Philip Guston at the Royal Academy of Art, London - March 2004

On 20 March 2004 I attended the Royal Academy of Arts to see an exhibition by the American artist Philip Guston. I only knew a little about his work having caught a review of the exhibition on a late-night arts TV programme some months ago. Guston's artistic trajectory was an unusual one: his earliest works are mostly figurative groups influenced by both the Old Masters and cartoons depicting urban street gangs and images of the Second World War. He then moved onto Abstract Expressionist colour fields, for which he garnered much acclaim alongside the likes of Pollock, but then in something of a creative u-turn, adopted a seemingly amateurish cartoon figurative style.

What made this exhibition particularly fascinating was the way it was presented in a more or less chronological order with works from every period so that you could see the evolution of Guston's style and the how he developed his themes over his entire artistic career.

The first gallery contained the figurative works from 1930-1952, the most striking of which was Bombardment from 1938, a depiction of an air-raid on a circular canvas that really does look as if it is exploding in your face. But the fish-eye perspective paradoxically creates a claustrophobic sensation as if the explosion is contained within a confined space. Bombardment also has a slight comic book quality, the figures striking super-hero poses. It was nice to be able to compare Guston's preparatory sketches with the finished painting. As we went around the room the figurative was beginning to make way for the abstract; the influence of Picasso could be seen in the later renderings of Guston's human subjects. I was not quite sure what to make of the new direction; the abstract work was not yet 'doing it' for me.

The second and third galleries were devoted to Guston's minimalist abstract works from 1952-1973. On the surface you could easily compare these paintings with other abstract expressionists such as Mondrian or even, as some of Guston's contemporary critics suggested, with impressionists such as Monet, a kind of 'abstract impressionism'. But I was beginning to sense something darker in these abstract paintings as if there was something violent and sinister lurking in the paint... or behind it, even. My two favourites of these abstract works were called For M (right) and The Light. For M struck me as intensely visceral; violent daubs of red and black paint like a blood spattered wall that affected me more profoundly than most abstract art does. The Light seemed a highly ironic title as within the strokes of chunky grey paint lurked three indistinct black forms like the monsters that hide under your bed or in the wardrobe during the nights of your childhood. Staring at this canvas I felt a disquieting fear that they were coming to get me. The transition from the earlier, more restrained and detailed grids of colours to these later agitated and sinister abstracts was exhilarating and intense.

But then towards the end of the 1960s Guston returned to figurative paintings and the sinister distorted figures evident in the abstract work began to take to form of cartoonish hooded figures. Guston's abstract work had brought him much acclaim from the art establishment who were, at that time, extolling the 'purity of non-objective forms'. Guston, though, appeared to harbour doubts about the very art world that had embraced his work and sort to rebel against it. This coupled with his ongoing concerns about the underlying right-wing extremism in America and his own doubts about himself as an artist led to a series of comical yet frightening paintings featuring hooded figures that could either represent the artistic elite, Ku Klux Klansmen or himself. Whilst looking at these paintings I was compelled to laugh but with that uneasy feeling that shouldn't really find them funny.

Guston's style by this point had adopted the appearance of a novice or even a child experimenting with his first set of paint brushes. Moving into the final two galleries which contained the last phase of paintings several new images began to emerge, most notably Guston imagining himself evolving into nothing but a huge cyclopic head, the junk and clutter of everyday things and the soles of shoes (a pun on 'souls'). While the influences of Italian Renaissance, Goya and Dante's visions of hell that were as evident in these later paintings as they were in Guston's earliest figurative works, the childish style he adopted suggested that he was striving to unlearn the techniques of realism and abstract expressionism. This is most explicitly illustrated by his 1978 painting The Line: A hand reaching down from a cloud and drawing a single charcoal line on the ground (which immediately made me think of the giant foot descending from the sky in Terry Gilliam's animation from Monty Python's Flying Circus). These paintings are funny, disturbing and melancholic all at the same time.

In 1979 Guston experienced a near-fatal heart attack that left him unable to work on the large canvasses that he had done. The last paintings in the final gallery are small works of piles of fruit, sandwiches, legs nailed to a ladder and a final bandaged cyclopic head staring up a litter-strewn hill. The final exhibits are small sketches that range from every period of his career and one in particular caught my eye: Drawing No. 2, Ischia. This simple sketch illustrated how Guston built up and overlaid architectural shapes that formed the basis for one of his earlier abstract paintings and went some way to explaining how Guston approached those paintings. Another untitled sketch looked like a massive drum-kit for a player with twenty arms.

This was one of the best exhibitions I can remember seeing. My knowledge of art history is woefully lacking and I am no expert by any means but I loved Guston's work. I cannot remember the last time I was so inspired by a single artist's work. The best recommendation I can think of is that once I completed viewing final gallery I returned to the first and walked through the entire exhibition again.