Working with figuration in the way I am doing now [in the seventies] is a purely imaginative projection, of course, because I don’t paint from things, you know, as you do when you look at an object. It is all imagined with me. I think… you enter into a really complex, almost insoluble “contest” between meaning and structure—plastic structure—and that is what I miss in totally non-objective painting: the lack of contest, when it becomes too possible.

PHILIP GUSTON

(Philip Guston in Jan Butterfield, “A Very Anxious Fix: Philip Guston,” Images and Issues, Summer 1980, p. 34).

Lauded as an Abstract Expressionist and key figure of the New York School throughout the 1950’s, Philip Guston’s later figurative work came as somewhat of a surprise to the New York art scene of the early 1970’s. Now regarded as a hallmark of postmodernism, the artist’s figurative paintings from 1969 and onward stem from inspirations that predate his abstract production. Far before he began his artistic career as a muralist, a young Philip Guston took a correspondence course at the Cleveland School of Cartooning in 1926, drawing influence from the work of George Herriman. Inspired by the formalist qualities of renaissance painter Piero della Francesca and following the socialist footsteps of Mexican muralists such as David Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera, Guston would go on to create large-scale murals during the 1930’s. Indeed, the 1930’s were formative years, in which murals in Los Angeles, New York and Morelia, Mexico, largely expressed social injustice, terrorism brought on by the Ku Klux Klan, and the need for unity of workers within industry during the height of the great depression. Produced at the tail end of a tumultuous decade in American history, the present lot, Inside, 1969, exemplifies the artist’s post-war mentality. Steeped in comic aesthetic, the narrative and muralist techniques are employed as Guston investigated social and personal concerns, weaving public events and autobiography.

While growing up in Los Angeles, Philip Guston witnessed the horrific inflictions of the Ku Klux Klan. This witnessing would resurface in Guston’s artwork, white-hooded figures are notably identified in the Conspirators, 1930-1932, and the mural The Inquisition, 1934-1935, before resurging over thirty years later in City Limits, 1969. In reference to the incorporation of Klansmen in his later works, Guston states: “They are self-portraits. I perceive myself as being behind the hood. In the new series of “hoods” my attempt was really not to illustrate, to do pictures of the Ku Klux Klan, as I had done earlier. The idea of evil fascinates me… I almost tried to imagine that I was living with the Klan. What would it be like to be evil? To plan, to plot.” (“Philip Guston Talking,” transcript of a 1978 lecture; reprinted in Philip Guston Paintings, 1969–1980, ed. Renee McKee, London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1982, p. 52).

In the present lot, Inside, 1969, the comic-style figure could be interpreted as an antithesis to the threatening Klansman, a ghost-like, faceless entity, covered with a white sheet visibly stitched together– at once portrayed smoking a cigarette and gesturing a sign for peace. Cigarette smoke looms upwards into a small grey cloud while bearing resemblance to a comic book callout, a small bubble usually filled with a caption in order to advance the narrative; however, Guston’s Klansman remains silent, void of caption, empty, his gesture goes unexplained. Such elements emphasize the dichotomy at play in the present lot, along with the contrast between public and private, of senselessness and reason, violence and peace.

Inside, 1969, reveals such contrasts within four spaces, suggesting physical and psychological notions of interiority and exteriority. The most pronounced space, in which the Klansman stands, is a red interior demarcated by three black lines at the top left, lit by a single dangling light from the ceiling. This red interior is coupled by a second interior defined by the white sheet that covers the Klansman offering an intimate and anonymous space that refuses the possibility of a penetrating and scrutinizing public gaze. This private space is also depicted in the use of black rectangular eyeholes through the Klansman’s hood, repeated in shape and color as windows in the exterior background.

While three quarters of the composition is engulfed by Guston’s red interior, one quarter of the composition depicts the public sphere. Again, the artist employs a black line at the top right of the red space to demarcate interior from exterior– both of which narrowly bleed into one another. This black line seems to distinguish space as much as it drafts the city, constructing the large five story building in the background and suggesting the continuum of urban sprawl protruding towards the far right of the composition. It should be noted that while deeply figurative, Guston continues to apply an expressionist brush stroke– lyrical gestures filling large expanses of the canvas. Black pavement rises up to the black outline of the cityscape, an exterior contained by a red boarder that visually anchors Guston’s palette of black, red and grey; however, the entire composition is simultaneously isolated within the canvas by virtue of a white boarder, uniting all spaces as a whole. In this way, Inside, 1969,
references both the multi narrative spaces of Piero della Francesca’s frescos and the single frame narrative employed in comic books, implicitly positioning an isolated segment into a larger storyline.

Gazing at Piero della Francesca’s The Flagellation, 1455-1460, one might notice the use of architecture as a device to define temporality and narrative into physical and psychic divisions of interiority and exteriority. The Flagellation, 1455-1460, depicts two scenes, one background scene of Jesus Christ being flogged at a pillar while a seated Pontius Pilate observes (a prelude to crucifixion); the second scene, divided by a Corinthian column, places three men in the foreground of a cityscape. Here, the three men are undeniably of the Quattrocento period, portrayed in conversation as though oblivious to the torturous scene in the background. Using perspective, architecture and figures, the scene in the foreground positions the act of the flagellation in the past tense; however, intimately linking it to the present. Unlike Guston’s Inside, each register of narrative space in The Flagellation, 1455-1460, is occupied by figures; however, the intimate space is actively utilized in both artworks, suggesting evil at work, while the respective accompanying exterior scenes of gridded cityscapes suggest a simultaneous connection and detachment from the past. In Guston’s case, the single figure of the Klansman in Inside, 1969, represents evil as much as it represents self-awareness and self-reflection, using the backdrop of modernity in order to negotiate the past and present.