that. Aud: [inaudible] PG: It’s interesting to hear that remark, because I was very consciously, as I remember, trying to become more representational at this time, if you know what I mean, but through paint. I mean, through the application of paint, through the spontaneous use of paint. Rather than delineation of drawing, as I did in the earlier figurative things. at’s what I mean. Aud: [inaudible] PG: Solidity, you mean? Uh-huh. Solidity is good, too. [laughter] Aud: I always have this idea of getting better or something like that. PG: Getting better? Aud: Yeah, kind of getting better. PG: Some people think they got worse, but I’m glad you think so. Aud: But this seems to be a search. PG: Yeah, I agree with you. I think what I was aware of was that I was complicating things more for myself, taking on more complications than the earlier work. Maybe that’s a tendency I have. Aud: In the blue part of the painting [possibly e Evidence, 1957] . . . PG: Yeah. And it’s not blue, actually. It’s the slide. It’s really gray, a bluish gray. Aud: It looks like you had to really fight to put that on. PG: Yeah. ere was paint everywhere else, you know what I mean? is image that you see, more or less in the center, wasn’t there in the first place. I didn’t put it there. In other words, there were forms doing all sorts of things all over, and they were just wiped out. Somehow, at some point in the process of painting, you . . . I don’t know any other way to describe it, other than that you close in on your feelings in the painting. Aud: It doesn’t look to me like figure-ground, and the reason for that is there’s as much fighting going on in every part of the painting. PG: Uh-huh. Aud: [inaudible] PG: Yes, it is. Sure. Painting is colored light, actually, if you want to put it that way. But its own light. Not light that is seen but its own light, which comes from pigment. It creates its own light, sure. is is about 1957, 1958. I was definitely becoming involved with some kind of figuration again, even though I couldn’t name it. e unnameable. I definitely was heading towards a figuration, but I wanted it done all at once, just as I did in the earlier, more simple, reduced paintings that I have shown.

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Aud: [inaudible] PG: Yeah. I paint a lot on paper. Not big pictures. is is a big picture. e last one is about thirty-six inches by twenty-two or something. On a coated paper. I use the Strathmore paper. Five-ply, three-ply paper. With oil. And I like that. at’s on canvas, though; that’s a big canvas. I like to paint on paper because the oil paint fixes very rapidly and becomes tacky rapidly, so that you can change, overpaint quickly. Much more than you can on canvas, unless you use some kind of dryer. is [probably To Fellini] was about 1958 or something like that. I started getting interested in blue, using blue. And blue is a strange color to use—for me, in any case—because it always evaporates. Sky, water, or something. But to bring it frontal, to make it feel on the plane, to me, is something to conjure with. Back again to the red and pink [possibly e Mirror, 1957]. at’s a big, sevenfoot picture. I was very definitely, at this point, becoming interested in solid forms. And somehow had an inkling that I was headed toward figuration again. But the forms, at this time, were more of an ambiguous nature. And at the time I felt satisfied with that. But as time went on, I became dissatisfied with it. And as you’ll see, I really wanted more and more specificity of the forms. It’s a tug-of-war going on there, on the top between that black shape and the green shape. It’s a still life, just some things on a table. I don’t think I showed this one before, when I was here. is is a gouache [for example, e Two, 1963]. ere’s a series of oils on paper that I’m showing you here, which definitely started as still lifes. By still lifes I mean very simple still lifes, just two things on a table. Two cans of paint on the painting table. Just as simple as that, but that’s how it ended up. I couldn’t be satisfied with just painting two cans. I didn’t want to paint those two cans, but it got that way somehow just by the insistence on restricting myself to a few forms. And also reducing color. I began working literally with just mainly black and white. And a lot of the grays you see were simply erasures of black while the paint was wet. And my intention was really to locate these few forms. I thought of these very definitely as heads. Almost disembodied heads. Just head forms and shapes. Two, three, sometimes one, as you’ll see. is is about 1964, 1965. is came about through just simply two cans on the painting table, but look what happened to them! Because I couldn’t be satisfied until these two forms were affecting each other, acted on each other, did something to each other, to their spaces and so on. is was a series of about thirty paintings of heads mostly in black, very dense and very heavy—usually a single head or two head forms—which result in that show at the Jewish Museum [in 1966]. Aud: [inaudible] PG: Yeah. A little red, mainly black. Aer that show, there followed a period of battle for me between going into a sort of fairly pure kind of painting and a figurative painting. And for about a year and a half I didn’t paint. I drew constantly, just kept draw-

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ing constantly. Drawing very pure lines, very few lines. Some of them ended up just one line or two lines on the paper. And then, alternately, working with things, with objects. About the beginning of 1968, I started working with just common objects. Books, things on the table, my shoes on the floor. Just the most everyday objects. is is very typical. I think I did I don’t know how many paintings of books. Just simply a single book, an open book on the table. And it seemed to me that just by restricting myself to a single object, a great deal opened up. So I did lots of drawings of books. You know, when you really close in on a form, it seems to change, it seems to metamorphose. I mean, a book can become a tablet can become a hunk of stone. It can change. I did a chair, an old armchair. [laughter] Oh, it’s hard to explain. But I can tell you how I felt. I wanted to start all over again, in that way. A part of it is a kind of strategy. I realize that. But it had a feeling as if I didn’t really know anything, as if I really was starting all over again. Aud: e collectors must have had a heart attack. PG: Oh, yeah. e critics had a heart attack. I was all through when I showed this stuff. ree years ago [in October 1970], I had a big show of this at Marlborough and I was just chopped up. Except for one writer. All the rest said: “Well, he’s finished, that’s the end of that.” But it looked pretty good, in a way, because it almost matched what I wanted. I mean, I really wanted to be reborn. So maybe they were right. A bottle . . . I just took the simplest things around me. I don’t have all the slides here or we could go on forever, I had a pretty good record made of everything, hundreds of things in the studio. I did everything. I did the sandwich I was eating. A big plate of spaghetti, I painted that. I just did what was around me. I think I felt like I wanted to be like a sign painter, you know? Winter in the country. e dumbness of how buildings look when you really look at them. Stupid. is is about 1968. A little study. I thought, Well, I’m all alone and nobody loves me and I’m starting again and it’s terrific. [laughter] I felt good, I really felt good. I felt close to what I was doing. I was starting to paint all over again. It was a nice feeling. But I didn’t realize at the time, you know, you never know what’s going to happen a year from the present or a month from the present. You don’t know, because you’re working with highly charged forces here. You’re not always aware of it. I didn’t know at the time what this was going to lead to. And it led to a very intense two years of painting, which I’ll show you. My clock. [laughter] It just felt good. I wanted to see if spontaneously I could start with twelve and go down, and I wouldn’t ever really know where the three was going to come, whether I’d come out right. But usually I came out to the eleven. at’s a thirty-six-inch-square picture. I never showed you, Arthur or Bob, the preparation for the work you saw at Marlborough, but this was it, this was all the background to it. My shoes. You know, the shoes you wear in the country. It felt good to do that. It’s

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Philip Guston, Clock, 1969. Pencil on paper, 14 × 18 inches. Private collection. Photo: Steven Sloman.

as if you got rid of art. at’s the important thing. I was sick to death of what I was doing, thinking about, and working with. And I didn’t read any art magazines. I religiously wouldn’t look at art magazines. And you felt like an outsider, you felt good. Aud: You felt like you could always become a cartoonist. PG: Well, when I started I wanted to be a cartoonist, in fact. I like cartoons very much. Especially some of the older ones. I mean Bud Fisher and Chic Young and, of course, Sterrett. ose people. Well, those are the masters. But they’re marvelous. Cartooning now is nothing, but in the old days it was great. I used to love them. ey were great drasmen. Herriman, you know, Krazy Kat? Well, I’ve done hundreds of shoes. Hundreds of books and shoes. I’d gotten, I think, over the years so tired of all the myths about modern art. I got so bored with it that all the things they said you shouldn’t do struck me as being very worthwhile to do. Like representation, the painting shouldn’t be an illustration—why not? It shouldn’t build a deep space—why not? I mean, they’re just myths, just shibboleths. And I felt like I was in a very reactive mood, but that’s not important. What was important is that that mood gives you energy. Anything that gives you energy is important.

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I had a lot of stuff in that picture [Untitled, 1969], then I just covered it up with a brick wall. It felt good. So in my mind everything’s behind the brick wall. [laughter] And the other thing is, I never saw a painting of a brick wall. at’s important too, that I wanted to paint what I hadn’t seen. is is now about the end of 1968, and I’d just as well tell you about it because this is what actually happened. ere’s no point in being secret about it. e Chicago Convention was going on and I was stuck in front of the TV like everybody else, watching this thing and reading about it, and I went in one night and started doing this [probably charcoal drawing Untitled, 1968]. It just, like, came out. And I got very interested. I thought, can I even do that??! And I really got excited about it. It’s the first appearance of these hooded figures. at’s when he first appeared. Well, that’s just one of those monsters, I don’t know what it is, four-eyes [probably Head II, 1969]. And then I got really interested in the idea again that I did when I was very young. I’ll show you later. I painted Ku Klux Klan . . . I’m not interested in the Ku Klux Klan, but I was interested in the hooded figures as representing . . . It’s too simple, I don’t have to explain that. And I got very involved in it, deeply involved in it. ey became real characters to me. And for about two years, all of 1969 and 1970, I was riding the crest of the wave as far as painting was concerned. ere wasn’t enough time to paint all the things I wanted to paint. And one thing led to another, as you’ll see. ere’s a whole series of hands there. at’s a good painting. Aud: [inaudible] PG: What did you say, patches? Yeah, I wanted to make them tattered, like full of seams. I have them smoking a lot. ey change and sometimes they become . . . I felt like I was living with these guys, you know? ey talk to each other. ey’re tired. Well, this was the beginning of these large pictures I did. A lot of these weren’t shown in that Marlborough show. ere wasn’t any room. ey’re done very spontaneously, very quickly. And you see what happened to the city. at’s a large canvas that developed into a big city, day to day, rapidly [City, 1969]. Aud: [inaudible] PG: Sure. I know what the political means. I’m not doing a political tract. I think it went through my mind that I was just using symbols. But, to be truthful, I was having such a good time painting that it was releasing. I felt so free to do anything I wanted to do that everything seemed to fall into place. It was just one of those things that happen once in a while, every few years, things fall into place. And I didn’t even have time enough to paint. I used to write memos to myself: “Paint them drinking beer, eating a hamburger.” I could have them do anything. I felt like a movie director, like I was making a movie. Nothing wrong with that, just so it led to painting. And I was painting all the time. So, I knew that I was dealing with these bastards. I knew that. But I felt also sort of dumb. ey’re like those Watergate guys. In fact, it’s all prophetic. It looks like Ehrlichman and Haldeman . . . no, no. Who are the

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guys that broke in? McCord and . . . ? ey’re really dopey. I used to feel so good I’d say: I’m going to bloody them up, you know? I’m a painter. I’m not writing political tracts. at’s called Downtown. I had a good time getting the titles, too. Nice titles. Also, by the way, at that time, I didn’t only make memos to myself. I did lots of drawings, preparatory drawings for the paintings. So that for this picture, which I called Cellar, I just conceived the idea of a lot of figures diving into a hole in the floor, and that’s the painting. But I did a number of drawings like the previous one. So when I started a painting, it came pretty quickly. Most of them were painted in a day, over a day and a night, something like that. But I spent some weeks making drawings. I’d post all the drawings up, so when I start painting I know pretty much what I’m going to do. ere were changes, but they’re not major changes. It’s as if I could visualize it. is aernoon we were talking about process. Sometimes there were certain points when I wanted to reverse the process that I had experienced in the fiies and sixties, and I could preconceive a picture. at’s a big canvas, one of the early ones. Courtroom. ese seem very relevant to the news right now. Huh? Yeah, I didn’t realize I was painting Nixon. is is an “At Home” picture. [laughter] ere’s a whole series where they’re at home. ey’re not doing a lot of things. I started thinking about what they would do when they’re not out doing their job. Well, they’re resting. I like this one a lot [Bad Times, 1970]. I like the big enormous shoes going by the curtain, and the car. ese are big. ese are about ten feet to twelve feet horizontally. at’s one of the last ones I did, a favorite of mine, called Bad Habits. Big whiskey bottle in the middle, and smoking. Aud: Is he scratching his back? PG: Could be. He’s got a little whip there. Could be scratching his back. He’s got a rash of little pimples on him. [laughter] en at one point, I sort of sank the whole world, like it was doomed. In fact, it’s called Deluge. ere was, at one point, a lot of stuff below and lots going on and somehow or other it got sunk in that black water with a few forms floating on top. And that’s one of the last ones. It’s called Flatlands. It’s what’s le. Oh, also, I’ve got to show you—there were dozens and dozens, but I’ll show you a few. ere’s a whole series where I made artists out of them. Like, did they paint? If they do all these other things, why can’t they paint? Be artists? And, actually, what would they paint? ey’d paint themselves. And I have some where they’re going to art exhibitions and they’re arguing about art and talking about art. What? Aud: [inaudible] PG: Of me? You mean, that might be me painting? I’m under the hood, you mean? Aud: Yeah. PG: Yeah, it’s occurred to me. Somebody else suggested that. Well, it could be all of us.

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Philip Guston, Untitled [Rome, 1971]. Oil on canvas, 22 × 30 inches.

We’re all hoods. at’s a good picture [e Studio, 1969]. It’s very carefully constructed, that picture. [laughter] ey’re the best reactions you can have to painting, when people laugh at it. Look at the model back there. Aud: [inaudible] PG: It’s a lamp. e little picture? Yeah, they were props. ere were lamps, pictures, and clocks, you know, what you have in your house. Well, that’s the drawing I did when I was about seventeen that I told you about [drawing for Conspirators, 1930]. I did a series of paintings of Ku Kluxers, and a couple of years ago I found this up in the attic. It’s just a drawing about thirty inches high, a pencil drawing. So you see, it’s a different thing than the others. I must have made some kind of circle, I guess. I’m not doing them now. I’m doing other things. I seem to have le them for a while. Some rope he’s braiding there. Aer this show, we went to Italy for about seven months, just to rest and look at paintings. I wanted to resee all the things I liked again. And aer a couple months of looking, traveling around, in Italy mostly, I started painting. And I did a whole series of paintings on paper, simply because they were easier to take back with me, and these were some of the earlier things I did there. e paintings became very rocky. I guess influenced by the excavation sites that we saw, like Aquinia and so on, the remains of the ancient cultures. In many places around Italy

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Philip Guston, The Small Panels, 1968–70. Woodstock, New York.

you see still rocks are piled up, a very practical country. You want to do things threedimensionally. at [perhaps Farnesina Gardens, Rome, 1971] was influenced by cities you see on the hills. en I became interested in the gardens, the formal gardens there. ey were all around us where we lived in Rome up on the Gianiculum. And these are just some fantasies I did, a whole series of things influenced by the gardens, the way they cut them in various shapes. ese are about thirty by forty. ey’re small oils on paper. To me they represent so much. is actually makes me think of where we lived and what I saw out the window and so on. Even though it didn’t look literally like that, of course. But the men were always out here in the mornings, three or four men always trimming and cutting these shapes. Well, that’s just a brick on top of another brick. ese are some big paintings I did since I’ve been back, canvases. Some more gardens. I’ve done some large paintings last winter or last year, but I didn’t have slides of them. at’s a large oil, a sunrise [Ominous Land, 1972]. It’s a big oil, eight or nine feet. I don’t know how to describe what I’m painting now, except probably they’re less narration, story line, whatever you call it, and more involved with forms, fantastic forms. Oh, last fall or winter I started doing a bunch of small ones. at’s a little guest room off the studio. So, for a couple months I just started doing very small pictures. I thought maybe you’d like to see them. Just of single objects mostly. You can’t see the paintings so much. But it just looked good to me to hang them up. In fact, if I

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ever show these, and I might next year, I’m going to show them like that.* I’ve got more, so I’m just going to plaster walls with them, like wallpaper, just cover it. Aud: Are those on canvas? PG: No. You know, you get tired doing big pictures. I do, aer a while. And the most difficult thing to do is to do something in between. Like, a fiy-inch picture for some reason is very hard for me. I’ve got dozens of four-foot by five-foot canvases stretched up ready to go, and for years I can’t work on them. I either work on a very big one or a very little one. So these are just Masonite, sliced up in the lumberyard, mounted on some wood, glued on some wood, and just gessoed, in oil.

* This was done in 2000. See Philip Guston: A New Alphabet, the Late Transition (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 2000).

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O N T H E N I XO N D R AW I N G S 1973

Philip Guston: Well, the first thing to know is I’m not going to talk during these [slides of the Nixon drawings]. I’m just going to look at them, thank God. So, this is a premier showing. ey’ve never been seen. And just a word about how this came about. When I came back from Europe in the summer of 1971, I was pretty disturbed about everything in the country politically, the administration specifically, and I started doing cartoon characters. And one thing led to another, and so for months I did hundreds of drawings and they seemed to form a kind of story line, a sequence. So I put them in the form of a book, and that’s what you’re going to see. Some writers I know, one writer in particular, a friend of mine, liked it very much. He thought they should be done in a book, so he gave them to a very good agent and they went to every good publisher in New York. ey were gone for some months making the rounds. It was almost published by one publisher, Horizon Press, but all the lawyers were afraid to do it. e lawyers said, “Let’s not do it.” So Bob Reed is right, I almost made the enemies list, if they had been published. So, we’re going to start. is is before Nixon went to China, of course. is was the cover. [laughter] I called it Poor Richard. You’ll see. ere are four characters. It’s like a comic book. ere’s Nixon; Agnew, the pinhead guy; and that’s Mitchell with the pipe. Kissinger is just glasses. And a lot of it is at Key Biscayne. at’s the cover. e cottage cheese is there. Audience: Have you tried Straight Arrow Publishers? PG: Straight Arrow? No. e agent I went to took it to Random House, Viking, all the big ones, Braziller. But I’ll say this and then I won’t say anymore. You remember Nixon’s acceptance speech from 1968, where at the end he says, “It seems like an impossible dream. is boy who dreamt of distant places and listened to train whistles.” I did a lot of research while I was doing this. I started reading about it. I read Six Crises.* You ever read Six Crises? Terrific book. He said, “And now he stands before you the President of the United States, it seems like an impossible dream.” So, this is a premier. I’m getting a big kick seeing these this size. I start with him as a little boy. [laughter] Whittier. You know, I grew up near Whittier, a little town. And I’m about Nixon’s age. So some of the props are because I lived in a house kind This talk took place at the Yale Summer School of Music and Art, Norfolk, Connecticut. Guston’s Nixon drawings appear in Debra Bricker Balken, Philip Guston’s Poor Richard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). * Richard M. Nixon, Six Crises (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962).

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of like that. It’s like home movies here. Right? It’s like an early animated cartoon, isn’t it, Bob? [laughter] Duke. Duke University. He never made first string. Well, that was the hairstyle of that time. He was seventeen. And he was poor. He studied the work of Lincoln and Wilson a great deal. He used to live on ten cents a day. So Gary Wills says in an excellent biography.* [Tape ends]

* Gary Wills, Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970).

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T E N D R AW I N G S 1973

This statement accompanied a set of ten drawings.

It is the bareness of drawing that I like. e act of drawing is what locates, suggests, discovers. At times it seems enough to draw, without the distractions of color and mass. Yet it is an old ambition to make drawing and painting one. Usually, I draw in relation to my painting, what I am working on at the time. On a lucky day a surprising balance of forms and spaces will appear and I feel the drawing making itself, the image taking hold. is in turn moves me toward painting—anxious to get to the same place, with the actuality of paint and light.

Philip Guston, “Ten Drawings,” Boston University Journal 21 (Fall 1973).

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O N S U R V I VA L 1974

Philip Guston: Mercedes [Matter, director of the New York Studio School,] called me just yesterday and asked me to substitute for Feldman. And she said that he had a subject, or that he had a title? Audience: e name of the course. PG: Oh, the whole course. What was it—“Frustration”? Aud: No. “Survival.” PG: Well, that’s the same thing. Well, he’s a much better talker than I am. I mean, I’m really not too good in talking. I’m good in talking to one person or a couple of people. You understand that I’m not a lecturer. I’m a painter, I think. And I have no formal lecture, not even a formal set of ideas, except the same things that keep going around and around in your mind all the time, no matter what you’re doing. So I don’t know exactly how to start. Except that I was reading an article last night by Paul Goodman and it was about the war, his opposition to the war, and one phrase of his stuck in my mind. He said that he sometimes felt as if he was living in his country but his country had been occupied by a foreign power. I don’t know why that stuck in my mind, but I feel that way politically speaking. I felt recognition there immediately. But my mind immediately went to the current scene in the art world. I made an immediate connection and I felt, “Gee, that’s right, there too I feel as if it’s occupied by foreign powers,” you know? And then you start thinking about “Where am I?” or “How can I fit or produce and live in this situation?” And that maybe connects with Morty’s theme of survival. In other words, how do you survive? How does an artist, a painter, survive in a situation where you don’t even want to show, and it gets more serious as it goes on. You even become increasingly ashamed of being connected with the “Modern Movement in Art,” or you begin to really hate modern art altogether. ere’s nothing wrong in that. I mean, actually it works, it’s very good because it makes you question yourself almost every day, or at least every other day, about what you’re doing. Are you a painter? Should you be a painter? Why be a painter? I mean, why make something that is in essence a private dialogue—with what? With your contemporaries and also with artists that you admire in the past. at has its moments of satisfaction, but they’re very fleeting. I’ve got about fiy thoughts crowding in my mind at once. I don’t know how to begin. It isn’t even the problem of modern art or contemporary art. It’s a problem of how you look at the past too. It’s so evasive and elusive, and one’s loyalties keep shiing Not previously published. This talk was given at the New York Studio School on June 1, 1974.

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and changing all the time. Very recently I was again in Europe to look at paintings. Italy and Spain. Madrid and Paris. You spend a few weeks at the Prado and you fall in love with Goya. You just see Goya every day and keep thinking about him and looking at him, just absorbing Goya. And, as you know, the Prado is filled with it. It’s the one place in the world where you can see Goya. And then you go to the Louvre and you see a Mantegna, which again knocks you for a loop and you keep looking at it day aer day. Or the Uccello, the big battle scene that’s there, although this time I liked that less than I used to. e Mantegna and a painting by Perugino shocked me into some kind of recognition. And then aer a week in Paris I started thinking about Goya. How can I like Mantegna and Goya at the same time? Or, it wasn’t the same time, it was just three weeks apart. But such infidelity is terrible, you know? ey’re completely opposite poles, not just in painting or styles of painting, and I know historically they’re at different times, but I mean the way of looking and feeling about everything seems just totally different. And then, this is as I was about to leave Paris, I decided I’d go through the Greek rooms or Pompeian rooms that have all that jewelry and everything, and I saw two Pompeian paintings, about fieen by twenty inches, in black and red and pink, and they just destroyed everything I’d seen the week before. It was like vase painting, but it really wasn’t a vase painting. ey were the equivalences of form in space, and in the spaces there were just some people sitting and some angels holding something up. But the equivalence of form and space was so equilibrated. No “Part One.” ey were just constantly up there, just vibrating like that. I thought they were the most magnificent things I’d ever seen since I had been in Urbino and seen that Piero [e Flagellation]. But it was a different kind of situation, these Greek paintings. So I don’t know where I am most of the time, if I can make an admission about myself. I’m always questioning why I respond to this and why I respond to that. But, of course, when you’re looking at paintings in this kind of fashion for a couple of months and you’re not really working, you draw, you scribble in your hotel room, but you’re not really involved or anything. And that means, of course, that your mind is too free. You can roam and move around, which is all right, but I get surfeited with that. en when I get to work I get involved and you’re not as free, your mind doesn’t move around so easily. And you’re glad that you’re not as free. ere’s more resistance to this freedom of thought, because as you work of course everything narrows, keeps narrowing down, until your ideas are either one inch apart from each other or miles away from each other. And so that’s the only time I’m really happy, if you can use that word, is when I’m narrowed down to that extent. Sometimes I think, “Well, that’s probably what art lovers are.” ey’re looking at paintings and they have this kind of freedom, which you have too when you’re not painting to quite an extent: you’re not a painter, you’re looking. And of course you’re looking for certain things, that’s true. I don’t know where or what direction I’m talking. I’m just rambling. By the way, if at any point anybody wants to say anything or ask something, please do. It’ll help me out a lot.

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Aud: What does it mean to you to be a painter? PG: Well, you want to make that more specific or not so generalized? Aud: Why do you qualify it when you say, “I think I’m a painter”? I mean, for me, you’re a painter and I’m a painter, and why can’t a painter also be an art lover? I can see that your mind can see some paintings that other times you would exclude. PG: Yes, but it’s more than that. I think, as you go on in painting, what happens is that you become more prejudiced. at is, you become more disinclined to let other ideas and other ways of feeling that are not close to you into your ken, so to speak. Aud: You become disinclined, but then at another time you become inclined to let that in. PG: at’s right. Aud: But it’s not a question of loyalty. It’s just a question of your mind and . . . PG: Yes. Well, the word loyalty was a little bit facetious on my part. e only true answer there, not an answer but one response I could have, is that you need things at different times. I mean, I’ve been having a running argument, not that he cares very much about it now, with Mondrian. And it seems to vary in intensity. In the early fiies it was very intense, and then aer five or six years or so of working myself, it seemed to decline somewhat. About three years ago it again became very intense. Now, why do you have these arguments with a painter? You do, I suppose, and then people have had arguments with me. I think, to be a painter is indeed to engage in a very intense and active argument, a terrifying argument, in which at your most desperate moments you have to feel that not everybody can be right, somebody’s got to be wrong. Because I don’t think a painter looks at art in terms of . . . Well, I keep beating a dead dog, the word art lover. I mean, I could never go through a museum and enjoy every picture or most pictures. I just can’t do it. I keep wanting to see things which are, as I say, somehow related to my own feelings. But I’m not unaware that there are whole areas of painting that I may be blind to, yes, that I just don’t see. And then I think you have to be ready to see certain paintings at certain times. Aud: In what sense do you question whether you’re a painter? I just wonder how that occurs in your mind. It can’t mean that it means whether you’re right or wrong. PG: I think what I mean is that, as much or as little as I know myself, I guess I feel very moral about what I do, or moralistic. I have to feel that what I do has a meaning and is not self-indulgent. By that I mean, I think sometime ago, when I began painting, there followed perhaps a period of some years where I did a certain kind of paintings. I had certain loves and artists I admired a great deal, who struck me very hard, for what reasons I don’t know. ere might be psychological reasons why a painter like Chirico, speaking of modern painters, or a writer like Kaa, would hit me very hard. So I try not to investigate that. I just say, well, that’s what happened. And so then follows a period of years where you work to see if you can do certain things, and

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you’re influenced by certain people. Let’s say I was in my twenties then, something like that. And as I went on and on, I think I became more disenchanted with, let’s say, my own talents or gis. Aer all, you don’t live in a box away from the world. You are in the world. And I think I feel socially conscious, as most people who are in the world, and wonder about what’s happening to our society. And if I look at art of the past that I love, I certainly don’t want to be an imitator of the past. I mean, that’s too remote for my taste, or for my blood. And I don’t like the present either. And so, let’s see, to come back to your question, we could go on talking all night about it, and we could compare notes on our lives and how we feel and think. I think at this point, and for some years now, I can bore myself very easily in painting. I’m willing to accept boredom, but that’s another kind of boredom. I prefer the boredom or the tedium of these arguments you have. at’s a more absorbing kind, and maybe boredom is the wrong word. It’s more of a continuous and tedious argument that never seems to stop, between yourself and the material you’re working with, and the ideas you have and concepts you have, and having to prove those all the time. So I think an artist’s life, until you leave, is an unending discourse of this kind with yourself in the world. And of course the painting, the thing you call a painting, is a document and a record. I have no other way of looking at it. It’s a document and a record of this trial which doesn’t end. I can’t see it in any other way, and I don’t think it’s self-dramatization, really. I wish to God I didn’t have it, most of the time. But aer a while you’re very happy you have it, because it becomes the only thing you’ve got. And then it becomes your way of life. I mean, that just is your way of life, and it becomes more solitary, naturally. But the way I look at painting—and now we’re really talking about your original question about why a painter is not an art lover—an art lover doesn’t do that. He’s a customer, a developed customer, and schools develop him. He goes to the university and takes courses and he reads and all these things, but his noninvolvement makes him very remote from this thing that we’re talking about. And as a matter of fact, well, I wouldn’t say whether he knows how to look at a painting, but one thing is sure, that he and I don’t look at paintings the same way. Because, I think, what you’re seeing when you go around the museums looking at what we call the masters is the evidence of their trial. So that what a painting is, it’s not an object of course, is something that you can read. Well, not read but see. You know, ten people will look at a painting, it doesn’t mean they’re all seeing the same thing. Yeah? Aud (1): Well, as I see it, the art lover would be somebody who’s concerned with, say, possibility, whereas the inclusion of a moral point of view would not be how things could be but how things should be. PG: Exactly! Yeah. You mean the moral painter. Sure. Aud (2): When a painter’s wrong he’s saying, “at’s not the way I think it should be.” Aud (1): Well, it’s not wrong, because it’s a necessity. Nobody cares if you’re right or wrong.

