I Paint What I Want to See: Philip Guston (Penguin Modern Classics)

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His foregrounding of doubt – about what he was painting, which often shifted in the making, or what his own work was about, or what motivated him to do it at all – was what infused his late paintings with the ability to generate new ideas in the heads and hands of others. Whereas the UCal book was a labor of love, some years in the making—the cassette and reel-to-reel recordings were transcribed, and the book edited, by Guston’s close friend, the poet Clark Coolidge—one suspects that I Paint was whipped up in a matter of minutes. Got about halfway before losing interest due to it feeling repetitive caused by it being a collection of his interviews and talks.

Faith, Hope, and Impossibility and On Morton Feldman are two essays I think every artist should read. To read this book front-to-back is to witness his paintings gradually outpace Guston’s ability to describe them. This expertly curated selection of Guston's writings, talks and interviews draws together the artist's most incisive reflections on iconography and abstraction, metaphysics and mysticism, and the nature of painting and drawing. Guston is again someone you would like to invite for dinner and who would entertain and light up the evening with endless reflections and digressions about art.Philip Guston, one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, spoke about art with unparalleled candour and commitment. Ofcourse, with Guston you're better off getting the Collected Writings, but I love these little white penguin classics. Get the Coolidge/U Cal edition instead, which is properly edited and includes so many great pieces that don't appear in this throwaway rip-off, like Guston's panel talk in Philadelphia and his conversation with Bill Berkson. Abstract at times, there were moments when I had no idea what he was on about, but others where he was irresistibly captivating. Not a review—Guston’s writings and talks are wonderful—but a note to alert the interested reader to the fact that everything in I Paint What I Want to See can be found in Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations, published by the University of California Press in 2010 (this latter book also includes additional material, the editor’s selection of accompanying images, and an Introduction by Dore Ashton).

Figurative painting allowed him to do in art what he’d always loved about talking: to lurch from subject to subject, to butt up against contradictions, to make wisecracks, to repeat himself. Ideas about art don’t matter’, runs a 1978 note found in his studio after his death, itself an idea that launched a thousand painting careers. The latest edition of the Yogyakarta biennial explores ‘Titen’, a Javanese word for the art (or science?If his paintings are always saying ‘Yes, but…’ (to quote the title of Dore Ashton’s essential 1976 book about the artist), so too is Guston. No reader could finish the book with a sense of Guston as a painter with a singular and unwavering vision of his work and its place in the world. This book captures the breadth and depth of his thinking, and also captures the feeling of an intensely lively era when artists like Cage, Feldman and Guston felt that making art was a branch of philosophy. If you love art, or if you are an artist, if you love Guston’s work or even if you don’t like it so much, you will enjoy this book. The postponement of Guston’s 2020 retrospective, the arguments around which need no further reheating here, cast the artist as a less nuanced protagonist than either his works or his words suggest, in part thanks to the social media context in which those arguments played out.

Dialogues – with interlocutors like his friends Harold Rosenberg or Clark Coolidge, or with his students at Boston University or the Yale Summer School of Music and Art – allowed Guston to play out in a public forum the equivocations that informed the paintings made in the privacy of the studio.During his lifetime he seemed an outsider, but now the world of painting seems to have regrouped around him. What I appreciate most, re-reading this stuff, is how he manages to hold that existential, post-war bleakness without becoming too heroic and romantic.