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

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Philip Guston, one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, spoke about art with unparalleled candour and commitment. Abstract at times, there were moments when I had no idea what he was on about, but others where he was irresistibly captivating. The wealth of information on the creative process, metaphysics, philosophy, art, painting, and anything similar is honestly unreal.

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. 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).

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. 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. Even the earliest talk included here, his interview with David Sylvester from 1960, which took place during Guston’s abstract phase, seems to tee up his later practice. The postponement of Guston’s 2020 retrospective, the arguments around which need no further reheating here, cast the artist as a less nuanced protagonist than either his works or his words suggest, in part thanks to the social media context in which those arguments played out.

Or, was the whole world and everything in it set into an us-or-them binary arrangement because of the Cold War? 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.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. During his lifetime he seemed an outsider, but now the world of painting seems to have regrouped around him. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Guston, one of the most influential and provocative American artists of the 20th century, had turned his back on the hip New York scene. 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?

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. 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.The latest edition of the Yogyakarta biennial explores ‘Titen’, a Javanese word for the art (or science?