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PG: But, even in relation to what we’re talking about, it can get so bad, or so intense, that is, this trial that I’m talking about, that you can get pretty bored with it. And you will have to test that. Aud: Test the system. PG: Test your system. Like Cézanne said, towards the end of his life in some letter, “Now let’s start out.” He put on his knapsack and paints and stuff. “Let’s see if my theory works.”* So, it’s the same thing. You can have all sorts of ideas that have been working for you for some time, but those have to be tested. It’s like, aer looking through rooms of Goyas, of these very accomplished, incredibly constructed, huge massacre scenes and so on, they’re just marvelously done and some of you probably know them. His later work, that the art historians call the Black Period. I mean the late pictures that he painted on the walls of his house when he was rather an old man, and they were removed from his walls and brought into the museum. But in one of the last rooms there’s one painting, about the size of a door, and it struck me more forcibly than anything else in the room. ose big black paintings seem to me sort of, well, determined. Like he was going to show, as if he knew, this feeling. e monstrosity of humanity, the distortion of their faces, and the way he piled them all up in these pyramids, in these hills, these big black shapes and threatening clouds, and they’re just hacked in like that, very forceful. And they’re marvelous. Some are better than others, I think. But there’s one painting which is a peculiar throwback.† I didn’t know what it was. I’d never seen it reproduced, and I looked it up, and it was done while he was doing these black pictures. And it’s not black at all. It’s done in very light fluffy colors. It’s a painting of a woman leaning on a rock. e rock comes rather high, a gray rock, and if you look at it long enough, it has a kind of an elephant in it. Unmistakably, because he has that double, that paranoid, vision which operates there in his work to some extent. And there’s just an iron grillwork on top of the rock, and a tree and some clouds, and that’s all. But the whole thing was unmistakably done in one shot. ere’s no doubt of it. You just see him standing there and he lost himself in the painting. And of course the story goes that it was some former love of years ago, which may have been true. It doesn’t matter, except that it did look like, it did feel like, a memory. It’s a marvelous painting. I thought it was the best painting in the room, really, because he didn’t even stop to look at it, actually. He just painted it. at situation you dream about. Maybe if you’re lucky you do it two or three times in your lifetime, and then you wonder why you can’t do it when you want to do it. And I was struck by the fact that he let go of these big black impressive paintings and * “He could say, for instance, to Louis Le Bail as they were starting off together to the motif: ‘We are going to put our absurd theories into practice.’ ” John Rewald, Paul Cézanne, a Biography (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), p. 201. †

Una Manola: Doña Leocadia Zorrilla, one of the Black Paintings, originally in Goya’s country house, Quinta

del Sordo, and now in the Prado. Zorrilla was Goya’s companion during the last few years of his life and accompanied him into exile.

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Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, Una Manola: Doña Leocadia Zorrilla, ca. 1819–23. Museo del Prado, Madrid. Photo: © Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

it was like a man doing something spontaneously. Just thrown off like that and it’s just magnificent. Of course, on him it looks great. Aud: When Feldman was here he talked about trying to go underground. He must have talked to you about that some. PG: Oh, we’ve always gone underground. Walking all over Manhattan for twenty years, just walking on the streets talking about going underground. I don’t know which sense he meant it. Aud: He said he was not going to send any more music to his publishers. In fact, one of his pieces he played here he said was not going to be snapped up and consumed.

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PG: Well, that’s never bothered me so much. But I’ve been in the art world, I’ve exhibited and so on. I mean, I’ve been irritated by it, by certain things that have happened over the years. But irritation is not the same thing as being consumed. I guess if you feel you’re being consumed you should get away from the fire that’s going to consume you. I don’t know. Aud: Is that what you said to him the last time he brought it up? PG: Well, there are different ways of going underground. I’ve thought about it a lot and we’ve always talked about it, but something doesn’t feel right about it, to me. It implies that you’re involved in some kind of argument other than your art, I think. We all have those feelings. But I remember some years ago Rothko was doing some murals for the Seagram Building and I was walking with him one day just as they were being installed. e Seagram Building had just been finished and Mark said, “Well, I’m going to hang up those things.” It was in a boardroom or the director’s room, and he was going to make them really shake in their boots with these big dark murals, really give it to them. I mean, every artist has this inner hatred of the powers that be, of course. So that was his way. But I thought the other way. I mean, knowing the kind of painting I do, I made him laugh by saying, “My way would be of doing these murals so deep underground that when they were put up no one would even see them but the whole building would just crumble, you know?” So, sure. You think of: “I’d like to show those bastards who’s boss, who’s the power here.” at’s an artist’s natural antipathy and anger and so on. But when you’re alone with a few lines and some paint and a surface and everybody gets out of the room, and you hope even your own ideas get out of the room, so that you’re really alone with nowhere to go and you have to act and move, then you’re not in any dialectic with the scene or the art world. en, I think, the idea of going underground doesn’t even occur to you. It may later, aer you’ve done the body of work and you think you’re being consumed by the establishment. I suppose if it bothers you, you have to get out of the way. But I don’t feel that it’s terribly cogent inherently to what goes on when you’re involved. ere wouldn’t be any time to think about it. Aud: I wondered how clear he felt about that. Clearly he considered it, because here he was coming and sort of letting himself be picked at by people who would just as soon climb on his back. And then if he thinks a little they’d still be up. PG: If he thinks a little they’d still be . . . ? Aud: People are climbing on him. We’re climbing on you. PG: Yeah. Well, Zen Buddhist writings always have these images, and I just thought of one in relation to this. I mean, as you were talking about people standing on his back or my back. ere’s one about the dog who’s swimming and he’s beset with thousands of flies of some kind that just hang on to him, and the question is: How is he going to get rid of them? How’s he going to stay alive? So he starts immersing himself deeper in the water and of course the flies go away until only one is le on the tip of his nose.

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And then he dips down and he’s gotten rid of the whole brood. So maybe that’s going underground! [laughter] Drowning. You may drown yourself. Well, you’re bothered and irritated by all sorts of things. I think when you’re not working you can be irritated by all sorts of things. But when you’re in it, it doesn’t bother you. Aud: I first heard that statement about seven years ago. You were here, Mercedes, when Duchamp said it. And he hadn’t worked in twenty years. PG: Yeah. He had a real problem. Aud: It was a whole romantic mystique about painters. e title of the seminar was “Where Is Art Going?” And he said it was going underground. It was a kind of nineteenth-century garret romanticism. PG: Well, I don’t know. He kept making those valises that he shipped aboveground. ose valises couldn’t get around underground. [laughter] Speaking of Duchamp, did you notice an article called “Duchamp Parries Artful Questions”?* I’ve never cared for Duchamp. I think he’s been one of the worst influences in the century. Like John Cage, who certainly worships Duchamp, I think he has also been one of the worst influences of the century, in this decade. So, I wasn’t interested in what he said, because I never admired his early painting. I don’t think he was a committed painter. I think he was an amateur. By that I mean an art lover. He did some paintings and that was it. I don’t think he was involved in the kind of discourse that Mondrian, Matisse, Picasso, or Giacometti were involved with. But he said something that interested me. ough I’m going out of context here in relation to what we were talking about. Well, the article goes on talking about his influence on pop art, although they call it bop art here. “Mr. Duchamp, dapper in a dark suit set off by a deep pink shirt, turns serious for a moment. ‘I’m happy with what I did,’ he said, ‘I didn’t want to produce too much. It isn’t necessary in art. It shouldn’t be a rule that an artist’s importance is determined by the amount he produces.’ ” But here’s the part I wanted to get to. “What, asked another questioner, did he feel was his most important contribution? Mr. Duchamp mused. ‘e introduction of the random into art,’ he said, ‘though actually Rubens’ technique was just as random as the accidental threads I used to let fall on my canvases. But we didn’t realize it. We thought he knew just exactly what he was doing.’ ” Well, that interested me, because . . . Well, the word even here is a key word. Shows you how difficult the art of the past is to understand. Aud (1): Where does even come in that quote? PG: Yeah, I was trying to find it again. It did seem like a key word, didn’t it? Let’s see. Well, he said his contribution was “the introduction of the random into art, though actually Rubens’ technique was just as random as the accidental threads I used to let fall on my canvases. But we didn’t realize it. We thought he knew just exactly what he was . . .” Maybe I put that in? Didn’t you hear me say even?

* Grace Glueck, “Duchamp Parries Artful Questions,” New York Times, 25 October 1967.

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Aud (1): I said I did. Aud (2): Do you think he said “didn’t even realize”? PG: Yeah. Maybe. at shows you how prejudiced I am. [laughter] Oh, I know what I meant. I think what I really had in mind was that even Duchamp recognizes now that Rubens didn’t exactly predetermine everything he did, that he was just as random and spontaneous. Even Duchamp thinks that, so it must be so, no? [laughter] It must be true. If a professional anti-art artist says that Rubens and Michelangelo were spontaneous, it could be. Increasingly I feel that the toughest thing to understand is something that was done in another century. You look at the masters and you first think you see it, and then ten years later you see it another way, and then years aer that you see it in still another way. I look at the work of the past all the time. If I can’t see it in museums, if I’m not in Europe, I look at books and puzzle over it. And I think what struck me when I first went to Europe aer the war and saw the frescoes for the first time, saw Masaccio and Mantegna and Michelangelo and Piero, was how raw they felt. Not at all the way I had imagined them or the way I’d up to that point seen in the reproductions. Or reading art historians to the point where you begin feeling, as I guess most people do in art history, that it’s damn lucky that Piero lived, pretty nice that all those guys lived, so they could write those books about them. But I suddenly began smelling the lime and seeing the scaffold there in the Masaccio fresco, and started feeling how it must have felt to have just painted that big leg on the ground, with gravity, and that big robe and that beard. And that it had never been painted before. at’s the important thing, that it had never been seen before. And how raw and brutal and real it looked. A guy made it, you see? Or the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel or the Pieros in Arezzo. I got the sexton to get me a couple of ladders and a plank so I could go up. You know, they’re in tiers and they’re painted like billboards, like sign painting, bing boom. And that had never been seen before. is geometry, these circles and big vertical shas moving, and horizontal shas. How they must have looked to people then. You forget that. And you can see how Cézanne must’ve . . . Just look how quickly he’s, to use that word, consumed. So all art of the past is consumed. And what is the damnedest thing to do, and seems to me to take a lifetime to do, is to get rid of all that crappy machinery that consumes it, and to see it. And to feel it. I mean, how it felt to the man who painted it. And how it felt even at the time to look at. It’s remarkable to me, the powers that were at that time who commissioned these things, it was pretty adventurous to invest their money in this stuff. Of course, a lot of contemporaries at the time were doing regular jobs, regular commissions, and we don’t think about that so much. You think about these few. Aud: I think it’s impossible, though, to see it. PG: To unwind the clock, really. Aud: Not just history’s gestalt but your own gestalt, and the thing that Morty talks about

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as the performance. You’re as instrumental as Piero was when you look at a Piero. I mean, you have to form it to see it. PG: You have to form it to see it? Aud: Yeah. It’s almost like he gives you the instruments and you put a function on top of it. PG: I don’t know. I’m more romantic than that. at’s too mechanistic an interpretation, too analytical an interpretation for me about how one functions. I think that there’s a leap somewhere you make. I may sound like I’m directing Charlton Heston in that movie about Michelangelo. You know, let’s see how it really was, and all that? It’s foolish. I’m not trying to re-create it. But I guess partly I mean that too. It’s brilliant schmaltz, you know? No, I think what it is is that it gives me this feeling about how that Masaccio looked, the rawness of it. e crudity, you might say. By crudity I mean no monkeying around. He goes right to the point. I think all I mean is it gives me courage, and I guess I need that courage. So that if I do something on a canvas only aer stripping away a lot of nice ideas or things I thought I believed in, you know? You scrape all those things out and then you end up with God knows what, some raw form somewhere that just had to be that way. And to accept that in yourself I find continuously rough, you see. And maybe that’s why I, romantically, look for support or something like that in the past, on this level of feeling the reality of it, away from reproductions and things that have been said about it and written about it, and so on. Although I don’t really believe that it’s romantic. I’m just saying that as a strategy. I’m not knocking art historians. You have to remember that art history is a very recent science. Or it’s a very recent endeavor which is trying to make of the study of art a science, rather. It attempts to talk about the variety of relationships of the times, of that century, or the ethos of a certain period, in relation to this art that was created. I don’t know whether that’s wrong or right, but it’s an endeavor that doesn’t interest me very much. Because I think there is no way to account for these leaps that have been made. In other words, how do you account for the fact that there’s an emotion in the world that you could call a Masaccio emotion? You know? ere’s an emotion in the world which we call a Cézanne emotion, that didn’t exist before it was made. Now I don’t know whether maybe the times didn’t make it. Aud: Well, what Hauser* means is that . . . PG: He’s not the only one. Well, he’s a more determined one. He’s more of a scientifistic art historian, a social art historian. Aud: Well, what I think he means is that that leap can be there still but that it echoes. A Poussin floor, say, is exactly the same type of mechanistic structure that Newton was talking about. at, actually, if you look at science emotionally you can get the same emotion out of the Newtonian theory that you can out of the Poussin theory. * Arnold Hauser, Hungarian Marxist art historian, author of The Social History of Art (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951).

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PG: Yeah, but I could equally make a case for the truth of an inner continuity in art itself. And we could prove that by five hundred years of painting. I mean, these jumps into a new vision are made usually, or almost entirely, by discounting what is current in your times, and going even into the past as you know Cézanne did. And certainly Poussin did. Michelangelo did. I mean to say that there’s some kind of inner continuity in art that keeps running through. Now, I’ve talked to art historians about it and of course they will just say, “Well, that’s a necessary romantic egotism that you artists need, sort of a pat on the back.” But I always have this vision that in painters’ heaven the men who are centuries apart are together and they can have a conversation. And as a matter of fact they do. All good artists have always been involved with other art forms with distant times between them. It’s hard to believe, but who was painting at the time of Piero that is even remotely like Piero? Aud: I don’t think he’s discounting that, though. He’s saying that makes the new time. He’s a Marxist, but he still loves . . . He proposes that people make history. PG: Well, it’s true he’s a Marxist, and with literary critics who have a Marxist view the implication is that you understand your time. In other words, what are you going to do with this information, assuming it’s so? e only thing you can do with it is to apply it pragmatically. at is, understand your time, and then you’ll know what to do. But what if you don’t? No, but that seems to be the functional application. Aud: No, he simply says you do, you do think your time. It isn’t a question of learning it. PG: Yes. Aud: De Kooning never read Einstein and he paints like Einstein thought. Did you ever read Einstein? Because you paint like Einstein thought. PG: Well, I’ve just read popularizations of Einstein’s thinking. Aud: In other words, I don’t think you paint like Newton. In that sense, Hauser would say, you’re part of the times. PG: Yes, I know, but that’s merely true, you know? I don’t think I paint like Einstein. I think I paint more like Newton. You know, you always have to start again, so around eight years ago I started again in painting, questioning everything. And I began thinking about gravity, like Newtonian gravity. I got sick of a world of the relativistic field. And I became very absorbed in how heavy things are, and how things could levitate, and how wind blows through leaves, and light, and how people walk. I began feeling myself very much on the ground, my weight on the ground. In other words, I felt I needed to feel the weight of things, the positions of things. Maybe that’s why I dislike so much of what’s called modern art, because it seems to me too naturalistic, too much of a mirror reflection of what I can see when I stick my head out of the window. Sight and colors and movement. And yet at the same time I think I really believe in abstract painting. Not abstract painting but the abstract in art. Aud: en, what do you mean by modern art?

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PG: Well, there’s all kinds of modern art. You’re right, it’s a generalization. I wouldn’t consider Mondrian a modern artist. I think Picasso is a modern artist, a supreme example of the modern artist. Mondrian, not. I don’t know how to explain that, except I know I feel that. Aud: Where do you fit in? PG: Where do I fit in? I think I may have to end up becoming truly involved in the abstract in art. It’s something I’ve tried to avoid. I’m being terribly confessional now. When I talk about traditional art, I mean, if we talk about Piero, for example, or Mantegna, I think they’re grand abstract artists. In the sense that they sought and achieved a form, a reduction, you might say in form, of an optimum order. I’d put it that way. Which excluded, let’s say, “self-expressionism.” In other words, as if a man like Piero, almost by this search or this quest, eliminates himself in some way. In the way that Mondrian did. I’m involved in this thinking right now, these years, and it’s hard to talk about. I’d rather do it, or convince myself through my own doing, and have that kind of test. But I feel that this search for an optimum order which will remain is some kind of truth that I think is very great to be involved with, very wonderful and very rewarding to be involved with. As against, say, a Picasso. As against, say, a Michelangelo, for example, who I think is involved with his own genius. He’s a genius who’s involved with genius, like Picasso is a genius involved with his genius. But it’s a different kind of thing to search for this universality of form, of this order, which is some kind of revelation, I think, that’s quite different than these other ones. Aud: You spoke about the polarity going on in Mantegna. PG: Yes, it’s absolutely like that. Oh yes, yet he comes to that Saint Sebastian through an entirely different road than a Piero della Francesca. It’s so difficult to talk about these things, and yet I’m passionately convinced of what I’m talking about. But I can’t explain it exactly and I don’t think anyone can, what this optimum order is. I don’t know. It’s the highest type of human order. I think Piero’s is the highest type of order which has been achieved, which is at the same time human. And by that I mean it’s never really fixed. It’s not a pyramid. It’s not dead. It’s not an icon. It’s not a mummy. And what I mean by human is that it always gives you the potentialities of its moving into another kind of order. And that’s why I think it’s universal—it touches on the cosmic and yet it’s human at the same time, and not pretentiously so. I think Mondrian, certainly, of all the modern artists, will always exist because he certainly comes close to it. Although at times I think he himself was trapped into believing that he’d found a way. And then years later he didn’t. He undid the whole thing and started again, as witness his new work when he came from Europe in 1940 and so on. He almost started where he was in the teens, the late teens, really. He came back to it in a way but in a different way. Yeah. Aud: Kandinsky says the theory is not, in practice, what you always remain faithful to, what he called the principle of internal necessity. Other artists were to come forward

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with what might be called the principle of external necessity. To escape from internal necessity of our existence to create pure art free from human tragedies. PG: is is Mondrian’s writing you’re quoting, right? Aud: [inaudible] PG: Well, who wrote this? Aud: I don’t know. I found it somewhere. e person who influenced him most was a man called Schoenmaekers.* He was a writer, and he wrote e New Image of the World and e Principle of Plastic Mathematics. PG: Well, one thing that interests me in this thing, since we’re talking about Mondrian, is that in his writings his argument for nondifferentiated forms and equivalent forms revolved precisely around his concept of the tragic. Because he felt that the differentiated form, abstract or not, nonobjective or not, always involved the tragic. And this, I think, is one of the key arguments that I debate with him. A running debate I have with Mondrian is that it is true that an involvement with a form, with a differentiated form, and doing away with equivalency, does involve the tragic. And this is the whole point, really. Aud: It’s very Trotskyite. PG: Yeah. It’s really whether the tragic, in the sense that it’s mortal, is valid or not. I mean, this is the thing he really taught me about. Because this optimum order, this abstract order, might be too inhuman for man, too “mystical.” I don’t know. I have this debate all the time. On the other hand, looking at Rembrandt, who I think is probably the greatest painter in the world, it’s tragic, or it seems to go beyond what Mondrian is talking about. In other words, when you see a Rembrandt self-portrait you think, “How is it possible to have an image here which is so real, so three-dimensionally real, with a light coming from one source, and all these devices, and it never seems to shrink in itself ?” Unlike many portraits, Renaissance portraits, the great ones, Titian and so on, or Rubens, which reflect their time, which reflect a period style. People are projected as being grand or heroic or courtly. But Rembrandt’s selfportraits never diminish. It’s as if they keep reverberating constantly. Not just reverberating, but getting larger and larger. ey never shrink, you know? It always seems to mean more. Aud: He wasn’t aer any kind of idealized . . . PG: at’s right. Not at all. He became so involved in the flesh and bone, and the feel of things, of the mortal, that it seems to transcend that. And that’s the great mystery of art. I mean, that ideas are both marvelous and dangerous. at’s what happens when you look at the great ones you like, the ancients. It’s what I mean when I say I fall in love with Goya and I go to the Louvre and I see the Mantegna and I think: “How * Dr. Mathieu H. J. Schoenmaekers (1875–1944), dissident theosopher and Neoplatonist, former Catholic priest who met Mondrian in 1915.

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could I have loved the Goya?” We’re being circular. at doesn’t matter, does it? Coming back to this argument with art historians. at, at the bottom of the barrel, aer you take away the layers of painting’s relation with the time, with the science and the philosophy of the time and so on, the fact is that there was a man who happened to be named Goya, and happened to be named Rembrandt, and he specifically did it. No on else did. He did it. And what are you going to do with that block staring you in the face? All you have to do is look at a contemporary of Rembrandt’s. Say, Fabritius. All the things are there. Well, it’s just a picture of a man with a light on him. He’s got hair and velvet and so on. What? Aud: If Rembrandt had been born a Greek, what would he have done, practicing in the fourth century or fih century? PG: Well, I don’t understand that question. If he had been born a Greek? Aud: Emphasizing the difference between Rembrandt and the other people—he is an individual; you really classify him. PG: Sure. Aud: I mean, you can pick out certain elements in his work. But if Rembrandt the man had come from another century, what would his work have been like then? Aud (2): It’s all the same. PG: Well, to be very crude, there’s a thing that kids used to say in grammar school, “If your aunt had nuts, she’d be your uncle.” I don’t want to be facetious. [laughter] But if he’d been born a Greek with another name, there would’ve been . . . I don’t know. Aud: But it’d still be the same man. PG: Well, it would be some kind of a man, yeah. It’d be your uncle. [laughter] Aud: . . . how intensely the particular artist chooses to see the world. Not even chooses, because it has nothing to do with choice. PG: Yeah. Aud: It seems that the truly great artists, aside from any kind of a technical facility, the thing that makes a Rembrandt portrait so great and so alive now as compared to one of his contemporaries is that he did not have any ending. ere was no end to his vision. PG: at’s right. I like that. at there was no end. Aud: A perfect example of this, and it goes along with the whole idealized conception, is the whole surrealistic movement. Here you get a group of people who are trying so desperately to get at the root of humanity, and what is man, and all the composite parts which go into existence, and yet you can see them coming up against the wall. eir inability to express this thing until they settle on a whole literary thing. And they go into all these little conceptualizations, you know? And all this intellectual thing. And I have been trying to find out for a long time what it was about the surrealists which le me so cold. What was this thing? And I finally realized that that’s it, that their vision stops. It stopped at a certain point and didn’t go beyond it.

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Running around, talking, manifestos, you know? Trying to use that as a substitute for this pure vision. PG: Well, what gets me . . . Aud: I’m saying that it goes beyond mind. It goes beyond thinking. PG: Sure it does. I have a late Rembrandt self-portrait, just a little black-and-white postcard, glued on the fireplace, and I guess I glued it there because I didn’t want it to come off. And I keep looking at it all the time, and it just seems that it really is surreal. at is, if surrealism means above reality, or beyond reality. What people call the picture plane isn’t even there. It isn’t even a painting. at’s the most mysterious thing about it. e image itself in this particular portrait, the way he looks out at the world, his expression is full of ambiguity. I still don’t know whether he’s frowning or silently at peace. Or whether sometimes he’s distressed. People talk about the Mona Lisa, that’s not one-tenth of the mystery of this. inking about the expression, just even the expression on his face is so damned mysterious. Did you ever think about what things are made of in paintings? I guess I’m that romantic that I start imagining what would happen if you somehow made a little cut, a little trapdoor, on his head, and you peeled it off. It would be so dense in there! It would be teeming with millions of thoughts. It’s not bone. It’s not flesh. It’d just be a teeming thing, like looking into a dream of some kind. You wouldn’t know where the hell to begin. In other words, it’s as if all of life is just concentrated in this, and how the hell did he do it? He didn’t do it, he just was like that. He was Rembrandt, that’s all. I was thinking, in the Met, if you look at that El Greco self-portrait they have, well, if you did the same thing there, if you opened up this little hole in that El Greco self-portrait, you wouldn’t find the same thing. I don’t know what you’d find. It’d be fibrous. ere’d be some fire going on there. Even the flesh doesn’t stay still. It moves. One eye goes up, the other eye goes down. e bones are twisted. It’s a different kind of inner life there. Yeah? Aud: I’m trying to relate this whole thing to right now, and to an artist in this society and what’s happening. And I think I feel a whole reluctance among artists to just face the world. PG: What do you mean, face the world? Aud: Allowing themselves just to be overwhelmed by the forces which are going on. ere is a sort of a fear that this thing is so huge and so monstrous that if they open themselves to the fullest extent, that somehow they’ll just be completely devoured and disappear. And maybe this is death, but I can’t see any other way out. Doing anything else seems to me to be a cop-out, to be just drawing the line, just arbitrarily and not carrying the thing out to its fullest extent. It seems like a real responsibility. And when I find myself stopping or feeling any slight bit of contentment coming in, this kind of voice which says . . . PG: Yeah. Maybe we both speak from different vantage points, but there are times when

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you do what you say. But then other times you have to shut out the world to do something. Why is it, at times you draw and you get bored very rapidly because you’re just making lines, and you see yourself ? You’re making lines and it becomes meaningless to you. But there comes this moment when you don’t even see yourself making lines, you know? It’s as if you’re somewhere else, where at least a dozen things are moving around at once, and it’s almost as if you’ve lost yourself. Where feelings and thoughts are so near each other that everything is in a state of hovering, you know? Unfocused. I think that’s what is called the creative state, and I don’t know whether words express it. But that’s certainly true that at that time, and you can’t plan the time or will it, you’re not just making lines. And it’s always there. You can always feel, later when you look at it, this surprise of those few moments you had, that they represent something. It’s a document of a certain state you were in. And I think it’s a very dangerous thing. You can’t grab onto the thing and try to nurture it. Like trying to have a baby every day is impossible. And you can’t hug it to death. I guess one of the problems of being an artist is what to do in between. at’s really one of the great problems. Maybe that’s what Feldman means by survival. Survival is: what the hell do you do with the time in between? Aud: Go to a movie. PG: Sure. I’ve tried every possible strategy. I look at the world and . . . Aud: But that feeling of survival, survival of the artist in contemporary society as we see it today, what’s the feeling among painters in relation to the feeling among painters during the 1930s? at was a time when political interests were very strong too. Leading up to the Second World War and the explosion of abstract expressionism. How do you think the political climate in relation to painting today is in relation to what is was during the thirties? PG: Well, I don’t know if I understand you. I would separate certain things. I mean, the political climate was different. I grew up politically in the thirties and I was actively involved in militant movements and so on, as a lot of artists were. But I think the political climate was different, without going into it in detail. I think there was a sense of being part of change, or possible change. If you belonged to the Artists League Against War and Fascism, you felt that what you did, posters and floats, whatever it was that you did, you felt that it seemed to have some effect. Although, thinking of the war, it didn’t. e Spanish Civil War and so on. Whereas now . . . at’s the thing that struck me, when I quoted Paul Goodman, who said that he felt this, his country, was somehow in control of invaders or a foreign power. Where you can have hundreds of thousands of artists and intellectuals, writers, march and sign protests and it’s just down the drain. It just doesn’t seem to affect power. So there’s a big difference there, don’t you think so? Aud: You feel like a foreign power is taking over the art scene? PG: Oh, I think so. at’s what I was implying, yeah. And by the art scene I mean mu-

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seums and galleries and certainly lots of supporters of the current scene. Well, I think society is getting the kind of art it deserves now. I mean, what else can you say? e so-called avant-garde is so big, it’s so huge now, that it’s not an avant-garde. I mean, the army’s already occupied the country, you know what I mean? You can’t talk about an avant-garde. It’s occupied the whole country. So, it’s taken on all the aspects. Aud: Is there an avant-garde? PG: Well, I never thought seriously about an avant-garde. How can you? I don’t know. I feel, that stuff takes care of itself. Sometimes the most traditional painter might later on be the most avant-garde. Aud: How does minimal painting, for instance, fit into the so-called continuity of art? Is it strictly Mondrian? PG: I don’t think it has anything to do with Mondrian. If we’re talking about the same things? I don’t know whose work you’re referring to. Aud: I’m referring to minimal sculpture, for instance, and environmental sculpture. I feel that the role of the painter has been . . . As you are a painter, as Goya was a painter, as I feel myself as a painter . . . e cause of paint is becoming squelched by a kind of overpowering thing. PG: Yeah, I think so, too. at’s obvious to everyone. But I don’t mean to put down what you said. I say that’s true. We know that. e question is how to survive, really, with that. It’s merely true that you’re a product of your time. You live in this time but it’s impossible to survive without being against your time, like vehemently against your time. And I think that the current art, for my feeling, is too logical. And not only that it’s logical, but too exclusive. I think I’m more involved with inclusion. New art takes too many things for granted, which I can’t accept. Aud: It’s almost as if art historians are starting to paint. PG: Somewhat. Yeah, there’s a logic to it. In that sense, analytically, it says that. Aud: It’s all so expressible. Like critics have never had such a good time, I’ll bet, because they’ve been able to write articles about every . . . PG: It’s a shame that we can’t talk about something. We can just sit here and become a bunch of carpers and it doesn’t mean anything. I don’t think it’s rewarding, really. I don’t know what will come out of these new groups. Many things can happen. I don’t know. I’d just as well leave it open. What I’ve seen, though, makes me think that it doesn’t include enough. at’s all. I mean, I increasingly feel that. ey’re too artistic too, by the way. It’s anti-art but it’s the most artistic anti-art you’ve even seen. I guess painters like myself or my generation are less artistic, in the sense that there’s no assuming that there is an art at all. I prefer to believe, and I do believe, that Kline or de Kooning or myself or Rothko or some of the others of what was called the New York School were really more revolutionary, in the sense that we didn’t assume there was any painting at all. Like there wasn’t anything to start om. e only thing you

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could vouch for was your self, almost with the nineteenth-century sense of a Rimbaud or a Baudelaire. at all you could really vouch for were your own sensibilities and your own reactions, and you just had to go from there with a high critical sense, constantly testing yourself and seeing what could happen. Aud: And that could be on the lips of any artist working now, what you just said. Aud (2): No. PG: I don’t think so. It’s just the opposite. Aud (2): Group therapy. PG: It’s a reaction against this individualistic premise, you might say, in that the idea of preconception is very strong. And it’s based on a lot of assumptions. For instance, the assumption that the picture is flat. erefore if the picture is flat, you don’t penetrate space. You don’t create illusions of space. But the fact is, when you’re on a surface and you make one line and you make a second line, or one color and another color, you’re immediately creating holes, you’re creating illusions of all kinds. And I think you have to cope with those illusions. I wouldn’t exclude illusion, for example. Or what they call flat I would call the plane, which is a metaphysical place, not the surface certainly. ey mean the surface. In that sense, I mean, they’re exclusive, and I don’t respond to exclusivity. So that when you’re in front of one of the paintings you feel as if the guy’s there next to you and he’s saying: “Well, you see, it’s like this, you see?” Well, all those are assumptions. I want to come to a painting, whether it’s my own or anyone else’s, with the least amount of assumptions. Like I’m a dumbbell, I’m a dope. I don’t know what painting is, show me! But don’t exclude a lot of things. Maybe there is no painting at all! Who says it exists? You have to make it exist. Aud: Donald Judd says, which I think is really like Kant the positivist, he doesn’t want anything to be other than what it is. e assumption being what it materially is, and his assumptions on those materials are really simplistic. PG: Sure. Well, it all depends on what one’s appetites are, actually. It purely comes down to that. is belief is not invalid. Indeed, it’s part of art. But that’s what I mean by exclusiveness. It all depends whether your appetite is for this kind of clarity, which is logical and clear. But, to me . . . Aud: I don’t mind logical and clear. PG: Well, I mean, “logical,” you see? I would find it more logical to say that, in the Rembrandt, for example, since we were talking about Rembrandt, it also is what it is. It’s paint. Rembrandt doesn’t try to make an illusion of this person to eliminate paint. It’s also paint. But that’s not all it is. e moment you see this hand as paint, at the moment you see it’s paint, it’s also a hand. You’re thrown in two places at once. So, if your appetite is to enjoy this duality, then your appetite can’t be satisfied with the fact of just what it is. It all depends what your appetites are, what your needs are. And it depends on how you see life and how you feel life to be. I think that point of view is very pragmatic. I think that’s what I mean, not logical but pragmatic. It works.

