Paula Rego and Philip Guston - The Inner Child and the Lurking Adult

The first glance makes you grin. Two animals, upright, playing musical instruments: a cat blowing on a flute, a guinea pig plucking at a fiddle. But then you notice the cat’s left foot, bloodied and catching the right heel of the guinea pig. The detail makes you wince, and - as anyone who has ever taken home the classroom pet for the holidays knows - the soft, sad eyes of a guinea pig always conjure up a sense of intense vulnerability. The motif of Paul Rego’s painting The Musicians - Cat and Guinea Pig should be one that makes you chuckle. But instead, after the double-take, you are left feeling deeply uneasy.

Paula Rego, The Musicians - Cat and Guinea Pig (1981)

This early painting, and others in the Letting Loose exhibition at the Victoria Miro Gallery, seem to my mind, to be a working out of next steps. Thinking forward to two decades later and Rego’s response to a photograph that she had seen of the war in Iraq, I couldn’t help but be reminded of her painting War. Here the eye is drawn immediately to the bloodied mouths of a family of hares. And at first, you have real difficulty moving beyond that particular detail. Unlike with The Musicians, there is no lag in reaction time, and no opportunity to smile. You are forced to start with the most visceral element, and you work your way into the montage later. That directness seems somehow more correct for the subject. 

Paula Rego, War (2003)

This is a small and intriguing exhibition that captures Rego’s wonderfully paradoxical quality of being both elementary and puzzling. And The Musicians, with its look and feel of an illustration from a children’s book, wrenched me out of the apathy that I had been feeling for the latest blockbuster show at Tate Modern, a retrospective of the Canadian-American artist Philip Guston. 

Why the apathy? Glancing at the ubiquitous Tate Modern poster of a giant cartoon hand reaching down from a cloud to draw a straight black line, and searching for his most famous works on the internet - controversial paintings of the Ku Klux Klan that appeared childlike, unsophisticated and flat - had left me cold and unenthusiastic. Yet - I figured - if Rego’s rudimentary and deceptively scrappy paintings could ignite a positive aesthetic response, then perhaps I ought to give Guston a go. Indeed, ‘Remember Rothko!’ is an exhibition mantra of mine. Until I’d seen him in the flesh, I’d been completely dismissive of his magnificent body of work. Avoidance and reticence had done me no favours back then.   

Reticence hasn’t been mine alone though. This exhibition has taken a long time to arrive. The Tate, along with another three major museums, had temporarily suspended it, fearing that the large-scale KKK paintings were in danger of upsetting Black Lives Matter sensitivities. That ridiculous decision - if you can’t trust a paying gallery-goer with irony, you can’t really trust them with art - had eventually been overturned.   

I entered the first room, donned my headphones and sought out the free-floating rhythms of Morton Feldman’s For Philip Guston. If you’ve never viewed art whilst listening to an appropriate soundtrack, I strongly recommend it. Indeed, if Rothko had taught me a lesson on dismissiveness, Ferris Bueller has taught us all another one on music and art galleries. A trio of surrealist paintings caught my eye - awkward nudes, incongruous objects, and a towel that resembled a long piece of streaky bacon - but none of them managed to hold my attention, so I quickly moved on.

 

Philip Guston, If This Be Not I (1945)

All was to change in the next space. If This Be Not I demanded attention. The clock on a tower reads 2am, and a handful of children stare back at you, fronting a nightmarish and tangled cityscape. At least, you think they are children, as some of their faces are half-disguised by Venetian plague masks and paper bags for hats. The narrative is impenetrable and yet - this is, for me, the trick with the best surrealist painting - oddly explicit. In the bottom left hand corner, a child wearing a pair of striped pyjamas lies prone, clutching a trumpet. To the right, another child, with cropped hair and his back towards us, climbs into the same garment. This clothing and the date of the painting - 1945 - foregrounds the death camps. The muted melancholy tones - greys, seasick greens, whites stained with yellow - offer up only hopelessness. It’s a remarkable piece of work and it turned all of my preconceptions about Guston around. And as I was to learn, this was just one facet of an artist who spanned the whole gamut of twentieth-century styles and movements.      

Of that versatility, there’s a lovely moment in the exhibition where you get to see a transition of artistic style taking place before your eyes. Drawing No. 2 (Ischia) is neither entirely figurative or completely abstract.  

