Author Description

The year 1971 marks a critical junction in Philip Guston's artistic career, telling a story of renewal, invention, and outrageous satire through two major series, the Roma paintings and the Nixon drawings, as well as a select group of larger paintings. Speaking about his controversial transition, when Guston left behind the elegant abstractions that had earned him critical acclaim to explore strange new territory, he explained to a group of students how crucial doubt and self-questioning were to an artist's creative process, saying 'It's taken me many years, but I've come to the conclusion that the only 'technique' one can really learn is the capacity to be able to change.' The works in this exhibition not only define a watershed moment for Guston, but also the artistic and political climate of the United States in 1971. When Philip Guston first exhibited his new figurative work at the Marlborough Gallery in October 1970, the critical response was resoundingly negative. 'Clumsy.' 'Embarrassing.' 'Simple-minded.' 'An exercise in radical chic.' The New York Times headline referred to the artist as 'A mandarin pretending to be a stumble-bum.' The paintings in the Marlborough show were created in 1968-1970, a time of despair and upheaval in the US, following the assassination of the Kennedys, of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Our leaders were being murdered, our inner cities were rife with looting and rioting, war protesters filled our streets. The country was divided, and the death toll was mounting in Vietnam. But in the art world, disaffection ruled the day. In an era of cool minimalism and Pop Art ironies, the passions of the real world were to have no place in art, the critics had decreed. Guston disagreed, famously saying: 'I got sick and tired of all that purity--I wanted to tell stories!' And what stories he told, with his Klansmen, ominous but somehow familiar, perhaps even ourselves under those hoods, as suggested in 'Untitled' (1971), which features a