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Aud: When you were talking about Mondrian and the tragic, I remembered that Trotsky remarked that aer the revolution there wouldn’t be any need or any possibility for tragedy. ere would still be drama. But he said probably the only type of drama that would be possible was an ideological drama, not a personal drama. And I think that he means that when you have fully arrived at order, at the way things should be, you exclude any disgruntlement. I couldn’t be unhappy. It wouldn’t make any sense for me to be unhappy if things were the way they should be. PG: But, you know, coming back to this correlation you make of Mondrian and Trotsky, I remember reading that in Trotsky’s eory of Literature* or something there’s a difference, however, in the quest for this order. Aud: He was very nostalgic. He couldn’t bear the idea that there would be no Shakespeare, you know, that you could look at Shakespeare as a historical item. And perhaps that’s why Mondrian did quit. PG: Yes. But I was just now going to say that the quest for this optimum order, as I call it, which is beyond tragic or the humanly tragic, fascinates me. More than fascinates me, involves me very much because it’s the quest itself which is the tragic thing because it can’t be achieved, in essence. I think what I have in mind is that it’s inevitable that failure is the only quality which ensures continuity of creation. at’s what I mean. I’m trying to make another jump there. Aud: Well, Trotsky becomes the tragic hero of the revolution, which shouldn’t have had any tragic heroes. PG: Exactly. I think that, of the most recent artists, Giacometti represents to me a failure but a most profound failure. I mean failure in the sense that the thing he wanted to achieve was impossible to achieve. And I feel the same thing about Mondrian, although Mondrian was a different temperament. All right, we’re not talking about that. We’re kind of generalizing here for a moment. About the artist’s own sense of this sense of this search and its failure, with enough philosophic detachment to know that it’s doomed to failure, but an existential sense that this is the only way to live. And this sense of it’s being impossible as the only way you can continue. It sounds paradoxical, but it isn’t when you’re in that state, I think. And I feel that very keenly. I mean, you do get to a point where you think: Why art at all? Why look at Mondrian? It seems to me sometimes more marvelous to see certain states of the day, usually late morning when you can still see the moon. Certain atmospheric conditions. e sun’s coming up and you see the moon at the same time. Or at night the constellations. You’re watching the real thing. Or you can go out and feel a tree, or a rock and pick it up. All the sensations of the world that we live in as sentient beings are here, and why art? Why art? Huh? Aud: [inaudible]

* Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (1925).

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PG: Well, Kaa . . . I didn’t talk about Kaa yet. He’s been, I guess, the greatest influence on me. He’s not a painter, but that doesn’t matter at all. Sometimes I think the greatest thing about Kaa was an achievement of a consciousness where he could hover above his own involvement. As one of his parables goes, and I don’t think I remember it exactly, he finds himself involved with the protagonist in his battle, and sometimes he moves forward and he moves backwards and the image is one of actual physical battle, but he wishes to raise himself above this battle, so he sees himself involved with this protagonist. Well, I think artists achieve this at different moments. And I think we all do. Some artists can maintain it longer. I think a philosophical poet like Paul Valéry has achieved something like that. About the superconsciousness. Aud: e eye watching the eye watching. PG: Exactly. And of course, a lot of people, out of sheer exhaustion or impatience, will refute this and hope for more of a state of innocence where this wouldn’t exist, but I don’t think that’s possible. at’s just exhaustion, momentary exhaustion. I mean, everybody has that. I think this is an evolution which has been going on for some time now. It’s an evolution which is unstoppable, if that’s the word. It goes on and on, and men involved in creation have thought and become more and more like that. Aud: But don’t you feel it’s radically different from a man like Poussin who could say: “I neglected nothing.” I mean, he probably didn’t neglect anything. e idea that that situation is possible is alien. Nobody can maintain that anymore. PG: Mm-hmm. Aud: I’m sure he felt that way. at it was possible, even if he hadn’t done it. at Raphael had done it, or someone had done it. Or that it could be done. PG: Yeah. Aud: Wait until next year. And I don’t see anybody who means anything to us now who feels that way. It’s a really alien stoicism. PG: Well, what about Poussin? I have a difficulty with Poussin. I mean he may have said that he’d neglected nothing, but he may have neglected the most important thing. Aud: To you. But I’m saying, to him. I’m not disputing whether Poussin did or did not include the whole world. But he did include his whole world. Or his whole world seemed possible to be contained. at magnificent floor that de Kooning talks about. PG: Yeah. Well, of course, we can get into the discussion of Poussin. at’s something else. I don’t know whether we should or not. But when I look at Poussin, I’m made to be too aware of his order, of his construction. It’s magnificent, but it doesn’t move me in the sense that Piero does. I’m not aware of any construction in Piero at all. I mean, Poussin is a big pileup. In Piero’s Flagellation, for instance, that painting looks like reality, without any order at all. It’s like looking at doors and rooms and people. You can move in there anywhere. It’s like real life. And at moments it’s absolutely ordered and rigid. I mean, it has this power to be other than what it appears to be.

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Whereas Poussin, it’s great but it doesn’t move me to create. It’s aer all, I think, absolutely the most fantastic intelligence at work there. Aud (2): You’re interested that Poussin could say he’d done everything he could do. Don’t you think he accepted that there were things that had gone on in art that he didn’t know about? Aud: No. He wasn’t talking about art. He was talking about the world. Mallarmé said that the world would ultimately have to be summed up in a book. He didn’t say it could be. Poussin had fully developed an infinite series of symbolic references between an abstract order and everything else in the world. is is, like numbers, like a cabalist. at everything corresponds to a number. PG: Even themes. emes, above all, were very important in Poussin. Aud: at he would, by steady enumeration, if he kept painting the picture, he would slowly but surely have neglected not one single theme or type. Aud (2): at means that he didn’t think that another culture existed. Aud: at’s right. He couldn’t look at Venetian painters. Aud (2): I don’t understand those Asians. He wouldn’t accept that. Aud: He wouldn’t accept that at all. He couldn’t see the Venetians even though he took a lot of things from Titian. He thought that they didn’t know how to draw. And in his sense, they didn’t know how to draw. PG: But many painters exclude other things. Ingres excluding Michelangelo, violently anti-Michelangelo. I mean, it pained him. Aud: Poussin believed in the possibility of control. As Morton Feldman used to talk about, too. PG: No. I’m thinking, but I don’t know how to say what I’m thinking. Has anybody else . . . ? Aud: I was just going to say, you only have an hour, so never mind. PG: Oh, that’s all right. Aud: When your courtroom scene is happening, can you, like Kaa, go up in the balcony and watch what’s happening? PG: Towards the end of the courtroom. Towards the end only. How to explain that? Aud: You can always change roles, though. PG: No. Perhaps one shouldn’t even talk about these things, you know? It seems almost indecent to talk about it. But I’ll just say this: there is a sense that once in a while, towards the end, you’re doing it but there’s a peculiar sense that it’s inevitable. When things fall into place and you’ve gone through all the trials, you might say. And I think your strongest sense is the feeling of doom, or of no choice. ere are too many choices in the beginning of this. When you begin painting you’re too free. In the beginning, it’s very painful but you always have to start that way. at’s why it’s always so painful

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to start a new picture, or to start the process again, because you have to go through this whole thing again and again. To get rid of the freedom, you might say. I think what is happening is that you’re getting to a state of unfreedom. Is that a word? In the beginning, it doesn’t matter whether a thing is a foot away, or forms are, you can move around. But when it gets to a state where an inch makes all the difference in the world, you feel better. Paradoxically enough, you don’t feel as much in pain as when you have liberty. And that brings up the other question of what is freedom. is unfreedom, as I would call it, is perhaps a more metaphysical kind of freedom. Perhaps that’s the real freedom that we have. Aud: Berdyaev* talked about God as being not reasonable, in the sense that he set the limit for reason. In other words, in Berdyaev’s world, I’m walking around and I can be free and reasonable, but God can neither be free nor reasonable because he is that thing. PG: Well, I’ve never read Berdyaev. at’s just a name to me. I’ll have to read him. But that’s wonderful. It’s also a sense that when you get to the point of that inch, moving that form an inch or half-inch this way or that way, that ecstatic sense of unfreedom– freedom is the feeling that God says that’s all you’re really allowed. You go this far and no farther. Because to go any farther, and I’d be happy to do it too, would be not to paint at all but just be in life. I mean, illuminate this whole construction and go through the picture plane completely and just be in life and walk everywhere and move everywhere and know everybody and do everything. And do away with this symbolic action, which it seems you can’t live without. Because that’s what it is, a symbolic way of living. Somebody was going to say something, no? Aud: Feldman says in this article, I think it had a reproduction of a drawing of yours and a Mondrian drawing, and he was sort of regretting the fact that the Mondrian drawing was erased and then redrawn, and he was regretting the fact that it’s possible in a painting to have an erasure. at is, to show how you got from one place to another. And I was listening to Charles Ives, and it’s funny, but every time I hear people talking about Feldman’s music they talk about his being vertical rather than horizontal. And in Ives, he does that. at is, if you can imagine two harmonic lines being drawn over each other. And I sort of wonder how he could neglect it. PG: Well, I can’t explain Morty’s music, other than that I’m involved with it and have been for a long time. I guess it was 1950 we met and started a very close relationship in which we each had our growing aesthetic ideas and philosophical ideas we were constantly discussing. I’m devoted to his music, as I’m devoted to his mind. I’m fond of him personally. And of course he’s one of the two or three people who respond to my work. at seem related to me or to how it feels to myself. And also on whom I depend a great deal. * Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948), religious metaphysician, author of The Destiny of Man (1937), Dream and Reality (1943), and The Meaning of the Creative Act (1955).

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O N D R AW I N G 1974

Philip Guston: In former summers I’ve brought up slides of paintings. I would show a progression of them, and so on. But I didn’t do that this time, mainly because I didn’t want to bore some of the staff who are with us again. So I wanted to bring up things they’d never seen, which are drawings. And in selecting the slides, of the photos that I had slides made of, I didn’t know where to stop. I thought, well, I’ll start with 1960. en I said, Well, no, I’ll go to 1950. And then I went all the way back to when I was about seventeen years old. So I thought, maybe they’ll be like a retrospective, which is what this is. I’m going to show you what I drew like when I was seventeen years old. It’s a risky thing to do, but there it is. I mean, it’s what I did. And then I think drawings are exciting to look at. e art books I have, of the masters, are mostly drawings. I seem to tend to buy books of drawings. Because, of course, you see the most intimate thought, all his reflections, his erasures, the direct impulse. It’s not paint. We all know that with paint you put down a pink, a red, a blue, a shape, and you scumble it over, you change it. ere’s a lot of funny business going on in painting. But drawing is direct. Now, most of the time, except for the very early drawings, they’re not studies for paintings. ey’re meant to be like complete drawings in themselves, as you’ll see. But from about the late forties on, I drew a lot but not as complete drawings. You know what I mean by that? It sounds funny. I mean, the drawings were germinating ideas always in relation to what I was painting at that time. So that my habit of working all through the fiies and sixties and now is: I won’t paint for a week or a few days. I buy paper by the ream, the big butcher-block drawing paper. And I use either charcoal or ink. Something direct. In fact, I like charcoal because charcoal is a mess. You can’t ever really fix charcoal, but who cares? It’s like an extension of your finger, you know what I mean? You don’t have to stop to pick up ink, which is always a drag. e idea is: Don’t stop. So, I’ll draw. And they’re goofy drawings. I mean, just searching, searching, searching, and they’re germinating. My painting comes out of drawing. I couldn’t live without drawing. I know that. It’s constant. You scribble. You draw. Okay. My intention in drawing throughout the years kept changing. It was always in relation to the painting. Well, we’ll talk more directly about what we’re dealing with here. ere are gaps. Well, I don’t want to go into autobiography too much, but even this was in relation to what I was painting then. I was about seventeen when I did Not previously published. This talk was given at the Yale Summer School of Music and Art, Norfolk, Connecticut, in July 1974.

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this [drawing for Conspirators]. I was doing some large paintings of the Ku Klux Klan, which was very active in Los Angeles where I was reared. But this is simply pencil, which I like to draw with, on two- or three-ply Strathmore with a little pink for the bricks. So that’s how I drew then. It was way back in the early thirties. Several paintings came out of this drawing. Now, in this early work I don’t have photos of lots of drawings. So there are going to be jumps. For instance, between this drawing and that I’d say is about five years. A self-portrait. Very Renaissance-influenced, very involved with the modeling of forms. Hard and severe as I could, as three-dimensional as I could make it. Now, we’ve jumped—again, a five-year jump. A portrait of a friend of mine. Again, pencil on Strathmore. And things have changed for me somewhat. I did many drawings in this soer mode. I was very influenced by Picasso’s classical period, Corot drawings, Ingres of course. And I suppose I don’t have to tell you: you work from what you’re seeing, but you don’t draw everything you see. You evolve a highly selective process. You fight for that contour, of course, and so on. A drawing very involved with the feel of hair, the actual texture, the tactile quality of hair as well as skin. Well, it’s a big jump here. Again, about eight years. And you’ll have to accept it. But from here on, they follow pretty much year by year. So things had changed for me. is was a drawing from about 1948, 1949, something like that. I had been doing lots of imaginary paintings of children in masquerades and so on. And about 1948, I lost interest in it. I mean, I just couldn’t continue. And figuration itself seemed to slip away from me. I was also friendly and close to certain painters whose names you now know, who were roughly called the New York School. And they were going through the same kind of a process of change. And we were friends. I mean painters like Bradley Tomlin and Brooks, de Kooning, Kline. Well, others. And I was beginning to feel that painting should be more of an exploration and a radical change. Of course, being in that group, I shared the electric atmosphere at the time. But this was done when I went to Europe for the first time. I went to Italy for the first time in 1948 and I didn’t paint for that whole year. I just traveled and drew out of hotel windows. And this drawing [Drawing No. 2 (Ischia)] actually was done on the beach of a little island in the Bay of Naples called Ischia. It’s a drawing of the town, just looking at the complex of the town. Little white buildings and black windows, done with just a reed I found on the beach, with my bottle of ink. It’s strange how something done oand like this can lead to painting, you know, like a seed. is led me into a whole period of painting, all through the early fiies. I wish I’d brought slides along. And then I began drawing very freely and loosely, scribbling. at’s 1950, roughly working from a still life.* One of my intentions at that time, and it still is to some extent but very strongly at that time, was to attack the paper with a stick, with the stuff, the ink, with as little preconception as possible. at is, actually not knowing. Just a feeling, like some instinctual feeling, like you just want to make marks. * Possibly the untitled ink drawing no. 9, 1950, in Philip Guston: Works on Paper, exh. cat. (New York: Morgan Library and Museum, 2008), viewable online at www.themorgan.org/about/press/GustonChecklist.pdf.

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You don’t know where it’s going to go, how it’s going to turn out. I can only tell you how I felt at the time, which I think is a valid thing to do. I can’t look at a drawing and say: Look how I handled this area. at’s foolish. So that is how I felt. I would do hundreds of drawings a week and maybe get two or three out of it that I could live with, that I could tolerate. Why did I do that? I wanted to test myself. I remember thinking a great deal that maybe I don’t know what I think I know about structure and order and unity. You know, some kind of organic unity. I would sense all these things in the drawings that I loved, the notebook drawings of the masters I loved, but I couldn’t work like that, I wasn’t living then. I didn’t have that subject. I had no subject. Only the subject of my instinct, my urges. I didn’t know how it was going to turn out, so I wanted to test myself and see what would happen. Even the decision, like at the end of a week of doing hundreds of drawings, for example, putting them all up around the wall, even the difficulty of deciding which is good or which is working and which doesn’t, is hairraising. I mean, that in itself was part of the process. But I did know certain things that I wanted, still want and like and respond to. You see, now I can be more analytical about it than I was then. When you’re doing something, you’re not, but past tense you can do it. I did know that I wanted to feel the whole field, the whole rectangle, the whole area, the world! at’s the world, that’s your world. Alive. I didn’t want to feel that I was just making marks on the surface. In fact, there had to be a certain kind of balance, equilibrium, between the line and the spaces, the white, so that neither gained, if you know what I mean. And by the way, most of these drawings, in case you’re interested, are done with those bamboo sticks, those Chinese or Japanese sticks. I just cut a slit in them and they hold a lot of ink. en you turn it and it makes a different kind of line. I did include a few paintings in this slide talk, only to show some relationship between what was going on in the drawings and the paintings. at’s a painting done in the same year, 1951 or 1950 [probably White Painting, 1951]. And as with the previous couple of drawings, I decided I would attack the canvas like a drawing. It’s still my ambition, in a way, to treat a painting with the same ease. I didn’t have much money then, and I wanted to be able to buy reams of canvas, like hundreds of rolls, stick them up on the wall like you would paper. Go through fiy yards and maybe get one or two pictures out of it. And I treated this painting like a drawing, done in an hour or something like that. And I thought of it so much in that sense that I didn’t even have an easel. I just put the canvas on the wall and had a big hunk of glass with the paint on it. Usually it’s by your side. I had destroyed some pictures previous to that because it took too long to get to the side to pick up the paint. So I put the palette in front of me, in front of the piece of linen, so I could just pick it up and put it on without stepping back. I didn’t want to step back to look. at was about an hour’s work and I was to go somewhere with somebody and they honked the horn, so I went and I came back a day or two later and it looked fine. It looked okay. But this was a crucial painting for me. In the sense that I began to feel that I could really learn, investigate, by losing a lot of what I knew. Of course later I dis255

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covered that I wasn’t losing. I don’t know if I was gaining. Hopefully, gaining. But to reiterate that remark I made before, I began to feel that maybe I didn’t know what I thought I knew. And that induced a willingness to risk and follow urges, instincts. You know, we kill those instincts, don’t we? You start thinking about composition and so on. I mean, nobody tells you to put a line here and a line there. How do you know? You’re plunging. e sensation you have is that you’re plunging into space, like jumping off the Grand Canyon or something. You don’t know how it’s going to turn out. I still do that. I guess we’ll have to treat this as if we’re just going through a big retrospective show of drawings, because that’s what it is. I don’t know what to say about each one, except there it is and I like it and that’s the one that survived aer my eyes’ testing it over the years. Audience: [inaudible] PG: I know what you mean, but I don’t know how to answer that. I live in the world. I look, I see things move, I’m aware of forces, equilibriums. Maybe I misunderstood you. You mean, actually looking at something? Aud: [inaudible] PG: No, I’d never do that. at’s a bore. Aud: [inaudible] PG: Well, I mean vaguely. I mean imaginary. Yeah. I’ve spent years drawing from things. People, figures, and so on. But I think I’m aware, if it’s possible to answer that a little more, of forces that are at work. I mean, if I see wind blowing through a tree and I see the way the leaves move . . . I remember I used to like to lie down, like when you go on a picnic or something, and watch people walk, and I’d think, “Isn’t that strange the way they locomote? How one foot moves.” I think I’m in love with forces of things. What causes this to move and that to move and so on. What were you going to ask? Aud: [inaudible] PG: It’s more complicated than that. I don’t want to sound complicated. I mean to say, it’s not as simple as that. at is to say, there’s figuration in everything. We all look at spots, blotches, dots, and see things. at’s a natural activity. So that there seems to me to be an interaction going on between you and it. You put some marks down on the paper, and at the moment that you’re putting those marks down they’re not just marks. I don’t know what they are, but they’re not just marks. Because when you put down a mark and you put down another mark, something is happening in the spaces between those several marks or movements. What are you asking me? Whether I put down the marks first and then see, or whether I see first and put down the marks? Is that what you mean? Huh? Both. Is that what you’re asking? Aud: Yeah. What impulse drives you to, or allows you to, put the marks in one place on the page instead of another? Do you close your eyes and . . .

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PG: No. I think we’re talking about spontaneity. at’s a cryptic word. I don’t even know what spontaneity is, actually. First of all, one experience comes out of another. One work comes out of another work. It’s a series, it’s a chain, right? Drawing and painting is a chain of events. Aud: [inaudible] PG: I beg your pardon? Is this Gabriel? Yes? Aud: [inaudible] PG: A little bit like Louis [Finkelstein] did. In a sense of closely analyzing what it is that happened to me. Aud: [inaudible] PG: Sure. Yeah. Well, in that sense . . . who? Aud: [inaudible] PG: But you know what the real answer to Gabriel is, what he said? It’s what I’ve oen told Louis over years of talking, is that I don’t want to know. Who the hell wants to know? Because if I know, I don’t want to do, make. Making. is is a constant fight with Louis. Making is knowing, so if I know . . . You see, I don’t even want to talk about it right now. I don’t even want to talk about what I don’t want to talk about! Because there’s something enervating about knowing. You see, I think that creating is a double process. You have to be sophisticated as hell and innocent as hell at the same time. It’s a real impossibility, but I think that’s what it is. And I think that’s what all the great ones would say, too. at’s my theory. I’m really answering your question in a real sense, I think. No? So if you ask me what happens, do I think first and make a mark or make a mark and then think? I’m having a baby. I don’t want to know that much about it. I just want to have that baby, you know what I mean? Aud: [inaudible] PG: at’s a little better. at’s a little more practical question. Because, let’s say you spend ten, fieen minutes on this, and as it’s getting going there’s a growing feeling that something’s there, it’s happening, this is it. Your heart starts patting, your face gets a little red. You know it’s getting there. So then you’ll do certain things, coming from knowledge of the strength of the drawing, to make it more this or more that. at’s more of a realistic practical question. e other bugs you. at’s a good drawing. I didn’t know that was going to happen. And that turns out to be a very structured firm little drawing. Quivering, something quivering through the whole thing. Aud: When you make the first line on paper, does the quality of that line influence where and how you make . . . PG: Does it influence me? Sure it does. Because you make a couple of lines, whatever’s in your mind, and you’re aware that you’re setting off some energies there. You’re very

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aware of that. And that can lead you to another movement, another line. Is that what you mean? Yes, it does. But even there you don’t know what the total is going to be. And that’s what I’m talking about, that this whole period was, for me, one of not knowing. Where weights and densities and pressures, all that stuff. Not knowing. Aud: One time you were giving informative crit and we were all up in a room with all these big image paintings and Stephen [Greene?] said something that I always felt was very close to what you said. PG: Whose painting was this? His? Aud: Yes, it was his. And he said that the feeling he had aerwards was that he had never known anything about it, except when he saw it he knew that it was the painting that he had wanted to paint. PG: Yeah, that’s right. at’s very nicely put. Exactly. But that’s aer it’s done, you see? at’s what I meant. I put it another way. I’ll try to use more everyday terms. Like what I meant when I said that I didn’t think I knew what I thought I knew. Obviously, what that implies is getting rid of habits. And the strange thing, in relation to what you just said, is that when you’re willing—willing!—to make a jump and make things strange to yourself, the paradox is that aerwards you find out that that’s what it was you wanted to see all the time. at. Now, at this point I wanted to draw in masses, like losing contour. Sometimes I like to work with contour, like defining a shape. But that time in the painting itself, around 1954, I was just working with big masses of color. Pinks and reds and so on. And sometimes I like to do just the opposite, work with line and contour. Aud: How do you know that this is the last line you’re going to make? PG: Yeah. You know. Aud: How can you be so intellectual about questioning? PG: You see, all these questions about how do I know and where I make the next line, it’s just the opposite of what I’m talking about. I’m talking about engaging in this encounter with not knowing. Jesus! And you’re talking about “how will I know.” You still want to know how to make a picture. I’m not talking about making a picture. I’m talking about having an experience. Aud: It seems to me like the process you’re talking about comes aer you’ve finished something. Aud (2): ere is this intellectual side of art. PG: No one’s saying there isn’t. Who? Aud (2): Aristotle and maybe omas Aquinas, who were never able to divide the faculties of intellect and emotions as separate things. No one can find them in specific locations in the brain. So, if one is involved in an emotional process, one is necessarily also involved in an intellectual process. PG: Sure. But this is not only an emotional process, it’s also a process that involves mat-

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ter. By matter I mean ink, paper, space, and spatial divisions. It’s matter. You see, I’m in love with painting and drawing, and the great thing about painting and drawing, as opposed to thinking about it, is the resistance of matter. And what I’ve found over the years in going around and talking with painters or people who are more philosophically inclined, on aesthetics and so on, is that thinking is too free. I mean, boy, it’s like a spaceship. You’re like a space cadet. You can move everywhere freely. Boom! You can zoom all around. As soon as a guy proposes a thought, you propose the opposite and you get very involved in all kinds of sophistries and interesting philosophical and speculative thought, and it’s interesting. But I think the difference between a philosopher or an aesthetician and a painter, and I guess it’s also true with a poet and with a man who works with sound, is that the moment you use the stuff there’s a commitment, a resistance, where you’re not so free. And paradoxically, when you can only do this and not that, in order to move it over an inch and not two miles, you’re more free in some mysterious metaphysical way. You don’t have so many choices. So I’m a great believer in matter, in the material. For me, it’s all personal. Speculation about what I’ve done always seems to come later. I always get snarled up. When I did this, in the middle–late fiies, I was becoming interested in using organic forms, not just marks anymore. I wanted things moving into things, like trees and so on. If I stopped and thought, “Well, there’s an interesting exciting area, let’s see what it is I did”—Jesus, I couldn’t work. Other people may work differently. I’m not at all making a claim that this is the way to work. I’m not proposing a methodology or an aesthetic. I just mean that I have a tendency to analyze. And I know that when I start analyzing too much and start painting in my mind, I find I don’t paint. So much. Or I get stuck. I don’t like what I do. And I get disgusted with the whole business. And then I start liking to smell the paint. I’ll take titanium white, which is the white I use, and even when I don’t want to paint I’ve gone in the studio and I’ll just take white and I’ll take cadmium red medium, which is my favorite color, and mix it up and make a pink. at mess of pink makes me want to paint. I put it on and suddenly I stop thinking. And I like to think about painting, naturally. I look at the masters I love and I think about it. Well, what can I do? I’ll tell you what it is. What bores me is to see an illustration of my thought. at would bore me. I want to make something I never saw before and be changed by it. So that I go in the studio and I see these things up and I think, Jesus, did I do that? What a strange thing. And I like to feel strange. It’s a personality thing. I like to feel strange to myself. e whole world’s filled with things I know. But then, in working more with things, they don’t have nouns, they don’t have names, but they’re things. ings get squashed, are pushing each other, and all that. I like that feeling. ings dent each other, they affect each other. So, when do I know I’m finished? It’s when the drawing isn’t patted. at is, it’s not repaired or tickled. And where the line is alive. Where the line is making the form at the moment of the doing of it. I enjoy the feeling of the thing being caught at a very special certain moment. At a split-second moment the thing is caught, like it just came into existence. And it’s about to

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Philip Guston, The Scale, 1965. Pen and ink on paper, 181⁄4 × 241⁄4 inches. Private collection.

change into something else, by the way. It’s about to metamorphose into something else. I enjoy that. I don’t like waxworks, for instance. You know, convictions about what I like. One could give a talk called “What I Love and What I Hate.” Generalizations are terrible in art. So. We’re in about the middle sixties here. We’re going along. About this time, 1966, I had a show at the Jewish Museum of pictures with just black and white and gray. I’d eliminated colors. Maybe a little bit of pink or something. But generally I was involved with just locating single forms, two heads or two objects, on the canvas. I like that drawing a lot [e Scale]. e balancing. at was a surprise. A seesaw. A big heavy thing, naturally he’s going to weigh the smaller apple up. I mean, that apple will never get down. How could he? So, in the years 1966 and 1967, right aer this show, I didn’t paint for about a year and a half. I just drew. And I don’t know what I was doing. I wanted to clear the decks. Well, like that. I did literally thousands. I’ve got about two dozen I’m going to show you. Very spare drawings. Just with the brush and India ink on paper. Well. Bob Reed? I was doing these when I was coming up to Skidmore, and I was telling you I was doing one line. Well, you see. What say? Reed: e ruler ones.