Philip Guston, detail from Drawing No. 2 (Ischia) (1949)

It’s as if Guston is discreetly working out in ink and on cheap paper, where he’s heading. It causes you to move back a room and trace the journey again. And it’s there that you notice a lovely little detail in a striking 1944 Self-portrait. The artist’s elongated face, feminised by a tint of green eye-shadow and the glint of an earring, jumps right out at you. Which makes it very easy to miss the spectral, transparent hand that Guston his raising towards his cheek. Is this an attempt to erase the figurative? Either way, keep a close eye on that hand, as it will rematerialise later.   

Philip Guston, Self-portrait (1944)

Onwards, and a second look at the island of Ischia, which like the hand also seems to be dissolving towards incompletion. And then the aesthetic leap as we enter Guston’s abstract expressionism period. Beggar’s Joys is my pick here, not only because it is a gorgeous centripetal eruption of cadmium red, but it is also - as we shall see - a huge hint towards the palette that will dominate the rest of Guston’s artistic output.

Philip Guston, Beggar's Joys (1955)

By now my ears were aching and I needed to remove the headphones. Yet a few minutes later I was startled to find Feldman’s soundtrack still audible. I checked my headphones and phone and they were switched off. Had all those thoughts of the 'spectral' summoned up some strange musical presence? Thankfully no. In the top corner of this room a small speaker was piping out the same piece that I’d just been listening to. And thus, already a Guston convert, I entered the room full of his paintings of hooded KKK figures with a wide and inappropriate smile on my face.  

Like the jolt that I felt on looking at Rego’s Musicians, the contrast between Guston’s abstract expressionism paintings and these images of hatred and bigotry rendered with broad cartoon brushstrokes is a startling one. My dismissal of their online presence - ‘childlike, unsophisticated, and flat’ - was still valid. But in the context of what I’d seen up until that point in the exhibition, those adjectives suddenly felt like pluses. My reaction was a visceral one. Everywhere you looked there appeared hoods.  I chose to deal with a painting that featured just one of them (although I would later realise that I was neglecting the ‘self portrait’ within the ‘self portrait’). 

Philip Guston, The Studio (1969)

In this painting - and it is clearly meant to be Guston under the sheet - you start to pick out objects that the artist will use over and over again. That lightbulb, with its little nipple on the end, had appeared in one of the surrealist paintings that I had given short shrift too earlier in the exhibition. And the clock. As in If This Be Not I it also reads 2 o’clock. Guston seems to be teasing out meaning for us through repetition. Instructing us, perhaps, that we should be joining up the fully realised racial hatred of the Holocaust with the contemporary racial horrors of American white supremacism. And here’s that hand again, rematerializing from out of the decade long ether, this time clutching a cigarette between two fingers.  

Objects and repetition. As if to make that point explicit, one wall of this gallery is covered by a set of thirty-three tiles, each containing a crudely painted object, the lightbulb - switched off rather than on -amongst them. It seems to serve up a visual alphabet, a collection of the artist's props that he will use over and over again.

 

Guston's glossary

Then to City Limits. Three Klansmen occupying a comedy car with oversized cartoon wheels. Guston is a passenger here too. We know this as there is the hand again, clutching the same cigarette between the same fingers. Perhaps this was the jump that the curators and art-gallery power-brokers were nervous of. It is not just that Guston’s work depicts the KKK, it is him - the artist - donning the white hood. But it’s just that kind of unsettling detail that we need to address and accept. The culpability and the universal potential in us all for these crimes and mindsets. 

 

Philip Guston, City Limits (1969)

This is also the painting that hammers home to me the detail about Guston’s preferred palette. I think back to Beggar’s Joys, and it is as if those centripetal force have been reversed, and the images are now coming out of that abstract maelstrom and manifesting into physical evil. 

Sitting down for a breather, you feel even more angry that this exhibition was delayed. At the height of protest is when these paintings would have been most effective. Yes, they are offensive. But that’s part of the point. They are ugly. Also part of the point. But where I think they are most successful, is in their reduction of hatred and racism and bigotry to a two-dimensional banality. No intelligent person could see them as a vindication or a celebration of the Klan. 

