Here beginneth the Life of St. Philip à Guston.
It was verily in the year of our Lord 1913 that our holy man was born, in the city of Montreal, and unto him was given the name of Philippe Goldstein. And his poor family did go out from the North, and came into the City of Angels. . . .
Whereupon it came to pass that he did find a new name, and thenceforward was he called Philip Guston, and did become an acolyte in the Temple of Abstraction, and rose even unto its high priesthood. . . .
And coming into his 53rd year, St. Philip was sore troubled. And lo, was it revealed unto him that Abstraction was but a crooked way, and that there was a better Path, and he did call it Figuration, and for proclaiming it was he mocked and sore assailed. . . .
But a chosen Few did lend him ear, and now that is he gone on High, the people of all lands do rejoice in his teachings, and do venerate his images. Amen.
This is the official version of the life and times of the great American artist Philip Guston -- Canada really can't claim someone who left when he was 6 -- who had a strong career as an abstract painter, converted to figure painting in the late sixties, and became the patron saint of the New Figuration after his death in 1980.
But, as usual, the reality of history is more complex and messy than the simple, streamlined narratives we might prefer. A superb new survey of Guston's mature work opened Thursday at the National Gallery in Ottawa, and makes it clear that we need a much more subtle story to come to grips with what his deeply moving, gorgeous-looking art is all about.
For starters, the Great-Abstractionist-Turned-Figure-Painter story soon falls apart for lack of evidence of that initial abstract greatness.
It's heresy to say it, but I simply don't think most of Guston's Abstract Expressionism of the fifties is all that good. Fractured dabs of paint make for an impressive flurry across his canvases, but rarely cohere into pungent works of art. Guston doesn't achieve the tight all-over-ism of his boyhood friend Jackson Pollock. On the other hand, he can't control the more traditional blob-on-ground compositions of a Borduas or Adolf Gottlieb, either.
Guston's abstraction only really started to come together when it was already leaving pure Greenbergian formalism behind, several years before his official "break" with abstraction in 1968. It barely takes any imagination to see the impressive Group II, from 1964, as six squidgy faces on a grey background.
For some reason I've yet to fathom, Guston needed the framework of figuration to give his tremendous skills with paint real focus. But I'm not sure the results he got after his conversion actually speak that differently from the best work of his AbEx colleagues.
I don't want to dismiss the impact of the content in Guston's figurative paintings, but it's often upstaged by abstract, formal virtues. The "breakthrough" paintings of 1968, like Shoe and Paw, are gorgeous surfaces and right-on compositions as much as they're importantly meaningful pictures of stuff. Two exquisite larger paintings from 1978, called Platform and On Edge, have eloquently brushed black backgrounds that are as heart-rendingly beautiful, and powerful, as anything Rothko ever did. (The figuration in On Edge is so understated anyway that it might as well count as an abstract picture.)
It seems almost an accident that Guston could achieve his pictorial effects more successfully with figuration than with abstraction. But the explanation may lie in a pile of works by Guston that are mentioned in the catalogue, but are not among the 45 signature paintings chosen for this touring exhibition. (Originating in Bonn, Germany, it makes its only North American stop in Ottawa.)
Throughout the Great Depression and the war years, and long before he ever came to pure abstraction, the precocious Guston had rich experience as a figurative painter, with major mural commissions all across the United States. Unlike Pollock, Guston had already found himself as an artist before AbEx ever hit. Maybe we need to read his later figuration as a comfortable coming home after a troubled time away, rather than as a trip into the great unknown.
But even without knowing about Guston's past, a bit of knowledge of the late sixties helps bring Guston's moment of holy revelation thumping back to earth.
Abstraction wasn't the all-powerful force it's sometimes seen as, so breaking with it doesn't have to be read as an act of transcendent heroism. The Mexican art that had inspired the young Guston was one figurative stream that never died. (The National Gallery is also hosting a major survey of Mexican Modernism right now -- much amended since its flawed premiere in Montreal -- and the two shows have some interesting points of contact.)
European figuration, descended from Picasso and his ilk, was still a more active tradition than we imagine, even in the sixties. And Pop Art, especially, had been making strong headway since the start of the decade. In 1962 already, Guston the abstractionist had felt so threatened when his prestigious dealer began to show some Pop that he quit the gallery.
Guston's figurative paintings are not full-bore Pop by any means, but he comes close enough to some strands in Pop that he can never have been quite the martyred voice-in-the-wilderness he's usually made out to be. He was cast out from the formalist inner sanctum, yes, but he found another dealer, and continued to receive truckloads of awards, honours and job offers.
In fact, when his former colleagues in abstraction accused Guston of cowardly apostasy from the difficult way of the avant- garde, they may have had a point. For all its success among insiders, abstraction continued to be -- shockingly still is -- the whipping-boy for anti-art reactionaries. It's not hard to see how Guston's turn to figuration could have been read as a conservative return to the safe haven of the European mainstream.
If history has chosen to cast Guston as a forward-looking innovator, it's only because later Neo- Expressionists chose to adopt him as their forerunner. But let's not forget that eighties figuration itself often had a reactionary note to it. Neo-Ex may come further along on art history's evolutionary line than AbEx, but that doesn't mean it was an obvious leap forward; it may have been a throwback, with Guston as the missing link to some pretty hoary ancestors.
I would even argue that Guston's figurative work was so deeply -- and gloriously -- old-fashioned that it can't do duty as a true predecessor for most of the image- filled art that's been thriving for the last 20 years.
Much recent figuration, in painting but also in various new media, is committed to some form of direct contact with the contemporary world. The imagery in Guston's paintings, on the other hand, comes out of the Depression-era comics of his youth, not out of the Space Race and Vietnam-era when they were painted. If anything, Guston seeks the timeless rather than the timely; Since the old always reads as archetypal, the very past-ness of his symbols helps them speak about the Human Condition in a broadly, even painfully romantic sense. He dredges images out of the past in the hope that that will give them added totemic force, but the risk is always that the potent will simply become portentous.
Compare Guston's work to the true forerunners of today's politically engaged figuration, such as Nancy Spero or her husband Leon Golub -- early, anti-abstract company for this supposedly lone voice -- and his disengagement becomes obvious. Guston's theatre of emaciated limbs, nail- soled boots and cigar-smoking backroom boys is closer to the hobo worlds of Carl Sandburg and Pete Seeger -- and, crucially, of Beckett -- than to the rebellion of Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Like Goya and Cézanne and a very few other artistic loners, Guston's achievement depended on his stepping right out of the historical stream of things, and coming up with a visual language almost all his own. He looked long and hard at the past -- his own, and that of his medium -- and magically brought it forward to haunt the present. But I don't think he foresaw the future much at all.
No messiah, he. Philip Guston: Paintings of Four Decades is at the National Gallery of Canada, 380 Sussex Dr., Ottawa, until July 30. Call 613-990- 1985 or go to the Web site at http://national.gallery.ca