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Philip Guston, Edge, 1967. Brush, ink on paper, 131⁄4 × 161⁄2 inches.

PG: Well, I was kidding. I didn’t really use a ruler. But the successful ones, to me, were the ones where the space felt filled and they weren’t just lines. is one is one of my favorites. I have it hanging in the house and I look at it a lot and it’s amazing. If you do two roughly vertical lines, the ones that don’t work, the ones you throw away, are just lines. But the ones that work are, of course, where there’s a double thing going on. I mean, they’re lines but they’re not lines, because the spaces are brought into operation. And if you ask me: How do I know? I can’t answer that, except that in the last analysis it’s feeling. You just feel it, and you take your chances right there. I remember when I did this, that horizontal, just like the edge of a box, that horizontal line seemed miles long. It went forever, on and on and on, and I liked that. en suddenly it stops and goes down. And I felt, well, there’s nothing else to do. It’s pretty good. We were living in Florida, in Sarasota. ose are clouds, of course. e strong feeling of doing these was alternating between great exaltation, like I’m sure the Zen Buddhist monk who drew would feel, and feelings of great depression, terrible depression. Like, my God, I’ve given everything up. Is this what I do? It’s all that’s le? And then the next day great exaltation. I mean, absolute vacillation between those two extremes. And the fact that I had those extremes depressed me. Even that de-

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pressed me. But then I acquired a tiny little touch of wisdom: Ah, give it all up anyway. It just felt good to pick up ink and make a circle. You start at the right, you see? e line barely touches on the le? You feel good that it meets that line. I mean, what else do you want to do? I may have to go back to this. at dip on the le and the dangling vertical, the fact that it doesn’t go all the way down felt so good to me when I did it. And that’s all I knew. at it felt good, it felt right. ings shrink, swell out. And then I found that all sorts of things can happen. With the most limited means, you know? at was the great lesson. I mean, we’re all students and I wanted to know. at felt real, that dangling line. And then you can’t do it again. It’s funny. You do it and you think, “Well, I’ll do some more.” But you can’t. It only works once. You can only do anything once. Or the first time, that is. And these are charcoal. at’s a mountain near where we are, opposite our house. Treating the charcoal like an extension of your finger, like you’re drawing with your finger. I think a number of things were in my mind then, like how it would be if you hadn’t seen any art before. What if you were just doing it the first time, what would you do? About this time, 1967 or 1968, at the turn of the year, I turned to just objects. A glass, a drinking glass. Just things. I thought I had exhausted what I had been doing in the previous year and I started turning just to everyday objects. A leaf. ings in a vase. ey’re stuck. ey can’t get away from each other. It’s dangerous to say I looked at this or looked at that. It was winter and I’d been drawing the snow in the snow-covered back field we have there [in Woodstock]. I didn’t look at it. You do look at it all the time, but that’s not what you’re doing. So I suppose there is an influence of the things you see. at felt good, to do that. at’s one of my favorite drawings. It seems very full, the whole page feels full. Rain. Bug in the rain. [laughter] Well, then, I guess, about 1968 or so I really, the hell with it, I wanted to draw solid stuff. I didn’t suddenly do it, you know. But one of the first ones I liked was just a drawing of my inkwell. And that’s the bamboo stick you use. It looks like a body laid out. I started drawing things then. An old dilapidated armchair I have. It took a good half-year to get into it. But I’m showing you what I consider the better ones, the ones I like. is is already 1968, and this led into that whole group of paintings. at’s what I wanted to show you. ere are also hundreds of little paintings that I didn’t show. And then I got hipped on books. What was in my mind, I thought I would draw just what was very close to me. I read a lot. You know, you live in the country, so: Books. Lamps. Lightbulbs. Food. Shoes. Just things around me. And I must have done hundreds of books. ey’re just such a simple form, but it seemed filled with possibilities. I did a telephone book. Oh, you know, they have a drawing in the telephone book, like “Look in the Yellow Pages with your finger”? And then

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some of the books started looking like stone tablets. ey keep changing. When you draw or paint a form, it metamorphoses. It changes into something else. en I wanted to make thick books that look a little bit like in between a building and a grader. But I wanted to make it real solid. at was a painting which followed a lot of the drawings of books, and I’ve always loved this painting [possibly Book, 1968]. I have it. It’s a big gouache, about forty by fiy. And the book was bigger, but it got smaller and smaller. And then I thought, “Gee, that’s just the right size.” You could pick it up. A very tender book. at’s the first painting of the sole of a shoe. But it changes. I don’t know what the hell it looks like. It doesn’t look like a shoe, but I don’t know what. en I’d been drawing, for some weeks or months, some Klan figures. I was influenced, of course, like everybody else, very interested and involved politically in what’s happening to the country and the world. And this was done at the time of the Chicago convention of 1968. And this is one of the early ones, the early Klan drawings. at’s a painting which I’ve never shown. And then the eyes started disappearing. ey became more slits like that, see? But this was all germinating stuff in relation to that series of paintings. In 1970 I had a large show [at the Marlborough Gallery] of the theme relating to this. Pictures of big heaped-up bodies and terrible things happening and goings-on. Whipping each other. Beg pardon? Aud: What made you change your role from not knowing what you were going to get when you finished a drawing to kind of knowing? PG: Yeah. But you know, I discovered that as I’m going more into what obviously is a figuration, I don’t have the illusion that I know what I’m going to do either. I mean, there’s even more ambiguity and complication. at was another discovery for me. In fact, at about this time I reversed myself. I’d work for weeks on the drawing for a painting. I really could visualize the whole painting in my mind. And I thought, I want to see if I can do this, like I did in the past, seemingly know what I’m going to project and then start painting. And then when I started the painting, it didn’t hold that way. All these changes take place. And then working with not just figuration but with a subject matter, a real subject, almost a narrative subject, you discover that the shis of forms, spaces, really make you reel. It makes the other way of working almost simple. Aud: What was your emotional state at this time? PG: I felt less exclusive. I wanted to include everything. I felt, like everybody, disturbed about everything to such an extent that I didn’t want to exclude it from the studio, from what I did. Paint it. I didn’t think I was illustrating anything. What say? Aud: Were you ever thinking about having a more inclusive or exclusive audience? PG: I didn’t think about that. I had no illusions that I could ever influence anybody politically. at would be silly. I mean, this is not the medium. Nor the outlet, wherever, when you show them. No. I think the forms became exciting to me, and I wanted

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to see if I could include those forms in my work. I would make sketches like that, dozens. Start the paintings. Big fighting in the streets. But they changed in the painting, naturally. It goes through many transformations. In fact, I have one or two I brought along to show you what I was painting at the time [for example, Caught, 1970]. I conceived of these figures as very pathetic, tattered, full of seams. I don’t know how to explain it. Something pathetic about brutality, and comic also. I mean, the mixture of emotions. e guy’s gone nuts. Huh? Aud: You oen talk about almost a fear of not being afraid, or a fear of not having something to really grind against. Do you feel that that kind of feeling is a starting point? PG: Of this particular work? Let me see. You’re saying, a fear of not . . . Aud: Of not having anything to grind against. PG: A resistance, you mean? Aud: Yeah. Do you feel that that’s a starting point for a lot of these things to go into? PG: Well, I know when I’m starting these things—talking about not knowing, I guess I should explain that. I know that I’m going to do this kind of figure. I feel this kind of emotion. I know I’m not going to draw two giraffes in the circus. I know I’m going to do this. But in the doing of it, it’s also, I find, an exploratory world. And furthermore, I feel it’s more my world. It’s a place. I think you saw that 1970 work, did you? It’s a city, it’s a place. at’s the bad guy. ere’s a painting like that. Sheriff, I call it. I have them sitting around eating, smoking, plotting. I actually visualized the kind of room they were in. Beg pardon? Aud: [inaudible] PG: In a different way. I mean, I know I’m dealing with a certain subject, obviously, right? But how it’s going to turn out I don’t know. I mean, I did a whole series of drawings like this, but only this one turned out the way I wanted it. Yeah. It’s a different process, no doubt. Sure. How can it be the same? I wanted a bunch of lugs getting drunk, smoking cigars. at’s what I wanted. Brutes. But part of my own pleasure, in answer to your questions, was not too dissimilar. When it turns out, it’s discovery. I don’t know how it’s going to look. ese are notebook sketches I liked. ey all led to paintings. e studio was scattered with, all the walls were just covered with, hundreds of these things. And when I’d paint I would just have an atmosphere of all these drawings. I never followed any one of them literally. But it’s curious, isn’t it? at was one of the more successful paintings that happened aer a lot of those drawings. at’s a forty by sixty canvas. ey’re just pictures on a wall. A very sexy lightbulb and book. Aud: [inaudible] PG: Really? You know, I found when I was doing these pictures that I had made a circle, you might say. All my older interests in painting, the children fighting with

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garbage cans and all that stuff, very influenced by Uccello and Piero, came flooding back on me, and I felt like I had so much to handle. I couldn’t wait for the next day to start. Aud: Do you ever think about the paintings that you did of the children? PG: Oh, you know those? Aud: Yeah. PG: Yeah. ey’ve grown up. Aud: It seems like you’ve come back to that. But a lot of the drawings stay very consistent. PG: Well, that was one of the big paintings that came out of a lot of the drawings. I mean, those two. at and the previous one. ey’re big nine and a half, ten-foot paintings. Huh? Aud: One thing that seems to have changed, although it doesn’t appear particularly in the last show, in comparison to the fiies, was that you used to talk a lot about how you could never get to the outside. How you were always stuck in the middle, trying to push out. PG: Go to the edges, you mean? Aud: You’re outside all the time now. Why do you feel that happened? PG: I don’t know how to answer that, except that I feel . . . Let’s see. Well, let’s go on. at’s a recent drawing, which led to some of those recumbent figures that you saw up in the Boston show last spring.* at was the painting you’re referring to. at was one of the larger pictures. It’s recent. I just did it last summer, fall. In some of the work I’ve done since this show I feel . . . how shall I say? ere’s a real world I’m painting, that I’m imagining, and it exists. All I have to do is reveal it. I don’t even have to search very much. I just have to get in there and reveal it. So it’s a real world, a real place. Guys in a bed. Doing this, that. And I don’t stop so quickly. I want to realize it. I want to reveal this, you know? Does that make any sense? In the earlier work, say of the fiies, when the feeling stopped, I stopped. Here the feeling is more bound up with tangibilia. Aud: It had to do with trying to lose contour and lose form. And I think you’re going aer those forms now. PG: Oh, yeah, they’re very solid. Aud: ey’re very real to you. PG: Very real to me. And hopefully to others. ere’s an American painter who lives in England, and I’m not crazy about his work but I like him, Ronald Kitaj. He came to Woodstock last fall when I had these pictures all around—I hadn’t shipped them * Philip Guston: New Paintings at Boston University School of Fine and Applied Arts Gallery, March 15–April 14, 1974.

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to Boston. And there’s a whole series of painters, I conceived them as painters in bed. ere are very few hooded figures there. One is called Painting, Smoking, Eating, and he’s imagining this painting or he’s making a painting, I don’t know. He’s just in bed imagining it, smoking, paint can on his chest, some French fries on his chest. ere are about a half a dozen of these characters, and I was very pleased with what Kitaj said. He said: “You know what you’ve done? You’ve created a man, you’ve created a character.” And in some of the paintings I’ve done since that show, he’s there again. Maybe I feel more like a novelist or something. You know, you have to have something to deal with. Painting is kind of boring; it’s really tedious, like a job or a lesson or something. But when you have something to deal with, a character or a person, well, then he’s got to have an environment. He sleeps, he eats, he paints, he does things. You know, I used to be very interested in Beckmann in the forties. I used to love him, adored him. I guess I was influenced in some way. And again I’m very interested in Beckmann. Max Beckmann. He’s made a place, and it’s very important to make a place. ings are in my mind. My mind’s going faster than my mouth, so I don’t know what to say. Aud: [inaudible] PG: Figures, yeah. It’s the same guy. Like Kitaj said, it’s a personage. And without him, I couldn’t . . . I mean, he triggers everything off. You know, you can only go by feeling. All I know is, when I leave the studio, which is about fiy feet away from the house, and one of these comes off, I like the feeling that I don’t have a painting in there, I’ve got a being in there. He’s there. Or another guy is in there. A duplicate. One of the greatest things that was said in recent years was Giacometti’s statement that he wants to make a duplicate. e idea of a duplicate is just fascinating. So the guy is in there, he’s in bed, he’s thinking. It’s like making a golem. You know what a golem is? e medieval rabbis made a golem. It’s impossible. Only God can make life. A golem was like Dr. Frankenstein. So I went to Italy, aer not being there for some time, and I saw all the paintings I love differently, you know? ey all made golems. ey made an imaginary world of golems. And that’s really very exciting in painting, to make a duplicate of the world. Not a duplicate, of course. ere’s a paradox there. It goes parallel to the real world. And that’s a key word, parallel. But it’s a different world. And that’s very exciting to me. Aud: Do you think you were doing that all along without realizing? PG: Yeah, I thought a lot about that. And it’s very funny to think about yourself over a span of years or decades. It’s hard to think clearly about it, because at a certain point it boggles the mind. How do you know? I don’t know. But you only know now, really. And it’s all relative, too. Because where you are now colors your looking. It’s like a movie going backwards. So all I know is, I like tangibilia. I just like things touchable. Like you could bump into it.

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Aud: [inaudible] PG: I don’t want to dream. I think painting is a dream, but it should be like a dream with eyes open fully with stuff. So, early paintings of mine from the fiies, say, very spare things, if you know them—I look at them very much like an old girlfriend or an old love. I can’t look at it critically. All I remember is the mood I was in when I did it. at’s what I wanted to do. And this leads to a question which is very interesting to consider. Let me see. How to say it? I feel like I’m giving one of those little sermonettes, you know? When the TV goes off ? Here’s another sermonette. ings that stay in your mind. Like the best thing that Picasso said, and he said a lot of wonderful things. He’s one painter who really talked, wisely at times. He was a buffoon, too, but he said some marvelous things. I forget just how he put it, but, to paraphrase it, he said “self-trust.” It sounds like nothing, but it’s a very hard thing to achieve, for me. To trust yourself. Because we really don’t do it, you know. We depend on a lot of structures outside. Teachers, books, everything. History. So, how do you trust your instincts? In other words, if you have an impulse and you make a painting, you do it. You believe in it at that moment. Now, a month later, a year later, you say, “Well, that’s not so good.” But what are you doing? Are you denying your conviction at the time you did that? And can you? Should you? You know what I’m getting at? So if I did something with this total conviction and my life depended on what I painted in 1950 and I signed the canvas, well, that’s what I did at that time. Self-trust. It sounds like nothing, but . . . Aud: [inaudible] PG: Possibly. You can eliminate yourself by thinking about self-indulgence. at’s right. Sure. You can become that, but then you can become anything. You can think yourself out of things. You can check and negate so much. Many times I think, “Oh, Jesus, I’m just self-indulgent.” You tussle with that. Sure. And then you can make rationalizations, and that’s no good either. I mean, at the bottom of the barrel, all you’ve really got is your instinct, finally. Or whatever that word means. Instinct. Urges. Loves you have. at’s a big one. And the method, technique, you find it. You find the way to do it. Well, that’s what I had. e fact that it looks different, that’s something else. It’s something we can’t control. And of course the question always comes up with younger artists like yourselves. I’m forestalling the inevitable question. Maybe it’s not in your mind, but I know people who say it and I know it’s probably valid in many ways: At what point do you have that self-trust? I mean, conviction. In other words, should you first learn how to do such and such? What do you think about that? And then at what point do you trust this thing? I don’t know how to answer that. I think that, coming back to yourselves, well, I’m part of it too. Because I think that that area of trusting urges and instincts, I mean, who says? You go out and paint a landscape and there it is—the tree, the sky, the sea, the cow, whatever. Nobody’s telling you to put the blue here, put the green there. At some point you’ve got to mix up the stuff and put it on, no? I mean, that’s what you’re doing. ere are no rules. You learn aer

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the stuff is on there. But I would maintain that the other thing I’m talking about is just as much a part of your painting as analyzing it and talking to your teacher. You know what I mean? So, we’re all students, and I mean that. I don’t mean to sound modest, but I study my books and I go to museums and I look at Rembrandt. I look at a Goya and I look at Chardin still lifes, and I think it’s a miracle. And I think about it, it’s on my mind. And then there are times when I don’t want to. Like, for years I won’t go to a gallery, I won’t go to a museum. I won’t look at another painting. I can’t. So you do both. I think I mainly go to museums. Well, galleries—who goes to galleries? You go to museums. And you look at the masters, that’s who you look at. And you learn. And then you see them differently all the time. at’s a great thing, to see them differently. Maybe not better but differently. What can you do?

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CO N V E R S AT I O N W I T H H A R O L D R O S E N B E R G 1974

Harold Rosenberg: Philip, the big problem of your painting as far as the public . . . Well, we don’t know what the public thinks, but as far as the reviewers are concerned, the big problem is the paintings’ appearance of crudeness. ey look as if they were all bashed up. Now, do you regard that crudeness as a positive quality or as a sign of indifference to qualities which are usually tempting to be dealt with in a finished way? Philip Guston: e only answer I can think of is that years ago it was reversed. In the fiies, when I was doing certain pink pictures, people would talk about a certain beauty, how seductive they were. It was thought they weren’t crude, you see. And speaking of whether I had planned this beauty, I remember in the late fiies when the work started getting blockier and heavier, John Cage, who liked the work of the early fiies, was very upset, and he said, “How could you leave that beautiful land?” I mean, it was a beautiful land but I le it. I don’t think about beauty anyway. I don’t know what the word is. But, no, I don’t plan the crudeness. HR: But is it a negative thing? Is it that you just don’t care about beauty, let’s put it that way, or that you want the positive? I guess you’ve answered the question. In other words, you’re not interested in an effect, and it’s not simply that you’ve abandoned the land of beauty. PG: Exactly. So that when the brush finally goes where it’s supposed to go, where it’s destined to go, that’s it. Some months ago, a university here asked me to come and give a slide talk on my work, saying that the faculty and students would be most interested in hearing me explain why and how I moved from abstract painting to figurative painting. I declined and giggled to myself when I read the letter, because in the late forties and early fiies I would get invitations to come and give a slide talk and explain why and how I changed from figurative to abstract painting. So you can’t win. I mean, it’s impossible to explain. HR: You can’t win, but you can keep on talking. PG: No, you can keep on painting. HR: Let’s start with the idea that you don’t care anything about beauty. But I’ve noticed that the composition of these paintings is quite careful, even impressively well balanced. For example, these two smaller paintings called Smoking I and Smoking II . . . PG: Yes, two heads. First published in Boston University Journal 22, no. 3 (Fall 1974): 43–58. The conversation took place at the Boston University School of Fine and Applied Arts and was transcribed by Ruth Lepson.

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HR: . . . are beautifully composed paintings, if you got rid of those scrawly lines in the figures. e blocks of color . . . PG: I don’t believe that. For whom? HR: For the people who like beautiful paintings. PG: Oh, I see. HR: I don’t think that you could say that those are careless or self-developed compositions. Or is that just a habit you can’t get rid of ? PG: Well, that could be. ey’re bound to turn into a painting. HR: at’s a problem. PG: Sure. HR: What can you do to prevent yourself from doing a good painting? PG: Well, you don’t start out wanting to do a good painting. HR: All right, let’s start from there. You don’t start out wanting to. PG: No. God knows where you start and how you start. Every painter and writer knows there are private strategies, as Cocteau calls them, “professional secrets.” Sometimes in painting I keep making “mistakes,” then I realize that what’s happening is that I keep scraping out the mistake because it’s not meeting certain expectations that I have developed from the last painting, and then I reach a point where I follow the mistake. I mean, the hand wants to go to the le instead of to the right. So at a certain point I become willing to follow and see where going to the le leads, and it leads to all sorts of detours, fascinating detours. HR: Philip, when you say “a mistake,” don’t you really mean something that . . . PG: Not meeting expectations, really. HR: Or maybe meeting them. It could be both. PG: It could be. Yes, you’re right. HR: It could be that it looks too much like what you thought it would be. PG: Sure. Well, you said something at lunch which interested me. As we were talking about critics, you said that a certain critic of the New York Times likes the kind of art . . . how’d you say it? HR: He likes art that looks like something that he knows, but not quite. PG: Yes. HR: If you want to become a critic for the New York Times, the formula is: you’re really interested in the depiction of appearances, but you know that the camera does that. So you say, “Well, I don’t want naturalistic painting, I want a painting that looks like, say, Central Park, but it doesn’t quite look like it. So I know that the temperament of an artist has changed the way it looks to the ordinary visitor to Central Park.” en you know that you have a real work of art.

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PG: I didn’t have a sense of that. I just thought it was an interesting point. You wrote down some other notes. I’m curious to know . . . HR: Well, I wrote down three things. One was the question about the crudeness, whether it’s positive or negative. We have decided that point. It’s negative. at is to say, it’s not intended to create an effect of crudeness. It’s just indifference to what is normally considered to be beauty. PG: Now, in fact, in 1965 when we made that dialogue for the Jewish Museum exhibition catalog [see pp. 42–52], somewhat the same question came up. Not in the same format, but I brought up the subject towards the end of that conversation which I thought was a crucial one and I still do, that perhaps part of my process of working is almost to pretend. But, you know, pretense becomes real aer a while, and then I’m really in it, and there is no way back. I would imagine what it would be like to paint as if there had never been any painting before. Now, that’s an impossibility. Naturally I’m very involved with the culture of painting. Nevertheless, getting involved in the painting means to divest myself continuously of what I already know, and this gets you into an area of, well, you call it crudeness, but at that point it’s not crude to me. I just want to realize a certain subject. HR: But the concept of crudeness comes up, for example, most perfectly when we talk about folk art. It looks crude but it has certain qualities. at’s the way people who are pro–folk art talk about it. e idea is that somebody has a strong feeling but he really doesn’t know how to paint, so he makes a terrific painting, only it’s crude and it’s technically inept. Audience: is is highly sophisticated, so what are you talking about? It’s really obvious that it’s highly sophisticated, so what’s all this “crude” bullshit? It’s a highly sophisticated development. It’s very obvious that the whole history of painting is contained therein, so what’s all this business about being crude? What is it, a sack of bananas or something? HR: at sounded very aggressive and passionate. It sounded crude. Now, in folk art there is the concept of crudeness, but the idea is only based on the antithesis of academic painting. When you’re talking about getting to paint like the first person, this is of course a highly sophisticated idea, as when Mallarmé said that the poet is an Edenic person, one that comes out of Eden. e concept is one of freshness, and of course that’s what we like about folk art, that it’s fresh. PG: But that’s what we like about some of the modern masters, too. Picasso and Matisse and Léger. HR: And Cézanne too, even. at is, the idea of freshness is one of the great values in what’s called modern art. So in that sense there is no art. Baudelaire, in fact, made a great distinction between a painting that’s complete and a painting that’s finished. A painting that’s complete can have all kinds of empty spaces around it. A painting that’s finished has been tickled to the point where it begins to look like it belongs in

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a museum, and I think that’s relevant to what you’re talking about. Actually, if you feel like drawing the line thickly without modulation, it’s a choice that is absolutely as legitimate as any other choice. PG: Sure, but as a choice it’s not that I don’t think ahead. It’s that it’s not even a choice. at is to say, I’m at a point where I literally can’t do anything else. ere’s no choice. You’ve been driven to that point. What was once a choice is no more a choice. HR: I think John Cage suggested that you could prevent yourself from being driven. PG: at’s what my story meant. HR: He said you could not be driven. PG: at’s right. at you could choose. HR: You made a mistake. PG: I made a choice. HR: You made a choice. PG: But I chose. HR: Of course, if you can’t choose, you can’t make a mistake. PG: at’s right. HR: You’re a victim of mysterious forces. PG: at’s part of the joy. HR: You want to be a victim of mysterious forces? You want to choose or not to choose? PG: I hope to be a victim. HR: You want to be a victim? PG: Yes, very much. In fact, it’s very difficult to become one. You really have to prepare for that state. Oh, yes. Were you asking me that, thinking I would say no? You know I would say yes. HR: No. Well, I thought you’d also put something else in. PG: Oh, I see. Any victim that decides to . . . HR: It’s really sublime to think that all you can be is the victim of a sublime executioner. You want to be executed by something. PG: I don’t want to be executed. Just so I can continue being a victim. HR: We discussed the fact that each time you wanted to be as if you were starting from scratch, like the first man. PG: at’s what I meant, yes. HR: e Edenic poet. But then how come your paintings look very much alike? You want to start all over again each time as if you were just born and it so happened each time that Guston was born he looked like a Guston who just died!

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PG: I don’t think so. To be changed each time may be a necessary illusion that we permit ourselves. HR: I know every time I write something, I feel as if I’ve gotten into new ground. At least I find myself as completely confused by it as the first piece I ever wrote. And when I’m finished with it, it sounds just like the last piece I wrote. I don’t think it’s an illusion. I think it’s a condition. PG: What I mean by this illusion is that when you are in the work, you think you’re making a leap, but in truth you may be only, say, an inchworm. HR: If you’re lucky! PG: If you’re lucky. And we really move in time very slowly. Although in the heat of it we have illusions, which comes from the fact that one picture evolves from the one before. A chain. Otherwise I’d be like someone throwing out a lasso. I don’t throw out a rope for a hundred yards and follow it. HR: Why not? PG: I seem to be more conservative. HR: One thing at a time. PG: It could be a question of personality. At times when I have gone way out, I find I need to come back for that inch. HR: ere was a mystical rabbi who said that a saint was like a thief. He’s always active in the middle of the night, and he risks his life for small gain. PG: When a show is put up, when it gets out of the studio and I see the work on the walls, I have an uncanny feeling that somebody, I don’t know who, is writing the plot here. Somebody is plotting this, you know. HR: You mean it was inevitable that you should have done that? You are caught in— what shall we say?—a destiny. PG: Well, that’s making it sound very . . . HR: Well, a plot is a destiny. I mean, somebody has it written in his brain. PG: Written, yes. HR: Well, that’s what you meant before, when you said you couldn’t have done anything else. PG: at’s right. I don’t have a feeling when I’m painting that I’m just plugging in the holes. HR: But that’s what you mean by the mistakes too, that it’s just a plot. PG: But the real subject would include the paintings, the images, I’ve destroyed. e manuscripts you’ve destroyed. It would be fascinating to talk about what one destroys. It fascinates me, destroying my images. I remember them just as well, sometimes more, than what stays. ey no longer exist, but they exist in my mind. So I remember them. ey’re as concrete as the pictures that remain.

