Philip Guston

A retrospective of Philip Guston work at the Royal Academy in London.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)

PAUL MORLEY:
What I love about the exhibition is the demonstration of how important it is to have great radical spirit. We begin as we go in at 17 - I had to double take that at 17, incorporating a lot of European techniques into what he does - you immediately get this idea of here's a guy that wanted to be a comic-book artist but his father had killed himself at 12 and he turns out to be this great artist. Then we move forward slowly into the '40s and '50s he turned to abstract art. And you see this abstract art which is kind of like Monet, but Monet, a guy whose brother died of gangrene. It has a poisonous sense to it and a wonderful abstract art that you can really hear the Feldman and the Cage being a soundtrack to - these little off-kilter bursts of interference. Bizarrely, after going into abstraction, he returns to figurative in the '60s, deciding in terms of the political turbulence of the '60s it was a complete cop-out, complete escapism to be worried about the red and the blue and - then suddenly returns to these wonderful cartoon figures of evil that, again, here we have a cartoonist who understands the history of art, who has a great radical spirit, great need, a compulsion to create images and cause untold grief in 1970 of what happened because the people who loved his abstract art thought he'd turned his back on them because he returned to figurative art and seemed to have made all of these odd, jaunty things, but these Ku Klux Klan cartoons; such banality of evil that he manages to capture absolutely take your breath away.

KIRSTY WARK:
And Elaine, the Ku Klux Klan is not literally meant at all, is it? He refers to it as a thing that happened, but it's him, isn't it?

ELAINE SHOWALTER:
It's him and it's also conspiracy and in the early paintings, the very young ones, there are sort of Spanish Penatentes who are lashing themselves as well as lynching others. It's a very complex image of the hooded man. I think Paul describes it well it seems to me - I think Guston is a difficult painter. The work is, I think, very ugly and very aggressive towards the end, but I thought you can have a difficult and not very compelling painter and a wonderful show. And this was extremely interesting show because you do see the development, and even the documentary that goes with it is really well done, and you come out of it with a lot to think about and a much more complete understanding of the period.

PAUL MORLEY:
I think it's interesting that you go all of the way up to his death. Towards the end there are these wonderful little haikus. He's reduced his art to little pictures of cherries and sandwiches.

KWAME KWEI-ARMAH:
When he gets back to the figurative stuff like the Ku Klux Klan stuff, I think it's him but I think it's more than him. I think he's saying it's all of us and all of our connections to evil. I think what's great is he has done what every artist should do. He is saying, "Let me reflect society through me. Look at me. Look at me. And I am connected to everything."

KIRSTY WARK:
Then in the final room on the right-hand wall, you have this little selection of drawings including a head and the other one which is wonderful full brush, which are just absolutely beautiful.

PAUL MORLEY:
The head is remarkable. It's fantastic to see this history of art through one person.

ELAINE SHOWALTER:
But he's very articulate. He was extremely literary. You see him in the documentary talking about his own work and he's one of those artists who can talk about his own work and who hung out with writers.

PAUL MORLEY:
He hung out with musicians, he hung out with philosophers. Everything feeds in. It makes him much more interesting. The cartoon work we were associating with Pop Art, what we have here is meaning as well.

KWAME KWEI-ARMAH:
Also, he painted close up. He was right against it. So he wasn't like just kind of standing around going, bang, bang. He was right in there going, this is how I see the world, and I want to - I loved that!