Resilience: Philip Guston In 1971

at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles (through January 5, 2020)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

…there’s no success like failure and failure’s no success at all
Bob Dylan
The painter’s first duty is to be free
Philip Guston

In 1970, New York City was the undisputed center of the art world and 57th street in midtown Manhattan was the epicenter of New York’s art world with its plethora of blue chip galleries. Art and theater critics reigned supreme — they could and would ruin careers with a gleeful flourish of their poison pens. When Philip Guston, acclaimed Abstract-Expressionist, showed his new large-scale paintings at Marlborough in October, 1970, he was roundly excoriated for his switch from abstract art to figuration. Not only was the work (horrors!) figurative, it was rudely cartoonish and crudely drawn.

I was lucky enough to actually have seen that very show. I remember being astonished. I’d never seen anything like it. Wonderfully lugubrious, the imagery was an oxymoronic cocktail of vaguely horrific, KKK–like cone heads, disembodied feet, and piles of upside-down shoes (which I now know is a cartoon symbol of death). Mounds of shoes and piles of bricks were eerie ghostly reminders of the concentration camps as well as collections of shoes from the deceased and the rubble of war-torn European cities.