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HR: e pictures that remain are related to one another, but would you say that about the ones you’ve destroyed? You could say that, if you had a record of those nonpaintings, they could have a similar relation to one another. PG: I can be very specific. Some of the images I’m painting now I painted and destroyed ten, fieen years ago, yes. Absolutely. I don’t have a photographic record, but I just know that that is true. So it’s a question of time: being ready, you might say, to accept. HR: Well, that’s not so uncommon. I have, for example, a painting, an ink drawing by de Kooning, which he did in 1948 and which he gave me at the time. en about seven or eight years later, there began to appear some spots. PG: What were the spots? HR: e drawing was done on a thin show cardboard with ruled squares. e spots began to appear and somebody thought that maybe the paper backing had oil on it. Anyway, we took the frame off and there was an oil painting on the back of the board, which de Kooning had obviously discarded. It looked like work he did fieen or twenty years later, though different too, of course. PG: One is never finished with anything. HR: No, it circles back. PG: Yes. In fact, some of the new paintings are close to the work of the1930s. One is never through with that. HR: Let me ask you this: Do you feel that, working now, there is a difference in the degree of freedom, of spontaneity, from those paintings of yours in the fiies? PG: Yes. HR: Very spontaneous? A fresh quality? ese paintings look more composed, have preconceived themes. PG: Well, some of them are . . . HR: Executed. On the other hand, I don’t think they’re necessarily less free and spontaneous. What do you think? PG: Well, as you know, in the early fiies I became very involved in discovering painting as you paint, and this was pretty constant with me over the years. Now, in the last six to eight years of painting, I felt like reversing the process. I made drawings for weeks before I started to paint. Why? Well, I felt like it, for one thing. I wanted to see if I could do it. HR: You mean, if you could work out a composition completely. PG: No. e idea, rather. Well, it wasn’t so much the composition but the forms, the subject content of it, the images. I saw the picture in my mind or in drawings that I made before I painted, and the painting usually went very fast with very few changes. It was fascinating to me to do that. But not exclusively so, either. I think that what

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I’ve done, I hope, is widen my range. I still will start paintings without drawings and very little preconception. I mean, I know I’m going to have a man lying in bed. I know I’m not going to have three elephants walking there. I know roughly what I’m going to do, but I’ll start and just plunge in and paint and keep changing areas that need changes. So I do both. It’s satisfying to me to know that I can have this range, to not be so exclusively . . . HR: Spontaneous? PG: Spontaneous. But that’s an esoteric obstacle for me. I don’t know what spontaneity means, whether it really exists. HR: Apparently, Jackson Pollock felt that the fact that he did not make sketches was a central aspect of his work, that it came into being in the course of trying to paint. You don’t think of it that way? PG: No, it’s too simplified a version of the whole thing. I mean, I think that Pollock was essential, that he did what he did. Every painter does what he does, invents his own technique, so to speak, or method. What he claimed may be his rationalization of it. It may also indicate his own personal struggle, anti-Renaissance. In a sense, Jack came out of late Renaissance painting. I think his early paintings are descendants of El Greco. To speak of spontaneity is too simplified a version. When you study Renaissance painting, you can find anything you want to find. You find blotches and spontaneity and spots, especially in drawings, and you can find preconception and years of preparation for a single canvas. Aud: You’ve been talking about crudeness. What do you mean by that? HR: Well, look at the show* aerwards. at’s the best reply, because you’ll see that the contours and the way it’s painted show no great interest in a finished or elegant canvas. What’s the opposite of crude? Aud: Refinement. HR: All right. ese paintings are not very refined. Aud: Are you talking about the paintings or are you talking about the subject? HR: I’m talking about the handling. at is, the form, the way details are treated. For example, there are plates of French fried potatoes that really don’t look like a good . . . PG: Meal. HR: Well, a good ad. I mean, you’ll never sell any French fries. ey wouldn’t give you an appetite for French fried potatoes. ey might give you an appetite for paintings. Aud: Are you trying to say that what you mean by crudeness is vitality? Are you trying to say the paintings have vitality? Is that what you’re talking about?

* Philip Guston: New Paintings, Boston University School of Fine and Applied Arts Gallery, March 15–April 14, 1974.

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HR: What’s vitality? Aud: I’m trying to say: Do the paintings have vitality? HR: Crudeness is not a synonym for vitality. I think it would be nice if you talked about some of the imagery in your paintings. Like pairs of shoes, French fried potatoes, lightbulbs. PG: Well, there isn’t really a hell of a lot to say about that. HR: You have recumbent men. I didn’t notice any ladies. Also soles of shoes. I want to talk about those images. Why are they recurrent? PG: at’s a tough one. I don’t know. What would you say about that? HR: Are they unconscious? Of course, you did have some of them a long time ago, but also in your last show. PG: Oh, yes. HR: You must have some feelings about the use of those lightbulbs. PG: I’m painting, I’m using tangible objects, obviously. HR: But why those? PG: Why those? You mean, why not, why don’t I . . . HR: I mean, you could have a horse instead of an automobile. PG: No. HR: As a matter of fact, in this show you have no automobiles. In the last show you had a lot of automobiles. Automobiles are going, aren’t they? PG: Well, the figures are inside, not riding around. ey’re in bed. HR: No, but you have some landscapes. PG: I don’t know. I think what I can say is that six or seven years ago I began painting single objects that were around me. I read, so I painted books, lots of books. I must have painted almost a hundred paintings of books. It’s such a simple object, you know, a book. An open book, a couple of books, one book on top of another book. It’s what’s around you. On the kitchen table there’s a lamp. I don’t have that kind of lightbulb, but somehow that lightbulb recalls something to me. ere’s something about a naked lightbulb. Why, I don’t know. If I talk too much about it I’ll stop using it. HR: You want to continue using it? PG: No, I don’t know whether I want to continue using it. I don’t know what I’ll do, but I do know that I enjoy the idea of unexotic objects. I like banal, simple objects, tangible, touchable. I’m doing a painting and my shoes are on the floor. Man is upright, he walks, he needs shoes. What else do you paint? I don’t paint stripes. But I don’t think shoes are better than stripes. Aud: I’d like to speak to Mr. Guston. You had a painting exhibition at the school and it was mostly Ku Klux Klansmen. For the past few years, you’ve been working mostly

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with Ku Klux Klansmen. I notice that in the paintings here you’re working with a new image of the sleeping figure. I was just wondering what you foresee about this image as an image. Are you going to explore it as you did the Klansmen? PG: Yes, they’re really very recent, these recumbent figures. Actually, I think of them as the painter in bed. One of them, the one with the French fries, is called Painting, Smoking, Eating. Paint cans on his chest, imagining a painting above him. inking now about them, they are mostly about painting. ey’re paintings about the painter. In the paintings of 1968–70 I also made the hoods into painters. ere were pictures where the hoods became artists. My favorite group, the ones I keep, that I find I take out and look at, enjoy the most, are where they are painters. I took one down the other day to show to someone who hadn’t seen the work, and I found the first picture I pulled out was where the hooded figure is painting another hood. I also had them discussing art, become art critics. I had one looking at an abstract painting. HR: Are there any where you think of a le political show? PG: No, I’m not that interested in a direct political interpretation. HR: But you are interested in politics. PG: Sure. Everybody’s interested in politics. HR: In the last show, I mean, the political experience, I remember you talked about it a lot. PG: Yes, I was very influenced by what was happening, when the hoods were doing things, beating people there, tying up bodies, patrolling, driving around cities. But now I think they’re thinking about it. Now they’re more meditative about the whole thing. Reflective. HR: at’s why they’re lying down. PG: at’s a good statement of reflection, yes. HR: ey’re not riding around in an automobile. PG: It’d be silly to have them . . . I would no more put them in a car now, there would be no reason. HR: So you think times have gotten more peaceful. PG: Oh, no. Peaceful? No. HR: Well, the people aren’t running around piling up bodies. PG: No. Well, I was never concerned about illustrating it anyway. I wanted to go deeper into meanings and overtones. Now they’re thinking about it all. It’s more inside. I have to dig for the images that come out.

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TA L K AT “A R T / N OT A R T ? ” CO N F E R E N C E 1978

ere are people who think that painters shouldn’t talk. I know many people who feel that way, but that makes the painter into a sort of painting monkey. Today I am going to show you slides of work, and I have limited the selection to the last ten years, for the most part, skipping about two decades of painting. I’m going to focus on what I’ve been doing up until last year. However, I thought I could say something before I start the slides. I would like to make some comments, but not about what my paintings mean. at’s impossible, totally impossible for me to do. I’m certain that professional art writers could do it much better than I could. Besides, I have developed a tendency to disbelieve what artists say in their official statements. Nevertheless, I will try to be as candid as I can be. I feel that strongly believed-in and stated convictions on art have a habit of tumbling and collapsing in front of the canvas, when the act of painting actually begins. Furthermore, I have found that painters of my generation are more candid and provocative in their casual talk and asides, and funnier, too. Mark Rothko, aer a mutual studio visit, said, “Phil, you’re the best storyteller around, and I’m the best organ player.” at was in 1957; I still wonder what he had in mind. So many articles appeared with words like sublime, and noble, and he says he’s the best organ player around. Franz Kline, in a very easy bar conversation in the fiies, said, “You know what creating really is? To have the capacity to be embarrassed.” And one of the better definitions about painting was Kline’s. He said, “You know, painting is like hands stuffing a mattress.” In a recent article which contrasts the work of a color field painter with mine, the painter is quoted as saying, “Painting is made with colored paint on a surface and what you see is what you see.” is popular and melancholy cliché is so remote from my own concern. In my experience a painting is not made with colors and paint at all. I don’t know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint? It might be things, thoughts, a memory, sensations, which have nothing to do directly with painting itself. ey can come from anything and anywhere, a trifle, some detail observed, wondered about, and, naturally, from the previous painting. e painting is not on a surface, but on a plane which is imagined. It moves in a mind. It is not there physically at all. It is an illusion—a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see. I suppose the same thing was true in the Renaissance. ere is Leonardo da Vinci’s famous stateTalk given at conference on “The Big Question: Art/Not Art?” at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, February 27, 1978. Transcribed by Renee McKee. Previously published in Philip Guston, Paintings, 1969–1980, exh. cat. (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1982), and Philip Guston, The Late Works, exh. cat. (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1984).

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ment that painting is a thing of the mind. I think that’s right. I think that the idea of the pleasure of the eye is not merely limited, it isn’t even possible. Everything means something. Anything in life or in art, any mark you make, has meaning, and the only question is, “What kind of meaning?” But then, it may be a matter simply of appetite, what one has a hunger for. ere are painters, I almost said aesthetes, who do know what to make and how to make what they know. Expectations are fulfilled; however, the air then becomes tepid and domesticated. Years back, in the late forties and early fiies, I felt that painting could respect itself, reduce itself to what was possible: that is, to paint only that which painting, through its own means, could express. I enjoyed that short-lived period. e reverberations of such paintings could be heard. But in time I tired of this kind of ambiguity. ere were better things, and too much sympathy was required from the maker as well as the alltoo-willing viewer. Too much of a collaboration was going on. It was like a family club of art lovers. is disenchantment grew. I knew that I would need to test painting all over again in order to appease my desires for the clear and sharper enigma of solid forms in an imagined space, a world of tangible things, images, subjects, stories, like the way art always was. At the first exhibition of Barnett Newman’s paintings, de Kooning was in the gallery. We le together in total silence, down the elevator and through to the street. More silence. en aer a coffee, he said, “Well, now we don’t have to think about that anymore.” I have an uneasy suspicion that painting really doesn’t have to exist at all—I mean, it didn’t come down from Mount Sinai; it’s not written in the Ten Commandments— unless it questions itself constantly. I mean, what can it tolerate? For myself, it can tolerate a lot—nothing can be excluded in art, in order to test it. ere can be puzzling detours, contradictions, images and styles which are irrational, and so on. e strange and the familiar, the everyday, can live together in a painting. I enjoy having a subject to paint. But it’s not very controllable, in fact totally uncontrollable, because meaning keeps shiing and so does the structure. In this necessary engagement images appear, then as quickly disappear. Failures are always around, waiting. It has always been mystifying to me why, on a lucky day, the images do take hold, grip, and there is no urge to clear it off. is temporary satisfaction, very temporary, is always a surprise to me. en a sort of chronic restlessness enters the studio and you begin again. Regarding the general situation in art today, which I suppose is the subject of this conference, I haven’t really too much to say. It has become official obviously; it is so insured against failure, against bad painting, against risking. But something must be wrong somewhere, because there is this overwhelming success and at the same time such an overwhelming apathy. Everyone knows about art, except the artist. He, it seems, must find out not about art, but how to stay on the treadmill. Each time he paints he must discover how to trust himself, his instincts, without knowing how it will turn out. It sounds easy until you try it. I think it was Picasso who was interviewed and who was asked, “What has been the most important thing in your life, master?” and he replied, “Self-trust.” He said that it had taken him a lifetime to learn how to trust his inchoate

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urges and instincts. And it’s not easy to achieve because we don’t even recognize the extent to which we are victims of the institutionalized art which is all around us. Nor how oen we check ourselves. You have a feeling or thought—check, check, check. Of the two writers that I’ve admired most for years, Franz Kaa and Isaac Babel, Isaac Babel gave a lovely, ironic speech to the Soviet Writers Union. It was 1934. He ended his talk with the following remark. “e party and the government have given us everything, but have deprived us of one privilege. A very important privilege, comrades, has been taken away from you. at of writing badly.” Isn’t that beautiful? Where am I? Doesn’t anyone want to paint badly? And now we are going to look at some slides. Can we turn down all the lights? Pitch black. I’m going to start with a painting I completed about a year ago, and about which I wrote some notes, in the form of a letter to a friend, the poet and novelist Ross Feld. I’d like to read it to you as you look at the slides. I wrote, I have recently done a painting which continues to baffle me, a highly desired state. I admit vacillating between trying to explain, or not to. Here are some thoughts then on a matter which should perhaps not be talked about at all. I also think the only real things to talk about are not possible to talk about. e painting might well say, “What do you want from me? I’m only a painting. Let me be.” But I can’t prevent my old habits of analysis and speculation. To be specific, as I recall with this painting, changes occur very fast, groups of forms are painted rapidly and then as quickly painted out. I felt as if I were living out the painting rather than painting it. Time was speeded up or else stopped. Quite suddenly, the work was done. Nothing felt arbitrarily placed in space, but rather irreversible: the only way, at this moment, the painting could be. e forms, which touch and bump and overlap each other, strain to separate themselves, yet cannot exist without one another. While they strive to become independent, a condition of delirium persists, as if these forms desire to configure other combinations of themselves. What a restless and startling state for forms to be in! It’s like life. So in a painting, sky, ground, and solid forms resist being taken apart. Yet, clearly on the plane of the painting, a singular combination of forms is fixed, held, to be contemplated. Perhaps the image being presented is really a natural one. And I have learned a primary lesson aer traversing a vast circle of thoughts and impulses, and the lesson is this: if forms are to be represented in a painting, this is the way they would behave and affect one another. Shall I think of the painting then as a kind of mirror reflecting a family of forms, as it were? is mirror mirrors change, then, or, rather, the promise of change. Ross, I know this may sound too circular, but it is here—precisely—where the mystifying area in creating enters. For if, as I believe, one is changed by what one does—what one paints— continuous creation can be furthered only in time. at is, to maintain the condition of continuity—or as we might put it, the subversion of an intolerable finality. Not to do so would be to enter the waxworks museum, which is comic and hilarious—a sort of mock death. Further, in refusing this waxworks state, one is propelled to make what one has not yet made, nor seen made. What one does not yet know how to make. I must say, though, that to dwell overly much on this unknown character of time, in art, may be inutile. Perhaps we are not permitted to know more than we do know.

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“Not permitted to know.” Yet these questions are old friends that have been turned over and over in one’s mind, chewed in one’s cud. It could be this that makes work resist being consumed, or consumed too easily. at is being packaged in a facile way, like being put into a slot. I was talking at Harvard and one graduate student thought that I was attacking minimal painting. I guess I had used the term stripes, but I said, “No, you’ve got it all wrong.” ere would be absolutely no way to prove that paintings of things and objects, real and imagined, are better than stripes. One couldn’t prove it, and I’d be the last to maintain that one could. All I can say is that, when I leave the studio and get back to the house and think about what I did, then I like to think that I’ve le a world of people in the studio. A world of people. In fact, they are more real than the world I see. I wouldn’t enjoy being in the kitchen, looking out of the window at the studio while having a drink, thinking that I had simply le a world of relationships and stripes in there. So how to know and how not to know is the greatest puzzle of all, finally. I think that we are primitive really, in spite of our knowing. It’s a long, long preparation for a few moments of innocence. I think that probably the most potent desire for a painter, an image maker, is to see it. To see what the mind can think and imagine, to realize it for oneself, through oneself, as concretely as possible. I think that’s the most powerful and at the same time the most archaic urge that has endured for about twenty-five thousand years. In about 1961 or 1962, the urge for images became so powerful that I started a whole series of dark pictures, mostly just black and white. ey were conceived as heads and objects. Aer the show at the Jewish Museum in 1966, I knew I wanted to go on and deal with concrete objects. I got stuck on shoes, shoes on the floor. I must have done hundreds of paintings of shoes, books, hands, buildings, and cars, just everyday objects. And the more I did the more mysterious these objects became. e visible world, I think, is abstract and mysterious enough; I don’t think one needs to depart from it in order to make art. is painting started out as a hand with a brush and it turned into a paw [see p. 185]. So I started thinking about evolution, that is, questions such as who was the being, the prehistoric man, who made the first line. I have a large collection of old rusty railroad nails, and I just nailed one into a piece of wood. I thought, how would it look if. at’s a very powerful if . . . I live out of town, and driving down to New York City I go down the West Side Highway. ere are all these buildings that look as if they are marching. You know, by painting things they start to look strange and dopey. Also, there was a desire, a powerful desire though an impossibility, to paint things as if one had never seen them before, as if one had come from another planet. How would you paint them; how would you realize them? It was really a tremendous period for me. I couldn’t produce enough. I couldn’t go to New York, to openings of friends of mine like Rothko, de Kooning, Newman. I would telephone Western Union with all kind of lies such as that my teeth were falling out or that I was sick. It was such a relief not to have anything to do with modern art. It felt as if a big boulder had been taken off my shoulders. As a young boy I was an activist in radical politics, and although I am no longer an

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activist, I keep track of everything. In 1967–68, I became very disturbed by the war and the demonstrations. ey became my subject matter, and I was flooded by a memory. When I was about seventeen to eighteen, I had done a whole series of paintings about the Ku Klux Klan, which was very powerful in Los Angeles at that time. e police department had what they called the Red Squad, the main purpose of which was to break up any attempts at unionizing. Remember, this was 1932, 1933. I was working in a factory and became involved in a strike. e KKK helped in strikebreaking, so I did a whole series of paintings on the KKK. In fact I had a show of them in a bookshop in Hollywood, where I was working at that time. Some members of the KKK walked in, took the paintings off the wall, and slashed them. Two were mutilated. is was the beginning. ey are self-portraits. I perceive myself as being behind a hood. In the new series of “hoods,” my attempt was really not to illustrate, to do pictures of the KKK, as I had done earlier. e idea of evil fascinated me, and rather like Isaac Babel, who had joined the Cossacks, lived with them, and written stories about them, I almost tried to imagine that I was living with the Klan. What would it be like to be evil? To plan and plot. en I started conceiving an imaginary city being overtaken by the Klan. I was like a movie director. I couldn’t wait, I had hundreds of pictures in mind, and when I le the studio I would make notes to myself, memos: “Put them all around the table, eating, drinking beer.” Ideas and feelings kept coming so fast; I couldn’t stop, I was sitting on the crest of a wave. In the picture Cellar, I wondered what it would look like to have a bunch of figures, scared, diving down into a cellar. I painted it in about four hours without any erasures. And when it was done I said, “Ah, so that’s what it would look like.” And that’s what I mean about primitive art or cave art, so that’s what it looks like. I want to see what it looks like. ey call it art aerwards, you know. en I started thinking that in this city, in which creatures or insects had taken over, or were running the world, there were bound to be artists. What would they paint? ey would paint each other, or paint self-portraits. I did a whole series in which I made a spoof of the whole art world. I had hoods looking at field paintings, hoods being at art openings, hoods having discussions about color. I had a good time. is drawing was done in 1930. I discovered it about five years ago in a drawer, in a package of old drawings. It’s a sketch for one of the early Klan paintings [Conspirators], though later Klan paintings are totally different. So one never forgets anything, one never goes forward and forward, you are always moving in a circular way, and nothing is ever finished, nothing is ever finished until you leave. e paintings have very simple titles—as Harold Rosenberg called them, laconic titles. is is called A Day’s Work. Before they were shown at Marlborough [in 1970], Tom Hess, who was then editor of Art News, heard something was up, so we went over to the warehouse to see them. He looked at this painting here, one with a piece of lumber with nails sticking out, and he said, “What’s that, a typewriter?” I said, “For Christ’s sake, Tom, if this were eleven feet of one color, with one band running down on the end, you wouldn’t ask me what it was.” I said, “Don’t you know a two-by-four with red nails?” is is called Scared Stiff; I put them in courtrooms being judged. When these were

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shown, my painter friends in the New York School would come up to me and say, “Now what did you want to do that for?” It seemed to depress a lot of people. It was as though I had le the Church; I was excommunicated for a while. Two or three people were notable exceptions. One was Rosenberg, who I think wrote the only favorable review, a really interesting and knowing review in the New Yorker. e other person was Bill de Kooning. At the opening he grabbed me, hugged me, and said he was envious, which was flattering, because I regarded him as the best painter in the country and, in many ways, the only one. I mean he’s a real mind and a real painter. en I le for Europe, immediately aer the show. e art critic from the New York Times, Hilton Kramer, gave me a whole page. He called it “From Mandarin to Stumblebum,”* and reproduced e Studio, which I think is a very sophisticated picture. I thought I had put in everything I knew about painting. But he thought, “Well, that’s the end of him.” He did a real hatchet job. I had asked the gallery not to send me any clippings, I just wanted to have a vacation. We were in Venice in November and in a weak moment I went to American Express for mail. e “Xerox underground” had caught up with me and in it was the article from the Times. I was angry for about half an hour and then I threw it in one of the canals. Why should I be depressed in Venice? So, when I returned about eight or ten months later, I was at Yale and a student asked, “How did you feel when you read the review in the Times?” I explained to him that I was in Venice and then I started thinking, “at’s a hell of a review. Jesus, what if he had liked it, then I would have really been in trouble.” So, that solved that problem. So, I came back, I had finished with the hoods, they were done, you can’t redo a thing once it’s done. I started painting things around me again. e road outside, a couple of telephone poles, paint cans, a pile of junk. e line between the two poles was the last thing, and it felt very good. I felt like a telephone linesman. I made this line all the way across the canvas and it was finished. I started doing pictures of my wife and I in bed. en I did a whole series of paintings of smokers smoking; it’s me. When I show these, people laugh, and I always wonder what laughter is. I suppose Baudelaire’s definition is still valid; it’s the collision of two contrary feelings. Many of the following paintings are paintings about the painter. is is called Painting, Smoking, Eating. ere is a guy lying in bed eating a bunch of French fries, imagining this big pileup of stuff above him. I have a horror of telephones. I have a gadget so that you can turn it off, so that I can call out but nobody can call me. It’s a very selfish thing to do, but I indulge myself in the luxury. And there’s a luncheonette not far away, and they have the most marvelous bacon and egg sandwich. at’s what this is. I was painting the hated object and the desired object. ere was a lot of bacon sticking out, and it started looking like a body. When you paint things they change into something else, something totally unpredictable. e telephone looked terrible. I started to scrape it out with a knife and it looked like the effect you get when you are a kid and you put paper over a coin and rub. So then I thought, I should make a painting out of it, put something between those two objects. * Hilton Kramer, “A Mandarin Pretending to Be a Stumblebum,” New York Times, October 25, 1970.

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I didn’t know what to do, so I made them into two pictures, one a picture of the telephone and the other a picture of the sandwich, and that seemed okay. en I started a series of several dozen paintings of paint tables. I began working at my painting table and then the water above it gave me the idea of a flood, with people drowning. You really can’t explain why you do certain things. I got a kick out of those two drawn heads, one guy looking and the other guy looking at the guy looking, with the other head half submerged in water. is is another flood; in fact I call it Deluge, like an end of the world picture. ree-quarters of it rising from the bottom was black with strange creatures moving around, then a few little objects on the red horizon: a little painting, a little clock, a little sun. en I asked myself, “What would it be like if the flood disappeared, what would be le in this wasteland?” is is it. And the strange thing, the most peculiar sensation, was that I felt I hadn’t changed at all from the work of the fiies. I painted this picture without stepping back to judge it. I started on the right and just kept going all the way to the le. I didn’t know whether it was organized or disorganized. I took my chances with it. e few people who visit me are poets or writers, rather than painters, because I value their reactions. Looking at this painting, Clark Coolidge, a poet who lives about thirty miles away, said that it looked as if an invisible presence had been there but had le these objects and gone somewhere else. I like that kind of reaction, compared with reactions like “e green works, the blue doesn’t work.” I didn’t arrange this still life, it’s just objects picked out from around the studio. It’s called Painter’s Table. It was fun to paint ashtrays and cigarette butts, which began to look like something else. I draw constantly when I paint, I’ll take a week off and do hundreds of drawings. It’s a form of germination. I don’t follow drawings literally. Once in a while I will indulge in a very loose painting. By loose, I don’t mean deliberately loose, rather just not having too much on my mind and just stumbling on painting and seizing on whatever happens. I don’t remember painting these heads drowning in a basement, that awful feeling of the basement being filled with water in a dream or nightmare. I use the complete range of everything I’ve ever learned in painting: to be tight, to be loose, to be conscious, to be not conscious. Sometimes I make sketches of paintings, plan it out and change little in the doing of it. At others I start with nothing on my mind. Everything is possible—everything except dogma of any kind. ese are large pictures, about eleven feet in width. I put rubber casters on the ten-foot painting table so that I can move from one part of the painting to the other part very easily, without losing my thought or urgency, and without stepping back to look at it. e worst thing in the world is to make judgments. What I always try to do is to eliminate, as much as possible, the time span between thinking and doing. e ideal is to think and do at the same second, the same split second. I think, in my studies and broodings about the art of the past, my greatest ideal is Chinese painting, especially Sung painting dating from about the tenth or eleventh century. Sung period training involves doing something thousands and thousands of times—bamboo shoots and birds—until someone else does it, not you, and the rhythm

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Philip Guston, The Magnet, 1975. Oil on canvas, 671⁄2 × 80 inches. Photo: Steven Sloman.

moves through you. I think that is what the Zen Buddhists called satori and I have had it happen to me. It is a double activity, when you know and don’t know, and it shouldn’t really be talked about. So I work towards that moment, and if a year or two later I look at some of the work I’ve done and try to start judging it, I find it’s impossible. You can’t judge it, because it was felt. What measure is there, other than the fact that at one point in your life you trusted a feeling? You have to trust to that feeling and then continue, trusting yourself. And it works in a reverse way. I know that I started similar things in the past, twenty to twentyfive years ago, and would then scrape them out. I remember the pictures I scraped out very well; in fact some of them are sharper in my mind than the ones that remained. “Well then,” I would subsequently ask myself, “why did I scrape them out?” Well, I wasn’t ready to accept it, that’s the only answer. is leads me to another point: it doesn’t occur to many viewers that the artist oen has difficulty accepting the painting himself. You can’t assume that I gloried in it or celebrated it. I didn’t. I’m a night painter, so when I come into the studio the next morning the delirium is over. I know I won’t remember detail, but I will remember the feeling of the whole thing. I come into the studio very fearfully, I creep in to see what happened the night before. And the feeling is one of “My God, did I do that?” at is about the only measure I have. e kind

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of shaking, trembling of “at’s me? I did that?” But most of the time, we’re carpenters, we build and build, and add and prepare, and when you drag yourself into the studio, you say, “Oh, that’s what I did. It’s horrible. All of it has to go.” is is one of your last-minute touches. Oen at the moment you’re playing your last card and are ready to give up, another kind of awareness enters and you work with that moment. But you can’t force that moment either. You truly have to have given up. And then something happens. You see that book down below [in e Magnet]? When I was doing it I automatically put that question mark on the book. en I went to the john, and in the country you’re not going to the john, you are going to the moon; when I eventually came back I thought, “at’s a corny thing to do, that question mark.” But I le it there. I ought to explain what I meant by trifles earlier. One morning, my wife, aer the rain, pointed out a spider that was making a marvelous web, so I started doing a number of web pictures with my wife and myself, and a lot of paraphernalia caught in the web. at’s her on the right, with hair coming down her forehead, and then I thought I’d put a shoe on her head [Study for Web, 1975, ink on paper]. It’s a terrible corny idea, but what can you do? It led to a whole series of paintings with both of us caught in the web. It felt good making a web, eleven feet across. I didn’t study the web, I don’t know what a web looks like. I just invented a web. Sometimes changing a form is important. I remember that eye, the heavy-lidded eye, was originally shoes and legs upside down; at that point it bored me, so I started taking it out and it became an eye, like an all-seeing eye in science fiction. It felt all right. ose two big fingers dangling down below puzzled me. e hand wrapped in the canvas didn’t look right until I did the lines on the hand, as if it were a Greek sculpture or an ancient hand, not a realistic hand. Well, this is a self-portrait [e Painter, 1976]. I had been painting all night. I went into the john, looked in the mirror, and saw that my eyes were all bloodshot. I came back, picked up a small brush, dipped it in red, and made my eyes bloodshot. en the painting was finished. You see, I look at my paintings, speculate about them. ey baffle me, too. at’s all I’m painting for.

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F R O M PA N E L AT “A R T / N OT A R T ? ” CO N F E R E N C E 1978

Participants were Philip Guston, Harold Rosenberg, and Marcia Tucker.

Philip Guston: Since I’m a dreamer, I have this image, this sort of fantasy image, that the painter’s all alone in his studio—I’m not trying to jerk your tears or something—but you’re all alone in the studio and it’s like one of those Rube Goldberg cartoons, you know? “How to Fry an Egg,” a big complicated thing? It’s a huge machine. e sun’s going down, it’s the end of the day, you make a single stroke and this big machine starts creaking and working, and five dozen secretaries have got jobs, two dozen truckers are at work, printers are at work, curators, and meetings are held. I mean, this guy’s all alone and he makes this stroke, you know? [laughter, applause] And this big Rube Goldberg machine starts creaking and working. Oh, I’m not trying to hold out the painter or the artist as being such a unique person. But he has to make this little stroke for this machine to work. But my eyes were awakened when Harvey Arnason did a retrospective show of mine at the Guggenheim in 1962. We worked together for a year—it takes a year to do a show. We knew each other very well, and I saw him quite frequently. And, of course, at the Guggenheim the show has to be ready right away. In other words, so they could hang it in one day, on a Monday when they’re closed.Well, there was a Léger show on just before mine, and I was up in Harvey’s office and he had a model of the museum, with little slides with magnets, and we hung the show in his office so that the men could hang it up right away when the Léger show came off. So I was in his office and the boss man comes in, Harry Guggenheim, the moneybags. [laughter] I mean, the man who owns it. And the secretary says, “Mr. Arnason, Mr. Harry Guggenheim is here.” So this man—we’d never met—comes in, and Harvey says, “Hello, Harry.” Harry says, “Hello, Harvey.” And Harvey says, “Oh Harry, I’d like you to meet . . .” Harry says to Harvey: “Harvey, how many people went through the gate last month? And I’d like to have the figures, how they compare with the month before and last year.” And he didn’t even look at me. I’m just the guy that makes the little stroke and this big thing goes . . . [laughter] So, I tell you what. You go on with your talk. I really don’t belong on this . . . You know, it’s not my . . . I’m in a different union.

