Philip Guston, Tate Modern review — violent, unsettling and thrilling from start to finish

The tremendous Philip Guston retrospective just arrived at Tate Modern is perfect pitch: gripping in painterly expression and energy, awash with colour and drama, revelatory at every turn, superbly calibrated in balancing art historical narrative, the painter’s personal journey and social context.

It’s the more pleasing as the show began life, in Houston, Boston and Washington DC, as the decade’s most controversial exhibition. Postponed from 2020 for fear that Guston’s Ku Klux Klan imagery was too incendiary following the murder of George Floyd, it opened in the US last year with handouts advising on “emotional preparedness” (“you have every right to feel your feelings”).

Nothing like that here, thank goodness, although the show is violent and unsettling from start to finish. It could not be otherwise, for Guston combined a conviction of painting’s capacity for tragic exaltation with a sense of absurdity and an enduring fascination for the comic strips which enchanted him as a child, growing up in a Jewish immigrant family in 1920s Los Angeles. The results are some of the most original, potent images to appear in postwar America. 

Three cartoonish Klansmen, squeezed into a Ford Model T, trundle across a blood-red urban wasteland in “City Limits” (1969). A broad-bean head, tucked in bed with a pile of chips, puffs on a cigarette beneath a lightbulb and a dangling yellow cord in “Painting, Smoking, Eating” (1973). That cord, sometimes a rope or knot, recurs; it was a memory of the artist’s first trauma — his father died by suicide and Guston, aged 10, found his body hanging in the porch. 

Crudely painted disembodied legs, some fleshy and drooping, others stony, ending in twisted soles or studded horseshoes, overlap to form a sinister mound in “Monument” (1976). Guston’s father was a blacksmith; other allusions are to the death of a beloved brother, his legs crushed by a car; Holocaust photographs of piled-up limbs; and the tumultuous bodies in Michelangelo’s “The Conversion of Saul”.

By the time he was constructing these grandiloquent, crazy paintings, Guston, in his sixties, believed that “our whole lives (since I can remember) are made up of the most extreme cruelties of holocausts” and that “the only reason to be an artist is . . . to bear witness to this.” The show unfolds very movingly how he came to that position, how it determined his changing approach to image-making.

Attracted early to Old Master gravitas, at 17 he painted “Mother and Child” (1930), a chunky Madonna grappling with a voracious, uncontrollable baby, crystalline against an eerie architectural backdrop. The follow up was the impressive tondo “Bombardment” (1937), a young American’s response to Guernica: mother and infant tumbling in a world turned upside down by war, freeze-framed like a cartoon as trees, buildings, people are whipped into the whirling circular form.

Through the 1930s-40s, living in New York and Iowa, Guston was a politically committed painter of downbeat, elegantly elongated figures and forays into metaphysical painting inspired by de Chirico, his favourite modern artist.

In the diaphanous tableau “If This Be Not I” (1945), slum children playing hide and seek, decked out as masked commedia dell’arte figures, Pierrot in white paper top hat, Harlequin slumped over a balustrade — slip into or emerge from a jumble of debris, including Guston’s signature props of lightbulb and rope. Set on a stage before a line of spires and chimneys denoting a Midwestern town, this beautiful, melancholy, spatially complex piece took Guston a year, and can be seen as his farewell to traditional representational painting.

For the next two decades, Guston himself played hide and seek with the figure. In “The Porch II” (1947) the street children are musicians and acrobats, abbreviated into geometric forms, one hanging from a rope. In the cadmium red “The Tormentors” (1947-48) and “Review” (1948-1949) the figures recede, lurking within blocky abstract patterning. They disappear altogether in “Beggars’ Joys” (1954-55), one of Guston’s most lyrical pieces, introducing the colour palette that would dominate from now on: strawberry reds, sugar pinks, warm whites, pearly grey, here pulled in feathery undulating strokes, wet on wet, into finely woven near-sculpted surfaces.

But, as their titles suggest, already in “Fable” (1956-57) and “The Return” (1956-58) the figures come back, shapes of heads, torsos, legs jostling within knotted clusters of pigment. “Passage” (1957-58) is densely gestural, yet its spectral figments are somehow airy. It was a highlight of Guston’s 1962 Guggenheim Museum retrospective — the moment he was hailed as a major Abstract Expressionist. The misreading explains the shock among his friends when soon after he became a defiant creator of outrageous, outlandish figures.

“The 1960s came along, I was feeling split . . . the war, what was happening in America, the brutality of the world. What kind of a man am I . . . going into a frustrated fury about everything — and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue,” he said. “I got sick and tired of all that Purity! I want to tell stories.” 

As this exhibition shows, he always had. In 1969-70 he magnified stubby, slapstick characters, the “Hoods”, to gigantic scale: Klansmen as white hoods with slits for eyes, running round town with big pink pointing fingers (“Dawn”), surging among high rises (“Untitled, Two Hoods”), looming in the classroom (“Blackboard”). Evil is everywhere, even within, suggests “The Studio” (1969): a Hood as Guston’s alter ego paints a self-portrait, holding a cigarette whose grey smoke writhes on a seductive rose ground dotted with hanging bulb and clock — light and time.

In “Flatlands” (1970), bloodstained Hoods, books, clock faces, dismembered feet, loose soles, are strewn across a deluge painting. “It’s what left,” Guston said. In the 1970s, his objects and body parts took on increasing expressionist monumentality: a three-metre canvas featuring a lone “Kettle” (1978), whistling in the dark; a one-eyed Cyclops, cowering before spiders, in “Web” (1975). Yet art historical and spiritual references are starker than ever in this late cartoon world, as are the veins of hope.

The wrinkled hand jutting from a cloud and holding a charcoal stick between two fingers in “The Line” (1978) alludes to Michelangelo’s God — the artist as creator, making something from nothing.

“Sleeping” (1977) is a hood-shaped self-portrait — heavy head, wrinkled brow, wisps of grey hair — curled up in bed, still wearing his clunky shoes: a massive pyramid composed of layers of tightly spiralling blankets. There’s a recollection, in the folding fabric and dramatic foreshortening, of the shroud-wrapped body in Andrea Mantegna’s “Lamentation of Christ”; from it Guston wrought this image of comfort yet terror, dreaming and nightmares. Quoting Rilke, he once told a psychiatrist, “I’m afraid if my devils are to leave me, my angels will take flight as well”. They’re both here, rampant and magnificent in a thrilling show.

October 5-February 25, tate.org.uk