I Paint What I Want to See: Philip Guston (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Figurative painting allowed him to do in art what he’d always loved about talking: to lurch from subject to subject, to butt up against contradictions, to make wisecracks, to repeat himself. This book captures the breadth and depth of his thinking, and also captures the feeling of an intensely lively era when artists like Cage, Feldman and Guston felt that making art was a branch of philosophy. No reader could finish the book with a sense of Guston as a painter with a singular and unwavering vision of his work and its place in the world. Not a review—Guston’s writings and talks are wonderful—but a note to alert the interested reader to the fact that everything in I Paint What I Want to See can be found in Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations, published by the University of California Press in 2010 (this latter book also includes additional material, the editor’s selection of accompanying images, and an Introduction by Dore Ashton).

We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Usually I don’t mind reading things like this even if I’m not familiar with the artist but I genuinely felt like I was retaining zero information from this. The latest edition of the Yogyakarta biennial explores ‘Titen’, a Javanese word for the art (or science? If you are not really into art, perhaps you will enjoy it less, but I firmly believe that reading and, in this case, almost listening, to someone who discusses the subject he is the most passionate about can not fail to captivate the reader. Philip Guston (June 27, 1913 – June 7, 1980) was a painter and printmaker in the New York School, which included many of the abstract expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.Guston is again someone you would like to invite for dinner and who would entertain and light up the evening with endless reflections and digressions about art. His repeated (and perhaps willed) endorsement of ‘frustration’ as a crucial artistic ingredient in the mid-1960s gives way, by the end of the decade, to an outpouring of large-scale paintings he repeatedly admitted to being baffled by. Its lack of introduction or contextual detail, aside from Coolidge’s brief notes carried over from the previous publication, isolates Guston’s statements as aphorisms or nuggets of adaptable wisdom.

If you love art, or if you are an artist, if you love Guston’s work or even if you don’t like it so much, you will enjoy this book. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.Dialogues – with interlocutors like his friends Harold Rosenberg or Clark Coolidge, or with his students at Boston University or the Yale Summer School of Music and Art – allowed Guston to play out in a public forum the equivocations that informed the paintings made in the privacy of the studio. To read this book front-to-back is to witness his paintings gradually outpace Guston’s ability to describe them. It felt weird hearing him describe the speed he could churn them out although that’s also part of why I chose it for the project, lol.

His declaration that ‘I think of my pictures as a kind of figuration’ is borne out in the works he was making at the time, many of which have matter-of-fact titles ( Table, Vessel, Branch, all 1960) that are worlds away from the highfalutin sublimity of those of his New York School peers. If his paintings are always saying ‘Yes, but…’ (to quote the title of Dore Ashton’s essential 1976 book about the artist), so too is Guston. Or, was the whole world and everything in it set into an us-or-them binary arrangement because of the Cold War? When asked about the subjects of these late paintings, he’s as confounded as anyone – ‘I don’t know what the hell it looks like’, he says, of a painting of a shoe – but that’s just what he loved about making them.Get the Coolidge/U Cal edition instead, which is properly edited and includes so many great pieces that don't appear in this throwaway rip-off, like Guston's panel talk in Philadelphia and his conversation with Bill Berkson. His foregrounding of doubt – about what he was painting, which often shifted in the making, or what his own work was about, or what motivated him to do it at all – was what infused his late paintings with the ability to generate new ideas in the heads and hands of others. Abstract at times, there were moments when I had no idea what he was on about, but others where he was irresistibly captivating. The editorial model adopted—allow someone else to do all the work, then conveniently “forget” the fact—no doubt helps to keep overheads low, but should we really be happy that the accountants have won again?