Not previously published. This panel was held on February 28, 1978, as part of a two-day conference on “The Big Question: Art/Not Art?” at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

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PG: In this context, since we’ve been talking about bad art and non-art, it just occurred to me, at this moment as you’re talking, that truly bad art, really lousy art, no matter how it looks, and it can look beautiful and we see tons of it, is that art which pretends as if this collapse of civilization doesn’t exist, its possibility doesn’t exist. And that’s really crap art, you know? Harold Rosenberg: Yeah, but you know perfectly well that you’re talking about the major production of art in the United States in the last fieen years. e dissociation of art in all forms, you might as well say it. Ultimately, I mean, that’s what you’re talking about. Do you agree? PG: Yeah, that’s right. HR: Reluctantly. marcia tucker: I want to know precisely what you mean, because I have objections to art that is sentimental. PG: at’s nostalgic art. MT: Yeah, a certain kind of nostalgic art that really tells you everything’s okay. HR: No, we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about dissociated art. PG: Lousy art is that art which pretends to have ideals as if the end of the world isn’t coming, you know? As if humanity’s going to go on forever and these ideals are going to exist forever. MT: On the part of the artist, or is that inherent in the art? Give me a really good example of a completely disassociated art. HR: Take Frank Stella . . . MT: I don’t buy that. I don’t think that Brice Marden is distanced or dispassionate, and I don’t think that Stella is really distant. PG: No, the work itself, not the person. e work itself. HR: Don’t bring up the fact that he made a contribution to some organization. No, Philip is putting this thing very sharply, and I admire that, by saying this is the definition of bad art. PG: Yes, that’s right. HR: at’s a very radical statement. He’s got everybody in his pocket. PG: Yeah, but it must be in the work, not . . . MT: Could I ask you something else? Would you consider, and let me take an example, do you think that inherent in Brice Marden’s work is the idea that you spoke about, that nothing’s going to happen, everything’s going to be okay? PG: No. I think this. I don’t know Brice Marden’s work very well, but I know some of it. We’re talking about the work itself, not about how the artist felt. I mean, all artists are radicals. We all know that. But I guess my objection . . . I’m going to generalize and say that kind of work, for the moment.

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MT: at gets me very upset, when you say that kind of work. PG: Yeah, well, I’m a philistine. HR: Let’s you and him fight. MT: No, we’re not fighting. I’m trying to isolate . . . I’m really trying to find out what . . . PG: All right, all right. at’s what I was talking about in my little discourse yesterday, that that work which pertains to art itself, that is to say, the issues of art itself, is a hermetic condition and tends to become so refined in itself, being so concerned with its own plastic problems, that, yes, I think that’s bad. Yes, I do. I think that’s bad and that’s why I’ve had, for twenty years now, powerful reactions against that and I insist that the work itself become really involved. Not that it would change anything, but I mean something else. I mean that it can only get energy and potency from the involvement with the condition of the world we live in. e real world, the political world. MT: I agree, but . . . PG: But it must be in the work, and that means—let me finish—therefore that you have to get out as fast as you can, get out of that kind of art which concerns itself with itself. [applause] And this, by the way, is a recent phenomenon, and that’s what I meant by my statement yesterday when I said that America finally got the art it deserves. In other words, let’s hide, let’s pretend that the world isn’t coming to an end and we all don’t live under this cloud. And, in fact, all the great art of the past, and I don’t want to die with the past, but to me the past isn’t the past. I mean, Signorelli could be working downtown, I don’t know. And Michelangelo was involved with change his whole life, when you look at the Last Judgment, that structure in Vatican City, you know? So this is what pushes . . . I mean, I’ve always been involved with the world.

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I N T E R V I E W W I T H JA N B U T T E R F I E L D 1979

Jan Butterfield: I know you have always had a great deal of interest in early art history, especially in Piero della Francesca and Paolo Uccello. Why have those early figures held a particular fascination for you? Philip Guston: I don’t know. It is hard to explain why you feel a kinship with certain artists in the past, but there is something that works. Some chemistry. I have done a lot thinking about Piero. I once tried to put my thoughts about him together, started out with about five hundred pages, and finally got down to a few paragraphs, which I titled “Piero della Francesca: e Impossibility of Painting” [see p. 41]. omas Hess published it in Art News in May of 1965. JB: ere are many artists who feel a close involvement with art history is a kind of contamination: that too much intelligence about art, too much knowledge or awareness of it, forces you to work out of the other side of your brain—the logical side. PG: Ahh . . . not me. JB: Your new work of the last decade has been very controversial. How do you feel about that? Do you feel that it has been misunderstood? PG: When what people have been calling the “new paintings” were first shown at Marlborough in 1970, they seemed to shock the New York art world a little bit. Or so I heard. We fled to Europe just aer the opening. But there were some who understood. When Bill de Kooning saw the show he said he liked it very much. You know, everybody thought those paintings were about the hooded figures and the bad condition in America and so on. And that was part of it. Every artist hopes to give his own interpretation of the world. But they were about something else, too. I like de Kooning and I respect him. I think I like de Kooning best. When he saw the show, aer embracing me and congratulating me, he said, “You know, Philip, what your real subject is? It is freedom!” And I said, “at’s right, Bill. You’ve got it!” And then we embraced again and he said, “Why, of course! e whole idea is for the artist to be free!” JB: And nobody knows that better than de Kooning. PG: Picasso knew about freedom, too. You know, if one were to sum up in one word what that man—who was the master of the century—was about, it would be freedom, and the right to be free. A lot of artists are afraid of freedom, you know? This interview took place in January 1979. First published as “A Very Anxious Fix: Philip Guston,” in Images and Issues 1, no. 1 (Summer 1980): 30–35.

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e other important thing that de Kooning said to me, which I think was wonderful, was this: he said, “Well, now you are on your own! You’ve paid off all your debts! Now you are on your own!” I think I am. And the reason I have felt like that, and still feel like that, increasingly, is that I don’t look at my pantheon of masters of the last five hundred years of European painting as much as I used to. Or when I do, I see them differently. JB: Your progression is logical. ere really aren’t any digressions, in a funny kind of way. e new works are a clear extension of the same search. PG: Well, they feel logical. Or rather, I should say that they feel inevitable. JB: Yes. Better. ey are not “logical” in the connotated sense. ey are inevitable for you. Simply, if you felt you were not locked into your own historical frame of reference, you were not. You were free. On the surface, there was no reason for you to discontinue the kind of work you were doing. It was successful. It was very well received. PG: But that doesn’t matter to me! JB: Of course not! PG: I feel that I am a student of all art. JB: But isn’t that where real freedom lies? Freedom lies in the ability or capacity to take that terrible step “out there.” PG: Of course. JB: But it is hard to walk away from the applause. Wasn’t that a difficult thing to do? PG: Yes. Well, no. JB: You said a few minutes ago that some artists are afraid of freedom—and they are. If you are terribly conscious of your own history, sometimes you can’t walk away from it. PG: But in a very real sense, you have to. All of the artists I admire have. JB: Freedom is a difficult thing to obtain, and it is a hard thing to handle once you have it. It is very dangerous out there. PG: Oh, I know it is. It is cold out there. But it is exciting, too, and full of surprises. I will tell you a story which symbolizes what we are talking about. In the early days, we all went to each other’s shows. Barney Newman and Mark Rothko, Franz Kline and I. De Kooning, too. Now, there was a group of people who worked totally differently! ere was great separation there. People talk about the “New York School” as if it really were a school, but there were a great many differences. You could ask why Bill de Kooning and I became close friends, for example. And then there was also the other group of Rothko, Still, Barney Newman, and Ad Reinhardt. JB: What did you call them? e other group of Rothko and Still and so on? PG: “Mystics” or “Transcendentalists,” I don’t know . . . JB: ey were the “Sublime” group?

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PG: Yes. “e Sublime.” So the conversation in the bar one night was about what a good measure of art is, and how you judge. I remember saying, “Well, let’s put it this way. When you got out of the elevator at the gallery, did your heart start beating, wondering, ‘What’s he up to now? What’s he doing? Will I be surprised?’ ” And then in the same conversation, I remember that we brought the past in. What it was like in Paris in the “Renaissance” years there. I speculated that when I went to a Matisse show, I didn’t know what I was going to see and that is why I was excited. e same was true of a Picasso show or a Léger show. So we thought that was as good a measure as any! Some artists—when I went to see Ad Reinhardt’s show at one point, for example—my heart didn’t start beating. I knew what I was going to see. JB: It’s interesting. at indefinable response. While you were telling me that, I was thinking about the differences between the work of artists I feel strongly about and those whose work I respect and like, but with whose painting there is no spark or jump that moves and engages. I think it is possible that the difference might be right there, as you have said. In the capacity not just for excitement, but for surprise. You need to feel that there are real juices flowing. PG: Oh, yes. It is that kind of excitement. We are not talking now about things which are “novel.” JB: Oh, no. Not at all. I think that surprise, that extension into the unknown, is where the real excitement lies—for both the artist and the participant. PG: You know, scientists talk about colleagues coming through with a discovery, a serious discovery. In other words, it is as if something had opened up—not a novelty, not a continuation of the status quo. I think it is much the same with painting. e question is, “What more is there to explore?” at is what is exciting! It has to do with intent. In terms of intent, I will tell you a funny story about the kind of things painters say to each other, which can be revealing. Rothko and I once made mutual studio visits. I was painting a painting like Evidence or e Tale in 1958 or 1959, something like that. And I went to Rothko’s studio and he came to mine and then we went out to drink, to a nearby bar at the Chelsea, close to my lo. We were both a little drunk, and Rothko said, “Well, Phil, you are the best storyteller around, and I am the best organ player!” Obviously, Mark meant that if you didn’t do the kind of painting that he did, then you were a “storyteller.” And he said, “And you are a damn good one!” You know? And he was the best in terms of what he did. JB: Absolutely. PG: e mutual attraction between Rothko and me had to do with that—with the fact that I go all the way in whatever it is I do, and he certainly went all the way in whatever it was he was doing. at makes for mutual attraction. Feeling ourselves to be “authentic.” Creating is a continuous problem, not a problem to be solved, I shouldn’t put it that way, but . . . one is always doubting oneself, and so on. at is perfectly in-

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evitable. So that talking to someone like Rothko, and seeing his work, led me to question my own premises, and that is good. at is the way it should be. I should hope to think that what I have done would have made Barney or Mark think, “What is he up to? ere is another road!” We all know that art has many roads, and creation many paths. JB: When an artist reaches a given point, there aren’t too many examples that can make much difference. at must be the hardest part, because at a given point in your life, when you have reached full fruition in terms of your own maturity, if you are looking for artists of equal power, there are never going to be very many. PG: Yes, but that is the way it is. JB: An artist’s life involvements are extremely important in relation to his psyche. ere are all kinds of things which give resonance to a life and work that we oen don’t know about. You are involved in music, aren’t you? You mentioned to me at one time that John Cage was a friend of yours. PG: Oh, yes. And Morton Feldman. We were very important to each other from about 1950 on. We haven’t seen each other lately, but Morty and I have been very close. For a time John and Morty and I were a kind of trio. When I first knew Cage in 1948 or 1949, in those crucial years when things were changing for me, I was very interested in the thinkings and the writings of Zen Buddhism. So was John, of course. During that time, Daisetz Suzuki, who is probably one of the very best writers on Zen Buddhism, was giving a series of lectures at Columbia, and I used to go up with John to hear them. Suzuki was a very impressive man. JB: I understand that. Obtaining that kind of information and learning that close to the source must have been quite extraordinary. PG: Well, yes, it was. In fact, it has continued with me. I have most of Suzuki’s books, and I continually read through them. JB: Did you find a kind of kinship with Cage? PG: More with Feldman than with Cage, actually, but I am very interested in Cage and I like him very much. JB: Was there a crossover between what Cage was doing then and what you were doing? It seems to me that because of your shared interest in Zen, and because his whole sense and use of space and silence are what they are, his work must have been important to you. You must have felt it hanging in the air. PG: Oh, yes, in fact I have another story to tell you, about Feldman and Cage. As the years went on, through the 1950s and early 1960s, Feldman and I became close, more so than Cage and I. As I recall, I think it was because Feldman was less . . . well, let’s put it this way: Cage was more didactic. I think Morty Feldman felt a kinship to my early pictures, to the touch. He always used to say what he loved about my early paintings was the “sense of touch”—the instinctive touch. You didn’t really know what you were going to do until you did it,

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you know? But with Cage, and that is what I meant by didactic, one always felt as if he were illustrating what he already believed—which is fine, but with Feldman, maybe the kinship he and I felt aesthetically had to do with the fact that we didn’t know what we were going to do until we did it! Cage and Feldman were in my studio, in 1951 or 1952, and I had just done what were probably the sparest pictures of all. I think one painting just had a few colored spots on it and lots of erasures, and so on. Well, anyway, that one picture had just been finished, and John Cage was very ecstatic about it, and he said, “My God! Isn’t it marvelous that one can paint a picture about nothing!” And Feldman turned to him and said, “But John, it is about everything!” [laughter] And I suppose I am interested in “e Everything.” JB: Yes, and that is particularly evident in the new work, which makes that “everything” more visible. Presents it in a more tangible way than before, even though the intent is still very much the same as in the early work. PG: Exactly. When I read newspaper or magazine criticism about shows I have had, they always say things like “an artist who has worked in many styles.” But I don’t think that way, and so it always confuses me somewhat. But certainly changes have occurred. In 1968 or so, when I started doing works such as Evidence—they called them “figurative,” but I don’t really think of them that way—I wanted to get into more of what I call “tangibility.” I wanted “touchable” things. I felt all along, with the nonfigurative things, that they were simply nonrecognizable figurative things. JB: Earlier today you talked about the whole phenomenon of nonobjective art or abstract art demanding too much sympathy from the viewer. Do you think that the problems involved in attempting to create, or succeeding in creating, an “other” are insoluble or too complex? Are they not really relevant? Do you feel that nonobjective art is not satisfying enough or that you cannot be really creative because you are always grounded in one attitude? PG: at’s right. In fact, I think that abstract art is too easily consumed. It is too thin. JB: Do you think it is too “easy”? I don’t really mean “easy,” because anything good is “easy,” but . . . PG: No. Any kind of creation is hard. But with nonobjective art, there is not enough for me. In fact, my criticism would be that I find my eyes bouncing off of it. It doesn’t grip me enough. And furthermore, I will tell you what I have discovered it to be. Working with figuration the way I am doing now is a purely imaginative projection, of course, because I don’t paint from things, you know, as you do when you look at an object. It is all imagined with me. I think you enter into a really complex, almost insoluble, “contest” between meaning and structure—plastic structure—and that is what I miss in totally nonobjective painting: the lack of that contest, when it becomes too possible. Look, there is something about dealing with the impossible that is ex-

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hilarating and wonderful! You risk failure and ruin and all that. I think a wonderful work of art should be a magnificent ruin, because it is impossible! JB: Why isn’t nonobjective art as “impossible” as figurative art? PG: Because it is just too possible. Totally abstract art is already conceivable, and I think it tends to make the painter an illustrator of concepts already held. You can illustrate a circle just as well as a cup of coffee or a still life, do you know what I mean? JB: Why isn’t nonobjective art more complex and more real because it deals with pure sensation or pure phenomenology, rather than a depiction of a barn door which is asking you to believe that it is a barn door when you know it isn’t? Why isn’t it cleaner and more real, because “it is”? Why do you feel that dealing with that is thinner? PG: I will tell you why! What I have discovered is that my interest lags with a great deal of what is called “abstract art,” and I think it is for this reason: I don’t think you can begin with what you should end up with. JB: Ah, but it is hard to think that you would! PG: For example, in my triptych from 1975, the Red Sea. My God! Do you know how many paintings are under each one? About twenty paintings! Twenty paintings in order to get to the fixation that “feels right.” Well, I couldn’t begin with that! e other thing about nonobjective painting is that you exclude a lot. For some years now I have wanted to make paintings more inclusive rather than exclusive. In other words, I am not working with limitations now. Everything is open. JB: But that is not altogether true either, because if you put yourself in a position where the determination is to deal figuratively, the implication is that you are dealing with the real world, and there are obviously specifics and limitations and boundaries there too. One certainly cannot deal with the entire world, so it seems to me that in pursuit of figuration your process in many ways is as selective in that realm as it is in the realm of the “other.” PG: Well, there are a lot of mysteries. We are in a very mysterious area, because definitions seem to dissolve. JB: Well, you see, I am not so sure now either. I used to be very sure! I am not so sure anymore. PG: Nor am I. [laughter] JB: e reason I am fascinated with all of this is that we are far enough away from the 1950s now, and from some of the myth overlaid on that period, to begin to have some perspective on it and to begin asking some real questions. I think perhaps you, more so than almost anyone else, can answer some of these questions I am asking, because you worked very specifically in an abstract expressionist vein, in an extraordinarily powerful and authentic way. ose paintings from the early 1950s did everything and more than one expected, in my mind, and yet you have le all of that behind to work equally authentically in a figurative manner—I am very interested in why.

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PG: It wasn’t enough for me. at was the reason I moved away from them. In other words, I felt that aer ten or twelve years of working within the limitations of a certain kind of painting, and wanting painting to do what only painting itself can do, I wanted to take on more. I have always had a very visual fix, in my studies of Piero and Uccello and so on. In fact, when I first saw a cubist painting, when I was a boy— even then I was immersed in Uccello—I thought the cubists were trying to recapture some of the plastic values of Uccello. In fact, I started looking at Uccello and Piero as a kind of Renaissance cubism, do you know what I mean? You see, I don’t think historically. I don’t think in time, or in centuries like an art historian. at is not my profession, to think in terms of “periods.” JB: In quantum leaps, perhaps, but not in periods. PG: at’s right! Leaps, but not “periods.” So, being versed in that, I wanted to take on more. In other words, the whole space. Look, let’s be very specific. In nonobjective painting, the strong feeling when you start is that you are working on the picture plane, on the canvas itself, whereas, when you are working with figuration, you are putting this in front of that, that in front of something else, like a deck of playing cards. Or like a collage. Which already means that you are penetrating the space. ose are all spatial concepts, you know? at is more challenging to me, because more of a contest goes on. An unresolvable contest. Do you know what I mean? JB: Yes. ere was always a phenomenon of space in your painting. PG: I hope so. Even in the nonobjective paintings. So, you see, it is not as simple as it might appear. But I am sure that you know that. JB: e strong point about those early paintings for me has always been their power, and the manner in which they existed. ey really “hung there” in space. PG: Perhaps that is what gave them tension. But there is danger in everything. Pure nonobjective painting, or painting that deals with simple geometric forms on a picture plane, can be just as much of an “illustration” as Andrew Wyeth, you know? I don’t see that there is a greater value in having a circle instead of a field of grass. Why is a circle any better than what you have called “a barn door”? I don’t know why. One isn’t any better than the other. My God, look at Piero! I mean, that is abstract art! I think Rembrandt is abstract. It is a matter of terms, that’s all. I don’t want to be dogmatic about it, but there are no “terms” in painting. All painting is abstraction. It is removal. ere is so much to say about all of that, one hardly knows where to start. I sometimes think that about the only possible question to talk about, the only issue to talk about, is “When is a painting finished?” [laughter] If you deal with forms in this imagined plane, whether you call it a “surface” or whatever, it is an imagined plane. A lot of people say, “Where is it? Why is this happening?” Or, “Why did it stop right there? Where is the fix? Why is there a fixation or a pause at a certain point?”

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JB: And “What is there that makes any one of those things interesting? Why is it that I care about any of those things?” PG: If you look at a marvelous Mondrian or a van Doesburg, the fix is very nervous, do you know what I mean? It is a very anxious fix. And that fix should promise other conditions of the same attitude. It is a continuous thing. e problem is that a lot of the abstract painters who work that way don’t have that excitement. ey look dead. Inert. It is a “wax museum” abstract look. But Mondrian can be very exciting. When he is marvelous, he is very exciting because he is very, very tense. JB: And so, quite the opposite of there being any kind of “loss” for you in figurative painting . . . PG: In the new work? Not at all. On the contrary, it has become more impossible, more exciting, more exhilarating, and there is a lot to chew on! I may be deluding myself. at is the risk one takes in anything one does. But I don’t think so. It is very exciting when there are no structured boundaries. Take one of the early pictures in the San Francisco Museum collection, such as White Painting #1, 1951, or For M, 1955, which is also there. I feel just as exuberant now as when I did them. I feel as if I am the same painter I was then. And that’s what I want above anything else. I want to be. I want to feel that I am entering a new territory. JB: Because that’s freedom! PG: Sure. Exactly! at is what I meant by the de Kooning story, and that’s what I think Bill meant when he said that. He said that it is about “freedom.” So I feel that I am investigating something I am not sure of. It is a voyage. Dore Ashton has called it “an unknown shore.”* I feel I am reborn. And I don’t mean that in the Carter sense! I am not a Baptist! A Zen Buddhist, maybe, but not a Baptist! JB: You are a “born-again” painter! PG: Yes! But an artist wants to be “born again” many times. I feel just as puzzled and mystified by what I do as I did then. I don’t feel any different. I think that is what has kept me alive. I am sure of it. I am sure that is why I am alive at almost sixty-seven, and I want to go on to Titian’s age, you know? Or Picasso’s age. I think a painter dies when he is through investigating. God, I wish I could live for two centuries! ere is so much to do, and there is always this fight for time. My God, there just isn’t enough time! I think a painter who lives a long time has a lot to do. ere is a real reason why Picasso and Léger lived on and on—because they recreated themselves!

* Dore Ashton, The Unknown Shore: A View of Contemporary Art (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962).

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INTERVIEW WITH MARK STEVENS 1980

Mark Stevens [looking at the paintings in Guston’s studio in Woodstock, New York]: You seem to love the fantastic. Philip Guston: Fantastic? No, I don’t think so. I like things rooted in the tangible world. I like old-fashioned things like gravity, how we locomote when we walk. I used to lie sideways on a park bench and watch how people walk. I used to think how amazing it is, the locomotion. I don’t like fantastic when it means an overlabored use of the imagination. Anyway, all art is a kind of hallucination, but hallucination with work. Or dreaming with your eyes open. MS: You start your paintings with the most ordinary objects in mind. PG: It could be anything. A briefcase, or a bug crawling across the floor. en I go on from there. I was thinking one night about Kaa’s story “e Metamorphosis,” when he wakes up and he’s a bug and he’s late for work. Well, I think the most fantastic thing about this story is that this man has not really changed. He’s totally conscious, totally aware. ere’s no metamorphosis. I like Isaac Babel, too, because he deals totally with fact. ere can be nothing more startling than a simple statement of fact, in a certain form. As Babel says, “ere’s no iron that can enter the heart like a period in the right place.” MS: Or a brushstroke in the right place? PG: You sweat like a dog for that. In the beginning the canvas is empty and you can do anything, and that’s the most frightening experience. You have to get the white out of the way. As you progress in the picture and it gets to where you’re involved with an inch in this rectangle which is your world, that’s when you’re most free. MS: en you find a sense of boundary or of control—a freedom from the anarchy of white? PG: You want to feel resistance. Or I want to. All my pictures must be fought for. Lots of overpainting and rubbing out. You want to have lived it. e complicated problem is when you do a painting that you think looks good. en you go into the house and you go to sleep and you wake up in an hour convinced that you’re kidding yourself. You haven’t lived it yet. So, without even looking at the picture you scrape the whole thing out and stay with it until—this is the mysterious part—you feel transparent. MS: at reminds me of Stravinsky’s famous remark, that he was the vessel through which Sacre du Printemps passed. First published as “A Talk with Philip Guston,” in The New Republic, March 15, 1980, 25–28.

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Philip Guston, Untitled, 1980. Ink on paper, 23 × 29 inches.

PG: All artists have known that. When you look at paintings, you can always tell which part is forced and which part is free. MS: Is it grim work, painting your more grisly images? PG: Someone once said to me, “Doesn’t this make you sad?” It doesn’t at all. e important thing is you’ve let go of something inside, no matter what it is. MS: You began your work as a figurative painter in the 1930s. Since then there have been two principal changes in your style—two hinges. e first was the turn to abstract expressionism in the late 1940s. e second was the return to figurative work in the 1960s. Could you explain some of the reasons you took up abstract expressionist painting? PG: I didn’t take it up. I didn’t join a club. Abstract expressionism was a phrase coined much later. But in 1947 I became lost for about a year, because I felt I had exhausted my subject matter, which was a series of pictures about children. I didn’t feel they were aesthetically felt—they were rhetorical. I was flattening out space at that point, too. In 1948 I went to Italy for the first time, got to brooding and feeling that those artists were abstract in many ways. I decided to start from scratch when I got back. I also knew painters like Tomlin, Kline, Pollock from the WPA 1930s, and they all

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had the same problems. ey wanted a new territory, to leave cubist and semi-cubist painting. We all gave each other moral support. Toward the end of the 1950s I was slowly evolving toward a different kind of figuration. Sort of black heads on fields of gray. Again I began to feel the necessity for a subject. It’s a different contest when there’s both subject and structure. MS: You mentioned how important it is for you to “live” your paintings. Do you like Harold Rosenberg’s definition of abstract expressionism as “action painting,” an arena in which the artist . . . PG: I was never certain what it meant. It’s so general. We argued about it for twenty years. Titian was an action painter. All painting is action painting. It’s not an arena in which to act. Act what? MS: He might have said, “To try to act yourself, for a moment.” PG: But that’s been the story since the caveman, only the styles have changed. Besides, you don’t know yourself when you’re painting, and as for freeing the unconscious, all art’s unconscious as well as conscious. What’s meant by the unconscious anyway? I don’t know. I know less as I go along. Or more. Or simpler. MS: In the mid-1960s you stopped producing your successful abstract works and did no painting at all. You just drew. What was going on? PG: It was clearing the decks. It was like starting again, like a child, just taking a very simple line. MS: Does that explain the extreme simplicity, almost crudeness, of those drawings? PG: Could be. It was a feeling I had, in about 1966: “What would happen,” I thought, “if I eliminated everything except just raw feeling and the brush and ink, the simplest of means without even the seductions of color?” It was like testing myself, to see what I am, what I can do. You see, at that point in the 1960s, I wanted to be a stranger to myself. MS: What did the critics say about the new figurative work? PG: For the most part, they said I was finished, I was through. e New York Times attacked the show—the headline was, I think, “From Mandarin to Stumblebum.” Since then, Dore Ashton has written a book about me,* and a few others have written sympathetically. ere seems to be about an eight- to ten-year lag. For a while I was with no gallery, but that made me feel good. Freedom is a marvelous thing. You know that old chestnut, that people are afraid to be free—well, it’s true. When I had my first show in the new figurative style in about 1970, the people at the opening seemed shocked. Some painters of the abstract movement—my colleagues, friends, contemporaries—refused to talk to me. It was as if we’d worked so hard to establish the * Dore Ashton, Yes, But: A Critical Study of Philip Guston (New York: Viking Press, 1976), updated and reprinted as A Critical Study of Philip Guston (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). For the negative review, see Hilton Kramer, “A Mandarin Pretending to Be a Stumblebum,” New York Times, October 25, 1970.

