I was lucky enough to visit the Philip Guston retrospective at Tate Modern last autumn. We made our way past Guston’s early work and through the abstract expressionist paintings that earned him acclaim in the 1950s and 60s before the exhibition bottlenecked into a black-painted hallway, inscribed with a quote from the artist: “The war [in Vietnam], what was happening to America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I … sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything – and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?” We stepped from the dark hallway into a large, light gallery filled with Guston’s paintings of Ku Klux Klan members. The grammar of the imagery is that of the cartoon; we see his hooded men living out the banality of evil. Guston’s “frustrated fury” had found absurdist expression.
What I loved about the show (besides, of course, the paintings) was the way it left a literal space for his black anger, which here is seen as a kind of creative force, spurring Guston toward his greatest work. In All the Rage, the psychoanalyst Josh Cohen concludes with a coda devoted to this same Guston exhibition. He writes: “These are certainly paintings to make you feel angry, but they will make you feel a lot of other things as well. Anger is most rigid when it’s angry to the exclusion of other feelings, and most alive and creative where it dares to make contact with other feelings.”
