Fair-weather National Gallery of Art visitors who climb the spiral staircase to the East Building’s Tower Gallery expecting to revisit the Henri Matisse cutouts that resided there for years are in for a shock. But it’s not an unpleasant one.
The cutouts — assemblages of hand-cut colored paper made in the final 15 years of the French painter’s long career — have been relocated to the East Building’s concourse level to make way for a series of exhibitions focusing on works made after 1970.
The subject of the first of these is Philip Guston, a mutable master who worked in several painterly idioms during the course of a half-century, evolving from Works Progress Administration mural art to abstract expressionism to a stunning late-1960s appropriation of the visual vocabulary of underground cartoonist R. Crumb.
The seven paintings and nine works on paper that now occupy the Tower Gallery are culled from throughout Guston’s oeuvre, emphasizing the bold fits of reinvention that occasionally put him at odds even with his admirers.
Because the Matisse cutouts were vulnerable to damage by light, the Tower Gallery’s skylight had to be blocked while the cutouts were exhibited there. The opening of the Guston exhibit marks the return of beautiful, natural light to the tower. The combination of Guston’s visceral, vibrant paintings — big paintings, packed snugly together in the compact room — and the flood of sunshine imbues the Tower Gallery with an almost overpowering sensual quality.
But what might seem an abrasive setting for some artists is perfect for Guston, whose work in all its phases always bled and screamed with raw emotion. Born in Montreal in 1913, Guston grew up in Los Angeles, where as a young painter he was equally influenced by the Mexican revolutionary Diego Rivera and the Italian surrealist Giorgio de Chirico. The son of Jewish parents who had fled persecution in Russia, Guston was keenly aware as a young man of the activities of the Ku Klux Klan.
He also confronted more immediate and personal horrors: When his father hanged himself, it was Guston, still a young boy, who discovered the body. The sinister visage of the Klansman’s hood emerged as a motif in his work while he was still a teenager. He’d return to it four decades later, when race relations (along with the Vietnam War) were the key topic of national debate.
In between, he followed his friend Jackson Pollack east to New York City, where he spent 20 years working his way through “pure” abstraction to stylized, personal figuration, and finally to the cartoonish style that characterized the decade preceding his death in 1980. Response to his final phase was initially hostile: When he opened a 1970 gallery show that included many iterations of the hooded Klansman image, The New York Times condemned him as “a Mandarin pretending to be a stumblebum.”
Guston, predictably, had his own take on his pursuit of his muse.
“I felt like an explorer who almost got to the top of Mount Everest, but somehow stopped just short,” he says in the short documentary film that accompanies the exhibit. “I remembered, ‘Maybe I forgot some gear.’ But in going down to recover this equipment, I took some side paths that looked exciting [and] full of possibility.”
Posterity has validated Guston’s detours, particularly in the confessional courage of his latest pieces. The formal simplicity of the paintings of this era — 1976’s “Rug,” for example, or 1978’s “Ladder,” made shortly after his wife suffered a stroke — belie their emotional sophistication.
No, not sophistication: Truth.
If you go
“In the Tower: Philip Guston”
Where: National Gallery of Art, Fourth Street and Constitution Avenue
When: Through Sept. 13
Info: Free; 202-737-4215, nga.gov