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canons of a church and here I go upsetting it, forgetting that that’s what good artists should do. At the opening only two painters, David Hare and Bill de Kooning, acted differently. It wasn’t necessarily that they liked it. De Kooning said something else. He said, “Why are they all complaining about you making political art, all this talk? You know what your real subject is, it’s about freedom, to be free, the artist’s first duty.” MS: Your earlier success had become a kind of prison? PG: It was more that in working with subjects and tangible forms I was led into some surprising and unpredictable structures. at was exciting. Also, I began to discover that the art world in general is very conventional. ey’re just as conventional as the TV world, in that, once you establish something, you’re in a niche and that’s that. My concept always has been that artists should change all the time. Clement Greenberg once said that some artists, like de Kooning and me, were “homeless.” He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but we accepted it as one. MS: Have museums shown any interest in your figurative work? PG: Except for this coming show [the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art retrospective in 1980], it stopped dead. I went through many years of there being no activity at all. at’s why I taught. MS: Do you read much art criticism? PG: Used to, but now I don’t pay much attention to it. I gave all my art magazines away, and when I read criticism, it’s mostly literary criticism. In fact, most of my friends are writers. I like their reactions to paintings. I like how they see. MS: What’s different about it? PG: ey see without the art world lingo. Sharply. Freshly. Sometimes they’re funny, or their reaction is funny, and I enjoy that. I don’t like writing that’s snarled up. It’s a cover-up. Good writing is simple. Meyer Schapiro last year sent me a pamphlet he wrote about Van Gogh, and it’s written very simply. T. S. Eliot takes complicated subjects in his essays and writes about them in the simplest way. You wonder, is the man’s thought so clear he doesn’t need to obfuscate it? MS: Have you kept up with contemporary art? PG: I don’t think contemporary American art is much worth talking about. It’s college art. It’s art that comes from being taught in colleges, in which you preconceive what it is you want to do and then you illustrate what it is you have preconceived. Totally mannerist. In the last several decades, modern art has been degraded into ornament. It’s too bad. It fits American society very well. In an office building you’re not going to see one of my pictures on the wall next to the plant, but you could put a picture of a few verticals and horizontals there. I prefer a more critical art. MS: e term avant-garde doesn’t mean much today. PG: e term avant-garde means money. It used to be—well, a military campaign would have an avant-garde to smell out the enemy. Now it’s the New York ruway. It’s an

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accommodating art. If you have the proper writing, advertising, blurbs, you’re set. e public behaves like the avant-garde now—it’s only too anxious to be new. Actually, I like Andy Warhol, because he takes all this foolishness and pushes it to the extreme. What’s wrong with modernism in painting is that it paints for this century. People see quickly today, so they paint so you can see it quickly. How oen do you go into a museum and you see paintings that, so-called, “work within the limits”? And your eye just bounces off. Anybody can go out and put down pretty colors, or smear around, or use a T-square. It’s become attenuated finally, without the crudeness, guts, rawness, whatever you want to call it, when you really have to grapple with a subject. I think what da Vinci wrote—that painting is a thing for the mind—is still true. MS: But don’t serious artists have to confront the formal ideas of their time? You might prefer your grandparents, but you are closer to your parents. Or at least since the Renaissance, the way great individual artists have been able to find their own space— both formally and personally—is to explore, change, elaborate what’s fresh in the art of their time. PG: I’m glad I’m working now. But the artists I admire were also great students of the past, you know. To my mind, the beginnings of modern art are wonderful. Certainly Cézanne is the key figure, but you know he meant exactly what he said when he wrote that he was trying to do Poussin aer nature. And he was a great student of El Greco, Tintoretto, and Titian. Picasso, de Chirico, Léger, and Matisse carried on from there, and of course they also studied painting from the past. ey had a subject and used objects. ey really wanted to find out what it was about the old masters that made them so solid, and what gave them that particular quality of fluidity and solidity at the same time. at effort is exhilarating. I don’t see much aer Picasso and Léger, though. I used to like Miró for his playfulness, but you can get tired of playfulness, too. Paul Klee, for instance. It’s like this is humorous week, “Let’s be humorous.” MS: In the art world there’s a pervasive sense that modernism has run its course. I don’t know whether that’s true, but what do you think is le for artists? PG: e rules of the game were established centuries ago. At the same time there is a problem, as you say, because there is such a thing as modernism, and there are certain problems that we have that separate us from the past. ere’s no point in pretending you’re walking down the streets of Florence in the fieenth century. MS: Certain formal problems? at’s been the dri of criticism. PG: Our great problem is subject. What to do. How to begin. I’ll sound moralistic: to do something worthwhile. Much modern art has only itself as a subject. I don’t mean that it’s abstract or not. I never felt that mattered. What could be more abstract than Goya? But a lot of contemporary art, whatever might be claimed for it, is made simply to create a pleasant environment. MS: But that’s also been a stimulus for the creation of some of the greatest art of the past.

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PG: No, I don’t think so. ere was much more to consider in the art of the past. But the problem is deeper, this one of subject. It’s a cultural and psychological problem for us. I don’t know what the hell you do. MS: A reductive artist might say he’s dealing with pure questions of form and color— his subject is the meanings that are part of the nature of those things. Without the distraction of realistic images. PG: ere’s no such thing as pure manipulation of form or color. at’s a myth. What’s the difference between that and a sphere in Piero? e shibboleths of the last fiy years are amazing. But take an abstract painter like Mondrian. He’s so good that when you go to the museum and there’s this picture and that and you see a Mondrian, you go right to it. It’s like a gun pointed at you. It’s because he’s passionate. He was a marvelous religious crank. He put his passion into forms. His passion for eosophy and art was a true subject. I think an artist has to reject all these shibboleths. MS: In favor of what? PG: A lot of what’s written and painted now is about there being nothing to write or paint, and it becomes boring aer a while. I’ve always had the feeling that art is nourished by the common and ordinary. Picasso drew constantly from the common. I have a feeling that in America a lot of good art may come out of this impulse. I’m not talking about proletarian art, because that’s as bad as being an aesthete. But I love the self-taught artists, like Pippin and Kane. Just as strong in my memory as the old masters is once seeing an old-fashioned ice truck in Manhattan which had a bucket painted on it, with the grain of the wood and everything, and spilling out of it these cubes of ice. Sometimes, when my painting is getting too artistic, I’ll say to myself, “What if the shoe salesman asked you to paint a shoe on his window?” Suddenly, everything lightens. I feel not so responsible and paint directly what the thing is, including the necessary distortions. To put the question another way, I was once talking to Harold [Rosenberg] on a panel, and I said, “I’d like to paint as if I’d never painted or seen a painting before.” Of course, it’s impossible. But Harold said that was Mallarmé’s definition of the true poet: the poet in Eden.

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I N T E R V I E W W I T H J OA N N E D I C K S O N 1980

Philip Guston: How does the exhibition affect me? I don’t see it as a painting show. I see it as the story of a life. I happen to be connected with that life. I don’t see it as pictures you put together, rather they are like evidences of a life spent painting. Joanne Dickson: You appear to have been influenced by Picasso; your work has three distinct periods as his did. PG: I think of myself as a serious painter that hasn’t been influenced by Picasso and then on the other hand has had to work like hell to get away from his influence. In a way, Picasso wasn’t even a painter; he was a volcano, like Michelangelo was. No one in the sixteenth century aer Michelangelo escaped his influence. ere are ways of being influenced by such artists that have nothing to do with appearance of the work. Courage is an influence—not checking one’s impulses, audacity, the willingness to please one’s self and to be free. It sounds simple but it’s the hardest thing in the world. I know it sounds platitudinous, but just try it! Aer the liberation of Paris [in World War II], a young GI painter visited Picasso. He asked Picasso why he, Léger, and Braque had le cubism. Picasso was a great wit, a buffoon, and a profound thinker. He said, “We were more interested in painting than in cubism. ey [Ozenfant, Gleizes, etc.] were more interested in cubism than painting.” Everything is in that statement. JD: It seems in both cases, yours and Picasso’s, you were willing to allow your image to be discarded in order to go on with the new era of painting. at takes great courage. PG: at’s an embarrassing comparison—please! I don’t think it’s courage, really and truly I don’t. I don’t think there is a choice. In fact, it’s best when you have no choice. If you have a choice, it’s no good. It means you have alternatives. at’s not art. Art is when you have no choice; there are no alternatives. It’s like breathing, wanting to live. Some painters apparently do the same thing always. It’s a matter of temperament, I think. e only important things to talk about are the things you can’t talk about; they can only be hinted at. Someone asked me a question yesterday, a very good question, but unanswerable, “How do you know when a painting is finished?” at interested me. at question is an old friend. It reminded me of that great old Balzac story, “e Unknown Masterpiece.” e master worked on a painting all his life. He kept the painting covered. No one had seen it. At the end of twenty years, it was at This interview was conducted on May 14, 1980, on the occasion of the opening of the Guston retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on May 15. First published in National Arts Guide, November– December 1980, 38–39.

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last uncovered. Balzac describes the painting as a “mass of lines.” I, too, have always painted for myself. Everybody paints pictures that look all right. at’s easy enough to do! So it’s true that you could stay on one picture all your life. On the other hand, all of your work is one picture. So then the question could reasonably arise: when do you stop? It’s a good question. e only real question. I’ve oen painted pictures that look all right except there is a big rock in my stomach when I go back home. What is the rock? I know I’m not finished. Because it doesn’t promise continuity, you know, future conditions of creation. en there are those pauses, when you stop, you can breathe or you feel some rhythm that moves through you. You begin to realize the desire to stay on it. e condition you are in is very unclear. It later becomes a very precise art. It’s like preparing yourself for the condition you’ll be in when something moves through you that promises future painting. at is when a painting is finished, and if it’s not finished it just means more conditions of the same condition. Otherwise you’re le with waxworks; whether they are abstract or figurative doesn’t matter. JD: Mr. Guston, five hundred years from now, in the history of art, if you could be remembered for just one thing, what would you like it to be? PG: I would like to be in the same place as Goya would be, where Manet would be, and where Cézanne would be. I wouldn’t mind a pat on the back from them, saying, “Not bad, sonny! Pas mal.” JD: What do you see as the function of art criticism? PG: It’s very important. What do you mean by art criticism? You see, the painter himself is a critic. He may not write. I mean in the Renaissance sense. e artist is doing many things when he is not making a picture. He is criticizing his contemporaries. He is criticizing himself. Whether he writes or not is beside the point. But that doesn’t answer your question. JD: I mean art criticism, not criticism by the artist. PG: You mean writers. I would like to read something about myself that would give me a thought about painting that I hadn’t had before. No art critic could ever come close to the lowest opinion I have of myself or ever come near my momentary ecstasy. at sounds terribly vain. JD: In regard to your own works, have you found writings by critics to be helpful, a hindrance, ignorant, generally perceptive? PG: Uh-huh. It depends on which critic. Sometimes I don’t like criticism. I’m very friendly with Dore Ashton and Meyer Schapiro, the art historian. We have long talks together. ere are others. I’m vastly interested in what they have to say. You have to distinguish between newspaper critics and men and women who are passionate about painting. e transfer of creative energy from one medium to another can be wonderful! JD: Could you comment on the interaction between the two states that you delineated: the art coming through you and at the same time the art being processed by continuous critical activity?

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PG: Sure. I think I know what you mean. None of us is a single thing. We’re single, double, triple, quadruple. What you’re asking is the only thing to ask; therefore it is all but impossible to answer. It’s a question of preparing yourself. I’ll be specific. I paint on the wall and stretch the canvas later. ere is nothing more frightening than to face a white canvas. You’re in a state where you can do anything. It’s a frightening thing when you can do anything. What you are working towards is becoming unfree. It sounds paradoxical, but that’s the way it is. Interestingly enough, where you’re moving form, when you are allowed to move only an inch, it makes all the difference in the world. at’s when you’re unfree. e work takes you over. In other words, you are not making it. You have to prepare yourself for this state where it has taken you over and you are a victim. Harold Rosenberg said to me, “You want to be a victim?” and I said, “You bet!” It’s a glorious thing to be a victim. ere’s the feeling that a third hand is doing the work. I feel that we all experience this in our lives. I don’t think it’s limited to painting. It’s both personal and impersonal when I talk about the third hand. You work in this style or that style as if you had a choice in the matter. But that’s shaky territory. e thing is, you can learn to read paintings. When you look at a painting, you can tell the part of the painting where the painter has been free and parts where he has been stuck. So we’re all participants in this. I’ve been stuck in parts of paintings—free in others—then I’ve had to wipe it all out and start with nothing again. at’s process. I’ve always noticed when someone is telling a story and they’ve done it for the dozenth time; a person’s eyes start wandering. He’s not really listening to you. If I tell it fresh, for the first time, all of his/her attention is right on it! at’s just like painting or writing. JD: e comment you made before, about getting yourself in a position where you were more or less restrained, the victim . . . PG: I mean victim in the sense of having resistance. When you start a blank canvas, there is no resistance. What you truly want, aer weeks on a canvas, is to get yourself into a state of resistance. JD: What happened to you between 1962 and 1969? Particularly in 1964–1965? PG: Same thing. I don’t consider that I’ve changed. I know what I’m going to do. Many pictures underneath have been scraped out. e appearance may change. at’s why I don’t take a historical view of things, even art of the past. at’s why comments about style seem strange to me, as if one had a choice in the matter. What I’m doing is trying to stay alive, to continue—not to die. Whatever one does, it’s cyclical. I don’t feel that what I’m doing now is different than what I did in the early fiies, the socalled nonfigurative paintings. What is to the point is that I’m in the same state. e rest is not my business. I have no control over it. Maybe I’m compulsive. JD: Wouldn’t it be difficult to spend your whole life creating without a little compulsivity? PG: I’d say it would be hard to spend your life painting without any compulsivity! I don’t glory in my compulsiveness. A painter must be compulsive to paint. No one is forc-

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ing you to do it. An artist is driven to be free. I think it’s the devil’s work. You know damn well you’re dealing with “forces.” It’s hubris. We’re not supposed to meddle with the forces—God takes care of that. He says, “Cherish what I’ve made.” e Ten Commandments tell us not to make graven images. You’re dealing with the forces—with hubris. e hubris in you has to deal with a very strong compulsion “to make.” I feel directly in line with a tribal colony, so-called primitives. ey are not primitives. Who are the men in that prehistoric cave? e men in the Lascaux caves who didn’t go on the hunt and used charred bones to draw on the cave walls? What kind of a neurotic was he to make those beautiful bulls? I don’t think art has changed very much. It’s a very archaic form.

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S T U D I O N OT E S 1970–78

Guston kept a pad of yellow legal sheets in his studio rolltop desk, on which he penciled notes to himself, ideas for pictures, letters, and sometimes sketched images for later development. The present selection of those writings was made by Musa Mayer during research for her book Night Studio.

September 1970

In a drawer I find scraps of paper with these notes. ickness of things. Shoes. Rusted iron. Mended rags. Seams. Dried bloodstains. Pink paint. Bricks. Bent nails and pieces of wood. Brick walls. Cigarette butts. Smoking. Empty booze bottles. How would bricks look flying in the air—fixed in their gravity—falling? A brick fight. Pictures hanging on nails in walls. e hands of clocks. Green window shades. Twoor three-story brick buildings. Endless black windows. Empty streets.

“About these hooded men.” e KKK has haunted me since I was a boy in L.A. In those years, they were there mostly to break strikes, and I drew and painted pictures of conspiracies and floggings, cruelty and evil. Also, I made a connection with my attraction to medieval and Renaissance paintings, the flagellation pictures of Piero, Giotto, and Duccio. Violence in a formal painting. In this dream of violence, I feel like Isaac Babel with his Cossacks; as if I were living with the Klan. What do they do aerwards? Or before? Smoke, drink, sit around their rooms (lightbulbs, furniture, wooden floors), patrol empty streets; dumb, melancholy, guilty, fearful, remorseful, reassuring one another? Why couldn’t some be artists and paint one another? Soon I’ll paint a picture of some of them eating around a table (great chance to paint food: spaghetti, hamburgers, beer, etc.). I tried one last year of two of them shaking hands. It didn’t work out—yet. Pictures should tell stories. It is what makes me want to paint. To see, in a painting, what one has always wanted to see, but hasn’t, until now. For the first time.

Not previously published, except for “Reminders” and “Where I Paint,” which were published in Bill Berkson’s Big Sky magazine, no. 6 (1973).

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Philip Guston, Untitled, 1971. Oil on paper, 22 × 30 inches.

September 28, 1972

ere is nothing to do now but paint my life; my dreams, surroundings, predicament, desperation, Musa—love, need. Keep destroying any attempt to paint pictures, or think about art. If someone bursts out laughing in front of my painting, that is exactly what I want and expect.

From a note to Dore Ashton on the dra of Yes, But . . . In general, I feel I am always described as in trouble and in crisis. Most artists feel that way. But when the picture comes out there’s a calm and feeling of continuity. I think the frequent use of crisis and anxiety gives the impression that I am in constant pain. As it feels to me, when the picture takes form, the new structure itself calms me and I would hope that the looker does not feel he is looking at pain, trouble, and anxiety, but at a new structure which he can contemplate. Ideally! at he gets a real, positive change. Years later, discussing my work with Clark Coolidge, we used to talk a lot about Melville. One story Clark told me stays in my mind: Melville is writing to Hawthorne aer having finished Moby Dick. He says, “I’ve written an evil book and I feel spotless as a lamb.”

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August 15, 1978

Oh, how I hate the calculation, the reasoning of the eye and mind. I hate the composing—the designing of spaces—to make things fit! What, aer all, does it satisfy? It robs and steals from the image that the spirit so desperately desires. But I love the shadows, for themselves alone. My wife Musa once wrote, “Because the sun was behind them, their shadows came first, and then the birds themselves.”

T H E L AW

e Laws of Art are generous laws. ey are not definable because they are not fixed. ese Laws are revealed to the Artist during creation and cannot be given to him. ey are not knowable. A work cannot begin with these Laws as in a diagram. ey can only be sensed as the work unfolds. When the forms and spaces move toward their destined positions, the artist is then permitted to become a victim of these Laws, the prepared and innocent accomplice for the completion of the work. His mind and spirit, his eyes, have matured and changed to a degree where knowing and not knowing become a single act. It is as if these Governing Laws of Art manifest themselves through him.

T H O U G H T S ( O R A DV I C E TO M Y S E L F ) Sunday, September 27, 1978

I just did a painting which I shall call e Tomb or e Artist’s Tomb. So it is truly a bitter comedy that is being played out. Painting, which duplicates and is a kind of substitute for your life, is lived from hour to hour, day to day. Nothing is stable, all is shiing, changing. ere is no such thing as a picture, it is an impossibility and a mirage to believe so. A fantasy the mind makes like having a dogma, a belief. But it won’t stay still, remain docile; you can’t tame anything into docility, with yourself as the master. Being a lion tamer—that’s just circus razzle-dazzle. Sometimes I spread out all over the canvas, the rectangle of action, and make this unstable and precarious momentary balanced-unbalanced condition. I did this last week. Now, in reverse, yesterday and today, I made a rock, with platforms, steps for my forms to be on, and play out their private drama. is will remain for a while.

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Philip Guston, Tomb, 1978. Oil on canvas, 781⁄2 × 74 inches. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

e only thing I have is my radicalism against art. All that abstract shit—museum and art history aesthetics. What a lie—lie! e only true impulse is realism. Arty art screws you in the end; always be on guard against it!

If I speak of having a subject to paint, I mean there is a forgotten place of beings and things, which I need to remember. I want to see this place. I paint what I want to see.

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T H E A P P O I N T M E N T ( A T R U E S TO R Y )

Once there were two Philips who were friends. One was a very famous writer, a celebrity, the other a painter who had some degree of fame. Philip the Painter, who lived in the mountains and whose solitude was always being interrupted by the telephone, decided to put a stop to this thievery of time. He installed a switch that turns off the ringing telephone. is was a luxurious feeling for him, since he could telephone out to the outside world, but the outside world could not reach him at all. Philip the Writer, who lived in the City (by preference, he once said, where he could roam the streets at will, eat in foreign restaurants, and taste all sorts of imported delicacies), had been trying to telephone Philip the Painter for six months. en, aer a trip to European cities, Philip the Writer tried again to telephone Philip the Painter. Again without success. Finally, Philip the Writer wrote this letter: “For Christ’s sake let your phone ring. e world isn’t just shit heads and monsters wanting to disturb you at your sacred foolishness—there’s also me, your old pen and brush pal. Call me.” Philip the Painter waited a week before he telephoned Philip the Writer, whose answering service said he was busy and that he would telephone Philip the Painter. But remember, Philip the Painter’s telephone couldn’t ring, and since he again went back to his “sacred foolishness” in his studio, weeks went by. He received a second letter from Philip the Writer. is time in capital letters. “how can i call you back if you won’t answer the telephone? humanly impossible. technologically impossible. hopeless situation, no?” en, as if they were secret agents, a designated time was chosen (through a third party, a neighbor) for Philip the Painter to telephone Philip the Writer. Philip the Writer couldn’t believe his ears when Philip the Painter called. Philip the Writer pretended he wasn’t home when he answered the phone call. e dilemma was overcome when Philip the Writer agreed to visit Philip the Painter a week later for dinner and some talk. With the stern admonition, however, that since Philip the Writer couldn’t telephone Philip the Painter, the appointment had to be firm and definite. is appointment made Philip the Painter more nervous than usual. He never knew from minute to minute how he felt. He couldn’t control his moods, which changed like the shape of clouds. e commitment to a definite time of meeting might mean that he would have to telephone Philip the Writer again in order to change the time of the meeting to a future time. Naturally, this made him even more nervous. is story ends happily, however. rough a new source of willpower, Philip the Painter overcame his nervousness and was calm as he prepared to entertain his friend, Philip the Writer. is determination was accomplished by the feeling of security that they would spend their evening, during and aer dinner, leisurely discussing their mutual nervousness about the time stolen

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from their work by the world outside. He knew they would exchange their fears of the ringing telephone. Philip the Painter knew that he and Philip the Writer would speak of their miseries and would plan strategies to prevent the frightening the of time.

ere is no [underlined three times] relationship between my desires, ambitions, and the needs of a dealer! e total conformity of painting now that we see is absolutely deadening to my spirits. Its conventionality. Its domesticity.

De Chirico’s thought was not willed. It was so perfectly balanced that his forms never seem to have been painted. His walls and shadows, his trains and cookies, his manikins, clocks, blackboards, and smoke. ey could all disappear. Yet they appeared. ey have known each other for centuries. De Chirico drew aside his curtain, revealing what was always there. It had been forgotten. Picasso, the builder, re-peopled the earth—inventing new beings. We believe his will. Marvelous artists are made of elements which cannot be identified. e alchemy is complete. eir work is strange, and will never become familiar.

You can wreck your painting that you believe in by overexamining it—dispel its magic— its spell lost. Advice to myself: leave it alone. It should be able to live by itself.

November 23, 1978

When I complete a painting that feels real—I think aerwards that I have found a way— a road. And my mind races on—painting pictures in my head. Infinite possibilities. What a delusion this is. All the possibilities—oh, at last I know. ese are mere notions— proven to be so when you start painting again. ey all tumble down when paint is put on. And again you must learn that there is no road—no way—all you possess is the luck to learn to see each time—freshly. Newly. No good to paint in the head—what happens is what happens when you put the paint down—you can only hope that you are alert—ready—to see. What joy it is for paint to become a thing—a being. Believe in this miracle—it is your only hope. To will this trans-

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formation is not possible. Only a slow maturation can prepare the hand and eye to become quicker than ever. Ideas about art don’t matter. ey collapse anyway in front of the painting.

December 8, 1978

American abstract art is a lie, a sham, a cover-up for a poverty of spirit. A mask to mask the fear to reveal oneself. A lie to cover up how bad one can be. Unwilling to show this badness, this rawness. It is laughable this lie. Anything but this! What a sham! “Abstract” art hides it, hides the lie, a fake! Don’t! Let it show! It is an escape—from the true feelings we have—the “raw”—the primitive feelings about the world—and us in it. In America. “It” is a game, as if we are all on a soball team on the backyard lot. We all agree, don’t we? On the game rules—“Play Ball.” Fit into the crappy lie of advertising art. Fit into the scheme of everything—don’t make waves—be a good boy—live and let live— what shit this is! Where are the wooden floors—the lightbulbs—the cigarette smoke—where are the brick walls—where is what we feel—without notions—ideas—good intentions?— No, just conform to the banks—the plazas—monuments to the people who own this country—give everyone the soothing lullaby of “art.” We all know what this is—don’t we?

A painting feels lived-out to me, not painted. at’s why one is changed by painting. In a rare magical moment, I never feel myself to be more than a trusting accomplice. So the paintings aren’t pictures, but evidences—maybe documents, along the road you have not chosen, but are on nevertheless.

N E W PA I N T I N G S

A figure lying in bed, very still, looking at a ball stopped in front of his nose, yet everything around him, windows, boxes, toys, books, are in motion. is just got itself painted. A pile of junk between two telephone poles. e itch to kick it, disperse it. I really only love strangeness. But here is another pileup of old shoes and rags, in a corner of a brick wall—in front, a sidewalk. I’ve been there. I’ve seen it before, but forgot. Green shade above with a chain to pull. Light it up. Large wall, a picture, a window. A hanging lightbulb. Not much else. Forms painted out.

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Back view, lying in bed, smoking. A head, profile, vomiting out forms or sucking them back in. A desolate hill, littered. Forms that got on top of that slope might move on to the other side and be invisible. e sun coming up has moved its position on the canvas many times from le to right and back again. Finally, towards dawn, it fixed itself. A very heavy sunrise. H. Michaux: e two brothers fighting in mud.* I want to paint that.

I M AG E S

Aernoon. Mended rags. Clock-face. Sticks of wood behind a brick wall. Graining. Back yards. screen doors. porches. old cars being dismantled. Venice, Calif.

REMINDERS

e thickness of things. e object painted on a store window. A shoe— a book—to be seen instantly from a distance. e worst thing in the world Is to look at another painting. Make your mind blank and try To duplicate the object. e images I’ve painted out. One morning, disconsolate, I started to paint, not watching myself.

* Henri Michaux, “In the Land of the Hacs” [Chez le Hacs], in Selected Writings (New York: New Directions Books, 1968), 133.

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A sense that I am painting in reverse. I continue the mistake. In the end, there is the image I have been wanting to see. ank God for yellow ochre, cadmium red medium, and permanent green light.

W H E R E I PA I N T

e studio is an empty room and has a wooden floor. It is three flights up in a red brick building. e window is open. ere is no sound and the early sky is pale blue. I look out to see the end of the street, the edge of town. A party is going on in a large room. In a remote corner I am painting on huge sheets of wrapping paper. I concentrate on what has to be done and soon I am finished.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Entries, including unpublished materials, are arranged chronologically. Works with an asterisk are included in this anthology. * Statement for Types—by American Artists. Art News Annual 43 (1944). * Statement for Twelve Americans, edited by Dorothy C. Miller, exh. cat. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1956. Interview with Joan Pring (“Interview with Philip Guston in His Studio”), June 25, 1957. Archives of the Museum of Modern Art, 113 East Eighteenth Street, New York City. * “Notes on Bradley Walker Tomlin.” In John I. H. Bauer, Bradley Walker Tomlin. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1957. Statement in Francis Celentano, “The Origins and Development of Abstract Expressionism in the United States.” MA thesis, New York University, 1957. * Interview with Sam Hunter, titled “Art in New York,” Playbill, November 25, 1957. * Comments from the Chicago Panel (possibly at Goldowsky Gallery), March 1958. * Statement for John I. H. Bauer, Nature in Abstraction, exh. cat. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1958. * Statement, in It Is, no. 1 (Spring 1958). * Statement on the role of nature in abstract art, 1957–58, in reply to a questionnaire from John I. H. Bauer, in The New American Painting, exh. cat. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1959. * Interview with David Sylvester, March 1960, broadcast by the BBC. In Interviews with American Artists, edited by David Sylvester. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. * Comments from a panel at the Philadelphia Museum College of Art, March 1960. In It Is, no. 5 (Spring 1960). Interview with H. H. Arnason, January 22–30, 1962. Estate of H. H. Arnason, Guggenheim Museum Archives, New York. Statement in Philip Guston, exh. cat. Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1962. * Conversation with Bill Berkson, November 1, 1964. Art and Literature, no. 7 (Winter 1965). * Interview with Joseph S. Trovato, January 29, 1965, Woodstock, NY. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. * “Piero della Francesca: The Impossibility of Painting.” Art News, May 1965. * Conversation with Harold Rosenberg, in Philip Guston: Recent Paintings and Drawings. New York: Jewish Museum, 1965. * “Faith, Hope, and Impossibility.” Art News Annual 31 (1965/66). Interview with Gladys Shafran Kashdin, 1965, Kashdin Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

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* Conversation with Joseph Ablow, Spring 1966. In Philip Guston, 1975–1980: Private and Public Battles, exh. cat. Boston and Seattle: Boston University Art Gallery and University of Washington Press, 1994. * Interview with Karl Fortess, April 14, 1966. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. * “On Morton Feldman.” Talk at New York Studio School, 1967. * Conversation with Morton Feldman, New York Studio School, October 23, 1968. * “The Image.” Talk at New York Studio School, January 15, 1969. Statement, in Art Now: New York 2, no. 8 (August 1970), n.p. * “On Piero della Francesca.” Talk at New York Studio School, August 1971. * Talk at Yale Summer School of Music and Art, Norfolk, CT, August 1972. * Conversation with Louis Finkelstein, New York Studio School, October 1972. * Conversation with Clark Coolidge, Woodstock, NY, December 8, 1972. * Talk at Yale Summer School of Music and Art, Norfolk, CT, 1973. * “On the Nixon Drawings.” Talk at Yale Summer School of Music and Art, Norfolk, CT, 1973. * “Ten Drawings.” Boston University Journal 21 (Fall 1973). Talk at Cooper Union, New York, March 1974. * “On Survival.” Talk at New York Studio School, June 1, 1974. * “On Drawing.” Talk at Yale Summer School of Music and Art, Norfolk, CT, July 1974. * Conversation with Harold Rosenberg at Boston University School for the Arts, 1974, in Boston University Journal 22 (Fall 1974). “On Cave Art, Church Art, Ethnic Art and Art.” Conversation with Harold Rosenberg. Art News, December 1974, 36–41. “The Mirror.” Talk at Harvard University, 1977. * Talk at University of Minnesota, February 27, 1978, in Philip Guston, Paintings, 1969–1980, exh. cat. (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1982), and Philip Guston, The Late Works, exh. cat. (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1984). * “Art/Not Art?” panel, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, February 28, 1978. * Interview with Jan Butterfield, January 1979. Published as “A Very Anxious Fix: Philip Guston,” Images and Issues 1 (Summer 1980). * Interview with Mark Stevens, 1980. Published as “A Talk with Philip Guston,” New Republic, March 15, 1980. * Interview with Joanne Dickson, May 14, 1980, in National Arts Guide, November–December 1980, 38.