If these paintings make you angry and uncomfortable, two works in the final room summon up a different reaction. Whilst these two works still leave you troubled, they are also incredibly moving. These elegiac paintings are both a rebuke to my dismissiveness of Guston’s ‘crude’ draughtsmanship, and a testament to just how powerful his work can be. Painted towards the end of his life, Guston’s Couple in Bed is an astonishing painting of the artist clutching both his wife and his paint brushes. It is no longer two o’clock in the morning. The artist’s watch is absent of hands. Time, it seems, is no longer relevant. Death is what waits.

 

Philip Guston, Couple in Bed (1977)

 

Guston’s Sleeping might be even more heartbreaking in its depiction of vulnerability. This time the artist is alone. The curl of his ageing and hefty earlobe, the sparse frizz of bed-hair, and that tight flump of an eyebrow and eyelid, conjure up a sad and elegiac pathos. I think I might have lingered for around ten minutes, just staring at those four fingers resting upon the blanket. 

 

Philip Guston, Sleeping (1977)

 

These two final paintings really stayed with me. It’s not just the singular skill and absolute artistry that have gone into their execution, but it is also that the subject - the tail-end of old age and therefore life - is a surprisingly rare one. Whilst the Great Masters have definitely painted old age, they have rarely shown it wasting away beneath the bedsheets. Yes, Toulouse-Lautrec is responsible for Le Lit, but that is an image of lazy and contented middle-age. Far more typical is Edvard Munch’s The Sick Child, art favouring the major chord of the sentimental and pitiful. 

What I’ve adored about both of these exhibitions is the contrast between a full retrospective and a glance into a particular moment of an artist’s development. Returning to the Rego again, and the other busier and more muddled paintings in the Victoria Miro exhibition, you get a sense of an artist trying out new ideas, ones that she will bring in and out of her work in the years to come.  

Indeed, rather than thinking about the paintings in this exhibition as a coherent whole, my takeaway from her strange, jumbled grotesques - people, animals, vegetables, fruit, monsters - is of the act of collating, a ‘getting down’ of as many nightmares from her childhood as possible. As Rego’s work progresses into the late 80s and 90s, and on into this century, the focus, control and impact of her oeuvre will grow. For example, compare The Vivian Girls in Tunisia with the already discussed War.

 

Paula Rego, The Vivian Girls in Tunisia (1984)

Looking at this painting, I’m taken back to the sets of transfers that I craved as a child. You would single out one, and - using the hard end of a pencil or pen - gently rub and apply it onto an empty landscape. This shot of nostalgia is further enhanced by the anthropomorphised strawberry in the bottom left of the painting, which brought to mind The Munch Bunch and the curiously unalliterative ‘Penelope Strawberry’. Mining your childhood can be both a fun and a dark business. In fact, turning my attention to my ten year old’s drawings and sketches, he seems to have the same approach as Rego does in these particular works: laying down as many strange characters as possible and covering the whole of a single sheet of paper. I’ll be keeping an eye on them and seeing how they develop in the years ahead.     

 

Paula Rego, Untitled (1983) 

I loved Paula Rego’s art the very first time that I saw it. It tapped into all of the things that I enjoyed as a young boy - before adolescence came along and switched things off for a while. Brimming with magic and darkness and fairy-tale grotesque, it summoned up the dark wonders of the imagination. As you age, you come back and realise that those darker subtexts are the dominating point. There are some horrific things going on in the world and eventually you’ll have to pay attention. And, indeed, as a newly minted Guston convert, I wonder what my ten-year old reaction would have been to a painting like If This Be Not I. Whatever the case, I certainly know what my fifty-two year old reaction is to a painting like Sleeping.

No matter, I’ve once again been taught a salutary lesson. There is much more to an artist’s work than a ubiquitous poster on the London Underground, or a solitary painting that is screen-shotted into a controversial puff-piece. Then again, to be surprised sometimes and to have those lazy preconceptions overturned can be both a pleasure and a privilege. 

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Postscript:

I think I’ve worked out exactly what drew me towards Guston’s Beggar’s Joys. It reminded me of a dessert that I enjoyed. This isn’t a first. About a decade ago, I wondered if an ice cream called ‘The Lucian’ that I had wolfed down at the Wolsely restaurant in Mayfair had been inspired by the palette of Lucian Freud who would dine there every evening. The waiter thought I was on to something. 

 

Humble Chicken's strawberry cheesecake 

This time, though, Guston’s abstract expressionist painting put me in mind of a strawberry cheesecake that I’d enjoyed at Soho’s Humble Chicken. What do you think?