Philip Guston, The studio

Throughout his career, Philip Guston's work metamorphosed from figural to abstractand back to figural. In the 1950s, Guston (1913--1980) produced a body of shimmering abstractpaintings that made him -- along with Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Franz Kline -- aninfluential abstract expressionist of the "gestural" tendency. In the late 1960s, withworks like T he Studio came his most radical shift. Drawing from the imagery ofhis early murals and from elements in his later drawings, ignoring the prevailing"coolness" of Minimalism and antiform abstraction, Guston invented for these late works acast of cartoon-like characters to articulate a vision that was at once comic, crude, and complex.In The Studio, Guston offers a darkly comic portrait of the artist as a hooded KuKlux Klansman, painting a self-portrait.

In this concise and generouslyillustrated book, Craig Burnett examines The Studio in detail. He describes thehistorical and personal motivations for Guston's return to figuration and the (mostly negative)critical reaction to the work from Hilton Kramer and others. He looks closely at the structure ofThe Studio, and at the influence of Piero della Francesca, Manet, and Krazy Kat,among others; and he considers the importance of the column of smoke in the painting -- as acompositional device and as a ghost of abstraction and metaphysics. The Studiosignals not only Guston's own artistic evolution but a broader shift, from the medium-centric andteleological claim of modernism to the discursive, carnivalesque, and mucky world of postmodernism.