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I L LU S T R AT I O N S Frontispiece. Philip Guston with students at Boston University, 1978 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ii Philip Guston, Self-Portrait, 1944 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Philip Guston, Head I, 1965 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Philip Guston hanging his exhibition, Jewish Museum, New York, 1966 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Philip Guston, Air II, 1965 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 Musa McKim in kitchen at Woodstock, 1974 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 Philip Guston in his Woodstock studio, 1964 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Philip Guston in studio with Morton Feldman, 1965 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Philip Guston, Mark, 1967 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 Philip Guston, Untitled, 1967 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 Philip Guston, Untitled, 1968 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 Philip Guston, Untitled, 1968 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 Giorgio de Chirico, Self-Portrait, 1911 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126 Philip Guston and Leland Bell speaking at New York Studio School (n.d.). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 Philip Guston, For M, 1960. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, The Bull, 1888 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181 Philip Guston, Paw, 1968 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185 Philip Guston, Untitled [Head], 1975 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198 Philip Guston, Untitled, 1974 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199 Philip Guston drawing, Sarasota, Florida, 1967 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201 Philip Guston, Statement, 1968 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203 Philip Guston, Clock, 1969. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222 Philip Guston, Untitled [Rome, 1971]. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225 Philip Guston, The Small Panels, 1968–70 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226 Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, Una Manola: Doña Leocadia Zorrilla, ca. 1819–23 . . . . . . . . . . . 236 Philip Guston, The Scale, 1965 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260 Philip Guston, Edge, 1967 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261 Philip Guston, The Magnet, 1975. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285 Philip Guston, Untitled, 1980 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299 Philip Guston, Untitled, 1971 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309 Philip Guston, Tomb, 1978 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311

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INDEX Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Ablow, Joseph, conversation with Guston, 56–71 abstract expressionism, 295–96, 299–300; as label, 15, 56–58, 215. See also New York School abstract impressionism, 15 abstraction, 15, 16, 25, 109, 114, 241, 295, 296, 302–3, 311, 314; in Mantegna and Piero, 242, 296. See also nonfigurative or nonobjective art accident, 194–95 advertising, 114 ambiguity, 5, 192, 279. See also mystery Amram, David, 106 Angelico, Fra, 148 anti-art, 127, 167, 247 Antonioni, Michelangelo: China documentary, ix Apollinaire, Guillaume, 5 Aristotle, 258 Arnason, H. H., 72, 81n, 287 Art Institute of Chicago, 91 Artists’s Club (New York), 2–3, 4 art lover, vs. painter, 232–34 art schools, value of, 110, 127, 141 Ashton, Dore, 297, 300, 305, 309; on Guston, 1–8; Yes, But . . . , 309 Auden, W. H., 35 audience (viewers), 61, 69–70, 91, 101. See also art lover Auping, Michael, xi authenticity in art, 172, 292–93 avant-garde, 12, 163, 247, 301–3 Babel, Isaak, ix, 280, 282, 298, 308 Balzac, Honoré de, 53; Rodin’s letters to, 130; “The Unknown Masterpiece,” 304–5 bamboo stick works, 153, 255, 262 baroque art, 16 Baudelaire, Charles, 5, 118, 130, 131, 160, 248, 271

Bauer, John I. H., 18 Baziotes, William, 40 Beatles, 95 beauty, 96, 269 Beckett, Samuel, ix, xi, 8, 209; Krapp’s Last Tape, 208 Beckmann, Max, x, 266 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 3, 4 Berdyaev, Nikolai, 252 Berenson, Bernard, 138–39 Berkson, Bill, 89; conversation with Guston, 3, 32–37 Bishop, Isabel, 9 Blackwood, Michael: Philip Guston: A Life Lived, x Blavatsky, Helena P., 120 Bonnard, Pierre, 61, 71 boredom, 186, 234, 246, 266 Botticelli, Sandro, 117, 142 Boulez, Pierre, 95 Brach, Mimi (Miriam Schapiro), 98 Bragdon, Claude, 120 Brancusi, Constantin, 172 Braque, Georges, 56, 57, 115, 139, 143, 150, 304 Breton, André, 136 Brooke, Edward, 167 Brooks, James, 40, 254 Buddhism. See Zen Buddhism Butterfield, Jan: interview with Guston, 290–97 Cage, John, 3, 4, 30, 77–78, 88, 167, 170, 238, 272, 293–94 Cahill, Holger, 39 “camp,” 50–51 cartoons, 159, 222 Castagno, Andrea del, 138 cave art, x, 48, 49, 133–34, 281, 282, 307 Cézanne, Paul, x, 12, 26, 34–35, 58, 64, 95, 131, 212, 239, 241, 271, 305; at Art

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Davis, Stuart, 40 deadness, 197, 297 Degas, Edgar, 1 de Kooning, Willem, x, 14, 21, 25, 123, 124, 190, 218, 241, 247, 250, 254, 297; close friendship with Guston, 3, 217, 291; on Guston’s Marlborough show, 283, 290– 91, 301; Guston’s missing shows of, 157, 281; ink drawing of, 274; on Newman, 279; and WPA, 40, 214 Delacroix, Eugène, 1, 64, 131 demiurge, 7–8 desire, and art, 73, 186, 187, 208–9 Dickson, Joanne: interview with Guston, 304–7 didactic: Cage as, 293–94; vs. creative, 167 Diller, Burgoyne, 38, 39, 40 disgust, 113, 209 Doesburg, Theo van, 16, 297 Doré, Gustave, 109 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 1, 75; Crime and Punishment, 70 drawing, 36, 86, 107, 111, 127, 155, 192–93, 220–21, 230, 246, 253–68; charcoal in, 253, 262; contour in, 258; line in, 199– 200, 202–4; masses in, 258; of Nixon, 228–29; painting and, 253, 255, 264, 274–75 Dubuffet, Jean, 106 Duccio, 149, 308 Duchamp, Marcel, 167, 195, 238–39 Duke of Windsor (Edward VIII), 94

Cézanne, Paul (continued) Institute of Chicago, 91; and past art, 241, 302; Piero and, 139; on putting theories into practice, 235 change, 14, 44, 159–61, 273, 280, 301, 310 chaos, 110, 122, 167–68; in Piero’s work, 65 Chardin, Jean-Siméon, 26, 64, 65, 268 Chicago Democratic Convention (1968), 5, 7, 156, 223, 263 Chirico, Giorgio de, x, 6, 16, 34, 57, 125–26, 233, 302, 313; and enigma, 2, 125, 188; Self-Portrait, 125, 126, 188 civilisé édénique (poet in Eden), 4, 48–49, 132, 133, 171, 271, 272, 303 Clark, Kenneth, 118, 146–47 Cleveland School of Cartooning, 1 Close, Chuck, 159, 160 Cocteau, Jean, 128, 270 color, 32, 33, 47, 71, 73, 127, 154, 216–17, 259, 260, 278, 316; masses, 153, 217 composition, 194–95, 256, 269–70, 274, 310 compulsiveness, 306–7 Constantine, Emperor, 139 Coolidge, Clark, 1, 284; conversations with Guston, 7, 8, 184–211; on discontent, 190–91, 210; on discreteness, 193; on enigma, 186, 188–90; on Guston, ix–xi; on image, 204–5; on Melville, 206–7, 210; on opposites, 197; on words, 207, 208 Corot, Camille, 26, 73, 254 Courbet, Gustave, 34, 116 creative process, 7, 12, 23–24, 35, 53–55, 85, 91, 112, 133–33, 172, 246; chaos and, 167–68; impossibility of, 35, 58, 94, 131– 32, 134, 257, 280, 294. See also painting process criticism (art), 169, 170, 270, 301, 305 crudeness, 269, 271, 275–76, 300 crudity or rawness, 107, 240, 302, 314 cubism, x, 5, 12, 34, 56–57, 115, 125, 139, 150, 304; Chirico vs., 188; Piero and Uccello and, 296. See also specific artists

edges, in art, 37, 69, 216 Einstein, Albert, 241 Eliot, T. S., ix, 5, 301 enigma, 2, 125, 186–90, 202, 205, 207, 279 erasures, 33–34, 36, 43–44, 46, 47, 49, 192, 216, 252, 298. See also mistakes Ernst, Max, 34, 195 essence or totality, 25, 91, 103–4, 119, 120 exclusivity, in art, 247, 248, 263 Exhibition Momentum 57 (Chicago), 14

Dabrowski, Magdalena, xi Dalí, Salvador, 16 Daumier, Honoré, 116

Fabritius, Carel, 54, 244 failure, 122, 249, 279, 295 faith, in art, 53–55, 99, 103–4, 107

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fantasy, 51, 52, 187–88 Federal Art Project. See Works Progress Administration art feeling and art, 15, 58, 120, 124, 129, 133, 149, 154, 165, 167, 175, 219 Feitelson, Lorser, 38 Feld, Ross: Guston’s letter to, ix, xi, 280 Feldman, Morton, 3–4, 77, 160, 200, 202, 209, 236, 239–40, 251, 252; conversation with Guston, 6, 7, 80–108; on dandyism, 94; Guston on, 76–79, 252, 293–94; on musical learning, 92–93; on musical systems, 95; on nonstyle, 97; on survival, 231, 246 Fellini, Federico, x, 66–67 figuration, 24–27, 42, 61, 63, 73, 104–5, 107–8, 152, 154, 187, 206, 219, 220, 256, 263, 294–96. See also image “finishing” a painting, 18, 20, 22–23, 29, 35, 49, 50, 53, 135, 271–72, 296 Finkelstein, Louis, 162, 257; conversation with Guston, 162–83 Fisher, Harry Conway (“Bud”), x, 159, 222 folk art, 271 forces, 205–6, 256. See also movement/ nonmovement form, 47–48, 50, 54, 62, 121, 154, 194, 196, 259, 260, 280; dead vs. live, 197–98, 204; Mondrian and, 243 Fortress, Karl: interview with Guston, 72– 75 Fowlie, Wallace, 128 freedom and unfreedom, 10, 17, 23–24, 36, 84–85, 100, 102, 232, 251–52, 290–91, 297, 300, 301, 306–7 frescoes, 115, 145, 239. See also specific artists freshness, in art, 65, 100, 182, 271–72, 302, 313; in Piero, 41, 65–66, 116–17, 118 142. See also innocence frustration, 54, 208 Gandhi, Mohandas, waxwork of, 27 Gaugh, Harry F., 14 Gauguin, Paul, 67 Genet, Jean, 119–20 genius, 242

Giacometti, Alberto, 168, 238, 249, 266 Giotto, 67, 112–13, 115, 139, 145, 147–48, 149, 308; Annunciation, 148; Entombment of Saint Francis, 147; Last Judgment, 147, 148 Gleizes, Albert, 304 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1 Goldberg, Rube, 287 Goldowsky, Noah, 14 golem, 51, 54, 266 Goodman, Paul, 231, 246 Gorky, Arshile, 40, 214 Goya, Francisco de, x, 1, 71, 95, 114, 125, 132–33, 161, 232, 243–44, 268, 305; as abstract artist, 302; Bailando en una cuerda floja, 2; black paintings, 5, 235; Una Manola: Doña Leocadia Zorrilla, 235– 36, 236 Greco, El, x, 25, 112, 118, 132, 302; Christ as Savior, 112; Pollock and, 275; selfportrait, 245 Green, Henry, ix Greenberg, Clement, 301 Greene, Balcomb, 40 Greene, Stephen, 151, 213, 217, 258 Gris, Juan, 115 Guardi, Francesco, 116 Guggenheim, Harry, 287 Guston, Philip, ii, ix–x, 138; bare canvas in work of, 218; on being a painter, 233–34; books in works of, 155, 157, 191, 196– 97, 204, 205, 207–8, 221, 262–63, 276; children in works of, 24, 34, 73, 151, 212, 264–65, 299; education of, 1–2, 38; everyday objects in works of, 189, 193, 204, 221, 262, 276, 281 (see also specific objects); in Florida, 77, 89, 200, 201, 261; Guggenheim show (1962) of, 72, 287; heads in work of, 5, 33, 34, 62, 73, 110, 121, 154, 194, 197, 198, 199, 260, 300; in Italy, 34, 115, 137, 152, 161, 225–26, 254, 266, 299; Jewish Museum show (1966) of, 5, 70–71, 109, 122–23, 220, 260, 281; Ku Klux Klan imagery of, 2, 6, 156, 215, 223–24, 225, 254, 263, 276–77, 282, 283, 308; lightbulbs in work of, 264, 276; and literature, ix, 1, 3, 4–5, 75; in Los

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Guston, Philip (continued) Angeles, 1, 2, 3, 213, 214, 254, 282; Marlborough show (1970) of, 6–7, 221, 263, 282, 290; parodies on art by, 158– 59; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art show (1980) of, 301, 304; shoes in work of, 155, 193, 221–22, 263; signature of, in paintings, 161; small panels by, 226, 226–27, 262; smoking in work of, 158, 283; studio notes of, 308–16; telephone, horror of, 283, 312–13; in Woodstock, 3, 6, 40, 66, 74 —WORKS : Actor, 154; Air II, 50; Bad Habits, 158, 224; Bad Times, 224; Beggar’s Joys, 217; The Bell, 217; Book, 263; Book and Hand, 156–57; By the Window, 158; Caught, 157, 263–64; Cellar, 158, 224, 282; City, 157, 223; City Limits, 157; Clock (drawing), 221, 222; The Clock (painting), 6; Conspirators drawing, 225, 254, 282; Courtroom, 224; Dawn, 158; Daydreams, 159; A Day’s Work, 158, 282; Deluge, 224, 284; Discussion, 156; Downtown, 224; Drawing No. 2, Ischia, 152, 254; Drawing No. 4, 152; Edge, 261; Edge of Town, 157; The Evidence, 219, 294; Fable I, 218; Fall, 153; Farnesina Gardens, Rome, 226; Flatlands, 159, 224; For M (drawing), 154, 155; For M (painting), 297; Head I, 33; Head II, 223; If This Be Not I, 8, 151, 214; The Magnet, 285, 286; Mark, 78; Martial Memory, 150– 51, 212, 213; The Mirror, 220; Ominous Land, 226; The Painter, 286; Painter’s Table, 284; Painting, Smoking, Eating, 265–66, 277, 283; Paw, 156, 184–85, 185, 189, 281; Poor Richard, 228–29; Porch series, 151, 214; Red Painting, 152, 215; Red Picture, 159; Red Sea, 295; Remorse, 157; The Room, 217; Sanctuary, 151, 213– 14; The Scale, 260, 260; Scared Stiff, 282; Self-Portrait, 9; Sheriff, 157, 264; Smoking I and II, 269–70; Statement, 203; The Studio, 159, 225; Study for Web, 286; To B.W.T., 153, 217; To Fellini, 66, 220; Tomb, 310, 311; Tormentors, 34, 152, 215; The Two, 220; Untitled (1967), 88; Untitled

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(1968), 106; Untitled (1969), 223; Untitled (1971), 309; Untitled (Rome, 1971), 225; Untitled (1974), 199; Untitled (1980), 299; Untitled (Book), 191; Untitled (Head), 198; White Painting, 215, 255, 297 habit, 32–33, 44, 119, 195, 215, 258 Hague, Raoul, 40 Hals, Frans, 71 Hare, David, 301 Hauser, Arnold, 240 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 210 Hebrews, and language, 82, 83 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 103 Hemingway, Ernest, 23 Herriman, George, 222 Hess, Thomas, 116, 282, 290 Hesse, Herman: Magister Ludi (or The Glass Bead Game), 165 Heston, Charlton, 240 hidden vs. exposed, 7, 205–6 history, consciousness of, 170–71 Holocaust, 7, 80, 151 Houdini, Harry, 77, 202 hubris, 7–8, 307 Hunter, Sam, 14, 15; interview with Guston, 12–13; on surrealism, 16 illusion, 34, 69, 141, 248, 278 image, 18, 20, 21, 25, 26, 31, 32, 42, 47, 49– 51, 61, 85, 109–36, 134, 184–85, 192, 204– 5, 207; enigma and, 188–89 impossibility of painting, 10, 22, 35, 41, 42, 53–55, 58, 94, 100, 104–5, 310. See also under creative process impressionism, 56–57 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 251, 254 innocence, 168, 171, 257, 281; crudeness and, 271; in Piero, 65–66. See also cave art; civilisé édénique irony, 33, 35, 36 Ives, Charles, 95, 252 Janis, Sidney, 176; gallery of, 3 Judd, Donald, 125, 126, 248 judgments, 53, 284–85 Jung, Karl, 136

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Kafka, Franz, ix, 1, 2, 3, 13, 36, 51, 75, 118, 127, 211, 233, 250, 251, 280; “The Metamorphosis,” 298 Kandinsky, Wassily, 1, 35, 82, 97, 242 Kane, John, 155–56, 303 Katz, Alex, 206 Kelly, Ellsworth, 127 Kierkegaard, Søren, ix, 3, 75; Either/Or, 96, 101 Kitaj, Ronald Brooks, 265–66 Klee, Paul, 106, 302 Kline, Franz, x, 3, 14, 57, 123, 124, 217, 247, 254, 278, 291, 299 Kokoschka, Oskar, 82 Kramer, Hilton, 283 Ku Klux Klan, 164, 282. See also under Guston, Philip Kunitz, Stanley, 180 Kuniyoshi, Yasuo, 9 Laing, R. D., 210, 211 language, 82–83, 86–87. See also words Le Bail, Louis, 235n Léger, Fernand, 40, 115, 150, 168, 213, 271, 287, 292, 297, 302, 304 Leonardo da Vinci, 139, 278–79; Mona Lisa, 245 light, 71, 219 Lincoln, Abraham, 229 Lippi, Filippino, 144 Lippi, Filippo, 142 Longhi, Roberto, 118, 138 Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 81 Louis, Morris, 64 Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum (London), 27, 116 magic (miracle) of art, 62, 83, 84, 85, 99, 127, 206, 207, 278, 313 Magritte, René, 16, 51, 187–88 Malevich, Kasimir, 1 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 1, 4, 48, 132, 171, 251, 271, 303 Manet, Édouard, x, 34, 35, 58, 116, 173–76, 177, 178, 179, 305 Mann, Thomas: The Magic Mountain, 82– 83

Mantegna, Andrea, 40, 54, 145, 212, 232, 239, 242, 243 Marden, Brice, 288 marking, 86, 87, 107, 133, 152, 205, 256–57; line and, 200 Marsh, Reginald, 38 Masaccio, 118, 132, 133, 137, 144, 212; Brancacci Chapel frescoes, 112, 143, 239, 240 mask, art as, 208, 242 Matisse, Henri, 26, 57, 238, 271, 292, 302 matter (things), 127–28, 258–59. See also tangibility; weight Matter, Mercedes, 4, 76, 78, 231 Mayer, Musa (Guston’s daughter), 150, 214, 308 McKim, Musa (Guston’s wife), 66, 78, 105, 184, 286, 309, 310 Melville, Herman, 8, 209, 210; Moby-Dick, 206–7, 309 Michaux, Henri, 315 Michelangelo, 34, 86, 117, 138, 139, 174, 239, 241, 242, 304; Heston as, 240; Ingres vs., 251; Last Judgment, 239, 289 Miller, Dorothy C., 10 mimesis, 110 minimal painting, 281 Miró, Joan, 16, 302 mistakes, 270, 273–74. See also erasures modern art, 130–32, 231, 242, 302; dilemma of, 122, 131–32, 172, 302–3; freshness in, 271–72; Manet and, 173–74; Piero and, 34, 54, 139, 141, 144, 242, 296, 303; shibboleths in, 168–69, 171, 222, 248, 303 Mondrian, Piet, x, 1, 16, 24, 93–94, 95, 119, 128, 172, 217, 233; Duchamp vs., 238; fixity in, 108, 297; Kandinsky vs., 35; minimalism vs., 247; mysticism of, 120; passion in, 6, 303; and totality, 6, 91, 242; and tragic, 134, 243, 249 Monet, Claude, 12, 34, 173, 217 Moses, Anna Mary Robertson (“Grandma”), 155 Motherwell, Robert, 1, 3, 29, 124, 152, 215 movement/nonmovement, 194–98, 204. See also forces

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murals, 38–40, 151, 212 Museum of Modern Art (New York), 10 mystery, 5, 51, 116, 164–65, 175, 186, 281, 295. See also enigma Nature in Abstraction (Whitney Museum of American Art, 1958), 18 neoplasticism, 16, 119 The New American Painting (Museum of Modern Art, 1959), 20 New Deal, and art, 2, 38–40. See also Works Progress Administration art Newman, Barnett, 109, 133, 157, 279, 281, 291, 293 Newton, Isaac, 240, 241 New York School, 2–3, 56–59, 124, 152, 215, 247, 254 New York Studio School, 4, 111 New York University, Guston at, 73–74 Nixon, Richard M.: Guston’s satire of, 5, 224, 228–29; Six Crises, 228 Noland, Kenneth, 64, 125 nonfigurative or nonobjective art, 59, 62, 63, 294–96. See also abstraction Odetta, 163–64 Oldenburg, Claes, 127 Olitski, Jules, 64 Olson, Charles, 207 opposites, 85, 102, 103, 197, 206. See also paradox Orozco, José Clemente, 168 Otis Art Institute (Los Angeles), 2, 38 Ozenfant, Amédée, 304 painting process, 9, 10, 12, 20, 21–24, 26– 27, 30, 32–33, 36–37, 43–47, 53–55, 59– 64, 73, 85, 91, 152, 153, 185–86, 195–96, 219, 251–52, 258, 259, 298, 306. See also creative process; “finishing” a painting paper, painting on, 220 paradox, 20, 34, 47–48, 85. See also opposites Pascal, Blaise, 83 Pavia, P. G., 29 Pearlstein, Philip, 206 Pease, David, 151 Perugino, Pietro, 232

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Philadelphia Museum School of Art, panel at, 29–31 Picasso, Pablo, x, 56, 57, 115, 128, 242, 297, 303, 304; Duchamp vs., 238; and freedom, 290; freshness of, 168, 271, 292, 313; Guston’s study of, 40, 150, 151, 213, 254; and “other” hand, 8, 32; and past art, 34, 302; Piero and, 139, 143; on self-trust, 267, 279–80; Wallace Stevens on, 4 picture plane, 5–6, 12, 21, 34, 128–29, 141, 151, 296 Piero della Francesca, ix, 27, 40, 41, 67, 95, 115–18, 132, 133–34, 137–49, 150, 212, 213, 241, 264, 290; Clark on, 146–47; freshness of, 41, 65–66, 116–17, 118, 142; Giotto vs., 115, 149; Longhi on, 138; modern painting and, 34, 54, 139, 141, 144, 242, 296, 303; perspective in, 140– 41 —WORKS : Annunciation (Arezzo), 139, 140, 147; Arezzo frescoes (Finding of the Cross series), 115, 137, 139–40, 142– 49, 239; The Baptism of Christ, 41, 65, 66, 116, 117, 140, 142; Death of Adam, 140; The Discovery of the Three Crosses (Arezzo), 146; Dream of Constantine (Arezzo), 139, 140; The Flagellation of Christ, 35, 41, 65, 70, 116, 117–18, 140, 232, 250, 308; Hercules, 117; Resurrection, 147; St. Julian, 117; Torture of the Jew (Arezzo), 144 Pippin, Horace, 303 politics and art, 231, 246–47, 263–64, 277, 281–82, 289 Pollak, Oskar, 36 Pollock, Jackson, ix, 1, 3, 40, 160–61, 214, 275, 299 Pompeiian paintings, 232 Ponge, Francis, 6 pop art, 5 Poussin, Nicolas, 24, 240, 241, 250, 251, 302 Pring, Joan, xi Proust, Marcel, 120 psychosis, 210 Public Works of Art Project, 38

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Raphael, 27, 64, 139, 250 Ray, Man, 195 realism, in painting, 15, 29, 42, 110, 145, 311. See also figuration; tangibility reality, 6, 42, 60, 88, 103, 119, 130; Feldman on, 86–88; mimesis and, 110 Reed, Robert, 228, 260 Reinhardt, Ad, 29, 30, 152, 157, 291, 292 Rembrandt, x, 5, 50, 54, 71, 95, 114, 132, 244, 248, 268, 296; Genet on, 119–20; self-portraits of, 25–26, 28, 125, 243, 245 Renaissance painters, x; Guston’s study of, 2, 34, 40, 137, 213, 275. See also specific artists Renard, Jules, 180 Renoir, Jean, 67 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 67 Resnick, Milton, 123 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 118, 119 Rimbaud, Arthur, 5, 248 Rodin, Auguste, 69, 130, 131, 172 Rosenberg, Harold, x, 4, 29, 30, 282, 283, 288–89; and “action painting,” 300; conversations with Guston, 42–52, 132, 171, 187, 269–77, 306 Roth, Philip, 7 Rothko, Mark, 3, 57, 95, 124, 159, 215, 217, 247, 281, 291; authenticity of, 292–93; on organ player vs. storyteller, 278, 292; Seagram Building murals, 237 Rousseau, Henri, 56, 105 Rubens, Peter Paul, 86, 238, 239, 243

Schopenhauer, Arthur, 118 Section of Fine Arts murals, 39–40 self, and art, 12, 25, 34, 63, 75, 124–25, 166–67 self-trust, 267, 279–80, 285 sensate. See tangibility Shakespeare, William, 70 Signorelli, Luca, 148, 289 Sirén, Osvald, 136 Siskind, Aaron, 14 Sloman, Steven, 200 Soutine, Chaim, x, 57, 81, 82 Soyer, Isaac, 9 space, 128–29, 150–51, 296. See also picture plane spontaneity, 182, 215, 238–39, 257, 274, 275 Steiner, Jean-François: Treblinka, 80 Stella, Frank, 288 Sterrett, Cliff, 222 Stevens, Mark: interview with Guston, 298– 303 Stevens, Wallace, 4 Still, Clyfford, 291 storytelling, 89–90, 115, 157, 308; Rothko on, 278, 292 Stravinsky, Igor, 298 sublime, 109, 110, 125, 133, 291–92 Sung painters, 8, 69, 127, 136, 217, 284 superconsciousness, 102, 250 surrealism, 15–17, 131, 244–45 surrealist poets, ix, 17 survival, 231, 246 Suzuki, Daisetz, 293 Sylvester, David: interview with Guston, 5, 21–28 symbol, 108, 120

St. Louis, 90; Guston in, 3, 214 Sandler, Irving, 29 Santayana, George, 96 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 63 Schapiro, Meyer, 301, 305 Schapiro, Miriam (Mimi Brach), 98 Schapiro, Theodore, 98 Schoenberg, Arnold, 93 Schoenmaekers, Mathieu H. J., 243 School of Paris, 57

tangibility, 6, 155, 165–66, 204–5, 265, 266, 276, 294, 298, 315. See also touchability Tanguy, Yves, 16 Taylor, Joshua, 14 teaching, 73–74, 79, 98, 182 technique, 128, 178 “third hand” or “thing,” 7, 8, 43, 63, 167, 186, 306 Thomas Aquinas, 258 Thoreau, Henry David, 123

questioning, in art, 120–21, 129–30, 134, 135

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Tiepolo, 116, 139 Tintoretto, 138 Titian, 116, 138, 139, 243, 251, 300, 302; Rape of Europa, 117 Tomlin, Bradley Walker, 11, 215, 254, 299 totality. See essence or totality touchability, 104, 129, 193, 276, 294 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de, 179–80, 182; The Bull, 180, 181 Tovish, Harold, 163 Treblinka concentration camp, 7, 80 trompe l’oeil imagery, 50–51 Trotsky, Leon, 249 Trovato, Joseph S.: interview with Guston, 38–40 Tuchman, Maurice, 81–82 Tucker, Marcia, 288–89 Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens), 169–70 Twelve Americans (Museum of Modern Art, 1956), 10 Tworkov, Jack, 29, 30, 152–53

Varèse, Edgard, 92–93, 95, 99 Venetian painting, 34, 116. See also specific artists victim, artist as, 272, 306. See also “third hand” or “thing” Vietnam War, 5, 7 Wagner, Richard, 93 Warhol, Andy, 302 Watergate, 223–24 waxworks, 27, 141, 280, 297 Webern, Anton: Six Pieces for Orchestra, 93 weight, 119, 241. See also tangibility Williams, William Carlos, 6 Wills, Gary, 229 Wilson, Woodrow, 229 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 35, 162 Wolpe, Stefan, 4 words, 207, 208 Works Progress Administration (WPA) art, 2, 38–40, 151, 212, 299 Wyeth, Andrew, 296

Uccello, Paolo, 15–16, 34, 40, 137, 138, 150, 213, 232, 264, 290, 296; Battle of San Romano, 146; Piero vs., 140 Unamuno, Miguel de, 8 unconscious, 300 underground, artist going, 236–38 University of Iowa, Guston at, 3, 40, 213

Yale Art School, 82 Yale Summer School of Music and Art, 150; talks at, 150–61, 212–27, 253–68 Yale University Museum (Art Gallery), 82 Young, Murat Bernard (“Chic”), 222 Yuchenko (WPA supervisor), 38

Valéry, Paul, 1, 42, 52, 250 Van Dyck, Anthony, 25, 28 Van Gogh, Theo, 67, 76, 160, 301 Van Gogh, Vincent, 67, 76, 160

Zen Buddhism, 127, 237, 261, 285, 293, 297 Zorach, William, 9 Zorrilla, Doña Leocadia, 235, 236 Zubarán, Francisco de, 71

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