Burnett begins and ends this slim, illustrated volume with attention to the puff of smoke between the hood and the canvas in Philip Guston’s painting, The Studio, 1969. “Draw an X from each of the four corners of The Studio and the lines intersect at the base of the densest nub of smoke at the billowing heart of the picture.” (56) Burnett is no slouch as writer or interpreter, so his attention to this detail (and others, see 30-32, 49-51 and 54-55) is significant. Burnett does not shy away from bold pronouncements; of The Studio he writes, “The work has grown in significance over the years because it might just be the best picture Guston painted in his life.” (15) Readers will be pleased the author backs up such speculations with interesting and credible arguments.
What if Philip Guston’s career had ended before the Marlborough Gallery show in 1970? Burnett poses this historically speculative question and sums up the artist’s biography before 1966. Burnett plays out the likely legacy and explains Guston’s unease with his oeuvre at the time leading up to the Marlborough show. Both Burnett and Guston guess that if not for his change, beginning in 1969, to a figurative style, Guston probably wouldn’t be included in pantheons of post-War painting.
The timing of Guston’s change was not independent of a natural, reactionary movement in 1960s American painting. The artist’s oft-quoted disdain for “Purity,” in favor of “telling stories,” was part of a larger correction to the dominant authority of Greenbergian formalism. Burnett isolates Guston’s unique contribution to the times for his abandonment of critical self-definition and elevation of art historical continuity. Guston himself saw the era as an opportunity for rebirth—he “died” the death of historical progress and was released to the anxious present. The writings of Soren Kierkegaard were crucial to Guston at this time, especially Kierkegaard’s description of the self evolving through experiences of despair and anxiety. Guston, says Burnett, applied Kierkegaard’s system of self to being an artist, saved by his / her art in post-modern history (following the collapse of pure abstraction’s ultimate authority.)
I dare anyone to approach Guston’s work from this period without acknowledging, intellectually and viscerally, the images’ all-consuming anxiety. “(My) whole life is based on anxiety—where else does art come from, I ask you?” he wrote to Dore Ashton. I agree with the sum of Burnett’s judgment of The Studio; it achieves a splendid balance, and anxiety is managed . . . if not for the puff of smoke, and by virtue of same.
“What are we to make of Guston’s claim that he turned to figuration because he wanted to ‘tell stories’ when he wasn’t even interested in the stories being told by his favourite painter?” (29) Burnett’s question is telling for two reasons: first, it presents a key paradox to be found in the appreciation of the artist’s work, and second, it demonstrates Burnett’s ability to use well-placed questions to move along his study.
In the first, Guston, who was a very intelligent man and seemed to possess the rare gift of original genius, was probably being clever when he talked about the iconographic or symbolic content of his work, preferring diversion and obfuscation to explanation and clarity. I am not accusing him of intentional, programmatic or manipulative rhetoric; instead, my opinion is that many artists caught in the grip of a duende, or mystery, have no genuine recourse except to divert and obfuscate. Also, we are wise to take his statements about great art at face value, such as (my emphases added): “The other thing that keeps me under the spell, so that I can look at these things forever, is the sense of ease of the forms,” and “Its formality is the thing that makes the strangeness. . . . It’s the form that not only brings the meaning into existence; it’s the form which keeps it perpetually renewing itself.” This was Philip Guston’s concept of great art—it has inner coherence and is perpetually renewing itself, no matter the subject matter. Although he was not speaking directly about his own work in these statements, no stretch is required to apply them to his narrative imagery.
Burnett’s debate with judgments made by Robert Pincus-Witten, regarding “baseness” and organic meaning,” are among the volume’s most difficult reading and critically advanced sections. (52-53) Readers will also benefit from a casual knowledge of artistic movements such as Abstract Expressionism and of historical artists and poets, such as Piero della Francesco and Gerard Manley Hopkins. But the writer never leaves the interested reader behind and always brings the reader along by returning to what can be seen by all in the image itself. The only disadvantage for the reader not overcome by Burnett's analysis is description of its physical dimensions—scale, texture and paint quality.
As Burnett builds to his conclusion, philosophical ideas about laughter and humor are woven into creative interpretations about the central role of the smoke plume. Finally, writes Burnett, the smoke in The Studio is evidence of the image's uplift, ebullience, grace and even resurrection.
Overall, this volume works very well as a self-contained concept: manageable and convenient size, accessible content organized around the interpretation of a single image, good supplementary material (well-chosen reproductions and helpful endnotes) and above all good writing.