I Paint What I Want to See (1)
An Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of I Paint What I Want to See by Philip Guston.
I had forgotten how much I love this book. I first picked it up in the thick of my irritation about the Guston debacle. My prominent impression at the time was that Guston, were he alive to witness what was done to his work circa 2021, would have personally broken Matthew Teitelbaum’s jaw. Now it’s easier to enjoy for its own sake, as Guston describes his enormous passion for and profound insight into the art of painting. In a hundred years, we’ll still be admiring Guston. Teitelbaum and Kaywin Feldman will be forgotten except for their names being attached to the most egregious episode of cowardice and bad judgment in the museum world in the first quarter of the 21st century. That despite all the competition.
Rather than succumb to the temptation to list the book’s many notable passages, I want to talk about the Generous Law. Page 24, from “Piero della Francesca: The Impossibility of Painting,” regarding Piero’s Flagellation:
The picture is sliced almost in half, yet both parts act on each other, repel and attract, absorb and enlarge, one another. At times, there seems to be no structure at all. No direction. We can move spatially everywhere, as in life.
Possibly it is not a “picture” we see, but the presence of a necessary and generous law.
Again on page 57:
When I was first, many years ago, under the spell of this painting, I was very influenced by it and naturally worked with many verticals and horizontals. But no matter how I paint, I seem to be superficially less influenced by it but actually more influenced by it, if you know what I mean. That is, I think probably I’ll go to my grave puzzling about this generous law. I think, more than anything else, I want to acquire in myself, to evolve into, a space where I’ll really know something about the generous law which must exist.
You may read the above and wonder if I’ve elided some explanatory context, but no. “Generous law” hangs there like a bare tree limb and dares you to climb it. Guston was evidently at the limit of his ability to describe certain possibilities of painting.
One thinks of the law that God gave to the Jews. A couple of weeks ago, Jews read the Torah portion that contains the story of the Golden Calf. Moses is taking dictation from God, who points out that in his absence, his people are already worshipping a cow statue. God quips, “I see that this is a stiffnecked people.” (One can imagine Moses replying, “You have no idea.”) He readies to smite them, but Moses says, let me go talk to them. Moses does so, and his brother Aaron, who was supposed to keep order while Moses ascended the mountain, starts muttering excuses. Finally, Moses summons a posse from Clan Levi and slaughters 3,000 doubters. God’s generosity contrasts with the Hebrews’ capacity to turn the bestowal of His ultimate gift into a catastrophe.
So it is with the order worked out by Piero and passed down through him to all painters. That vision is incomparable. It implies myriad creative possibilities and transcendent achievement. It’s yours for the taking, to make your own. And God help you if you do because you’re going to need it.
But I think Guston meant something more subtle than that. Jed Perl, in Authority and Freedom:
The more you know about gospel music, the more you see that the performances by Aretha that have come to define a generation were nurtured by her training in the church. The bass guitarist Chuck Rainey, who worked with Franklin on many hits, said of the 1971 “Spanish Harlem” that it had a “cross between an eighth-note feel and a shuffle. That’s the gospel, Pentecostal feel where you’re really trying to nail what the groove is.” Franklin’s genius—in skyrocketing performances that we’ve come to associate with the sexual revolution, the women’s movement, and the civil rights movement—was first and last a matter of craft….
In the movie that was filmed during those two nights at the church in Los Angeles but only finally released after Franklin’s death, Aretha is the calm at the center of the storm…. She begins the first night seated at the piano, her eyes sometimes closed, singing “Wholy, Holy.” As the choir spins and shouts under Hamilton’s energetic direction, Aretha can be almost expressionless, waiting for the moment when she takes up a song. She doesn’t rise to the occasion so much as she sinks deep into the music. The astronomical highs that she achieves along with the choir and the musicians are built on the strongest and most secure foundations. In the moments before and after she sings, as she sits or stands, quiet, concentrated, she’s entirely absorbed in her craft. No singer has ever made the time, the place, the moment more thrilling. But the look on her face is the look of the artist who is focused on the nitty-gritty of her art. The solitude of an artist at the height of her powers has probably never been clearer than in the footage of Aretha Franklin at Los Angeles’s New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in 1972. All eyes are on her, but she is alone with her vocation.
Or as Guston said elsewhere:
When you're in the studio painting, there are a lot of people in there with you—your teachers, friends, painters from history, critics... and one by one if you're really painting, they walk out. And if you're really painting YOU walk out.
I believe that the Generous Law to which Piero attests is that art is attainable via transcendent craft. Art may require you to transcend craft so totally that craft disappears, and then you disappear. But that way is clear and you’re free to walk down it. In the meantime, you would be advised to give up on the idea that the way leads anywhere.
Next Friday we cover the second half of the book. The week after we begin three weeks on Aesthetics of the Familiar: Everyday Life and World-Making by Yuriko Saito. Your thoughts are welcome in the comments.
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Our current book for the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is I Paint What I Want to See by Philip Guston. Obtain your copy and jump in. For more information see the ASBC schedule.
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A trio of fascinating books. Schreyach’s Totality, in which he deconstructs and analyses Newman from the outside in, to Ric Reuben’s The Creative Act: A way of Being, himself a player, ruminating on the act of creativity, and I Paint What I Want To See, Philip Guston’s deep dive into the trenches of where paintings are made; the doubts and angst of what it is to be a painter and what a painting is and isn’t, laid bare. Had I read Guston’s book many years ago, I might not have gone down this road of painting; in stark contrast to Ruben’s “everyone is creative.” Ruben is the yin to Guston’s yang. Guston is immersed, in the basement of the creative process, making, destroying, reworking, ad nauseam. As a painter, I found myself repeatedly saying, yes, I know what you’re talking about, even when I didn’t.
Reading this passage of Guston’s rang true as I recalled seeing those Rembrandts at the Frick’s temporary home at the Bauer monstrosity. He says: “In those great Rembrandts there’s the ambiguity of paint being image and image being paint, which is very mysterious…The point about the late Rembrandt is not that it’s satisfying but on the contrary that it is disturbing and frustrating. Because really what he’s done is to eliminate any plane, anything between that image and you. The Van Deck hasn’t. It says: ’I’m a painting.’ The Rembrandt says: ‘I am not a painting, I am a real man.’ But he is not a real man either. What is it then, that you’re looking at?”
In his interview with Clark Coolidge he states: “I once made an analogy that, in painting, creating, it’s a court. But unlike a court, you’re the plaintiff, the defendant, the lawyer, the judge, and the jury. And most artists want to settle out of court.” Amen to that, I say, there is no editor.
Franklin states: “Art may require you to transcend craft so totally that craft disappears, and then you disappear. But that way is clear and you’re free to walk down it. In the meantime, you would be advised to give up on the idea that the way leads anywhere.”
Guston says “The laws of art are generous laws. They are not definable because they are not fixed. These laws are revealed to the artist during creation and cannot be given to him. They are not knowable. A work cannot begin with these Laws as a diagram.”
A wonderful book and one I am embarrassed to say I never read before. Thank you!
Insightful. The Piero example, very fine. Does one choose art or does art do the choosing? The artist's choice, it seems, is whether to accept the yoke. One had better want it. As for disappearing when and if one is really painting, generally speaking, the lightning is more likely to strike during the blind stumble which follows that part where ego has gotten lost. PS: The Drifters' Spanish Harlem is tasteful, romantic. Aretha Franklin's treatment is merely sexual, and not especially preferred because nothing is left to the imagination. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7F2sJjoJP8 For more influential gospel precedents, Mahalia Jackson, Leontine Price, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Dorothy Love Coates and the Gospel Harmonettes and so many more.