Philip Guston: Mind and Matter
McKee Gallery, New York
November 11 - December 23, 2003
From Plato to Descartes to the present time philosophy's inquiry into the duality of mind and matter was the basis for explaining human individual and social existence. The events of the mental world were absolute, pure and superior; the events of the physical world, received through the senses and nourished by our appetites, were impure, clumsy, chaotic. Although both mind and matter were parts of the human composition, mind was considered the higher order in life.
At the time Philip Guston broke through the prescriptions against figuration, mind was considered the higher order in art as well. Abstract Expressionism had a spiritual momentum and then Color Field dogma narrowed the artist's realm of possibilities. But Philip Guston had much more to say. He opened the door, believing that the whole truth of human existence, the world of the mind and the world of the senses, was the proper subject of art, and it alone could satisfy him as a human being and as an artist. He was comfortable in the perfect realm of the intellect, but he was a man in time and space as well, where the everyday life of painting, sleeping, eating, politics, his wife Musa, were essential.
The inspiration for this show is a painting called Pyramid and and Shoe 1976, currently on exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in which Philip Guston accepts the duality of mind and matter and redresses the imbalance. The pyramid is the symbol of absolute pure thought and the clumsy shoe stands beside it as an everyday imperfect object. They are on equal footing. From 1968 until his death in 1980, Philip Guston continued to paint forms derived from the intellect and forms derived from the material world. Unlike some critical assertions, he never abandoned either source as a fertile terrain for painting.
The first section of this exhibition is devoted to Matter: the physical world. Paintings such as Painter's Head 1975, Anxiety 1975, Eating 1977, Alfie in Small Town 1979, and drawings Untitled (pasta) 1969, Objects on Table 1976.
The second section is Mind: forms of the intellect. Balance 1979, To J.S. 1977 (the Surrealist poet, Jules Supervielle), Martyr 1978, Aegean 1978.
The third room includes work with related forms. Wall Forms and Blue Sea 1978 is the more mental version and Rock 1978 the more material one; Untitled 1968 and Untitled 1980, relate in the same way.
Philip Guston's figuration, now widely admired as some of the greatest work of 20th Century American art, was revolutionary in the 1970's. Guston wondered why people didn't understand the paintings, since, after all, they are about us.
A retrospective exhibition is currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, until January 4, 2004. It was organized by the Museum of Modern Art at Fort Worth, and will continue on to the Royal Academy, London, opening January 20, 2004.
MCKEE GALLERY
745 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10151
