Guston's Ghosts
While browsing the bookshelves of the art section at the library, I discovered "Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures and Conversations," edited by Clark Coolidge, with an introduction by Dore Ashton, published by the University of California Press, 2011. The book's content is mostly text, and it has a useful index of topics -notably, Guston's own comments on his use of Ku Klux Klan (KKK) imagery in his paintings. The text transcribed here is from references to the Ku Klux Klan by Guston in the book. Briefly, Philip Guston had been invited to the Yale Summer School in 1961, returned from 1970-1974, where he made the comments; also, from an interview with Harold Bloom; next, at a talk given at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; and (last), written comments by Guston from his own notes.
Lecture 1972
What happened was I was painting common objects and so on and the democratic convention took place in 1968 and like everybody else I was very disturbed about it. It seemed to connect with way back in the 30s when I was just beginning to paint. In Los Angeles I had done some pictures of the Ku Klux Klan. The clan was very powerful in L.A. in those years. They were used to break the unions which were starting to form. And I was leftist in my thinking. I mean politically, in those years. So I did a series of pictures of KKK and somehow it all came back in a circle. I did this painting, a bunch of KKK in a room [possibly discussion 1969]. It's sort of a nice pink Sunday comic color ground, peach pink. And when my nephew saw it he said, "It looks like the school where they are learning how to be KKK's." So this is like the school.
Lecture 1973
This is now about the end of 1968, and I'd just as well tell you about it because this is what actually happened. There's no point in being secret about it. The Chicago convention was going on and I was stuck in front of the TV like everybody else, watching this thing and reading about it, and I went in one night and started doing this [probably charcoal drawing “Untitled”, 1968. It just, like, came out. And I got very interested. I thought, can I even do that??! And I really got excited about it. It's the first appearance of these hooded figures. That's when he first appeared.
Well, that's just one of those monsters, I don't know what it is, four-eyes [probably “Head II”, 1969]. And then I got really interested in the idea again that I did when I was very young. I'll show you later. I painted Ku Klux Klan ... I'm not interested in the Ku Klux Klan, but I was interested in the hooded figures as representing ... It's too simple, I don't have to explain that. And I got very involved in it, deeply involved in it. They became real characters to me. And for about two years, all of 1969 and 1970, I was riding the crest of the wave as far as painting was concerned. There wasn't enough time to paint all the things I wanted to paint. And one thing led to another, as you'll see.
Lecture 1974
There are gaps. Well, I don't want to go into autobiography too much, but even this was in relation to what I was painting then. I was about 17 when I did this [drawing for “Conspirators”]. I was doing some large paintings of the Ku Klux Klan which was very active in Los Angeles where I was reared. But this is simply pencil, which I like to draw with, on two- or three-ply Strathmore with a little pink for the bricks. So that's how I drew then. It was way back in the early 1930s.
Then I'd been drawing, for some weeks or months, some Klan figures. I was influenced, of course, like everybody else, very interested and involved politically in what's happening to the country and the world. And this was done at the time of the Chicago convention of 1968. And this is one of the early ones, the early Klan drawings.
That's a painting which I've never shown. And then the eyes started disappearing. They became more slits like that, see? But this was all germinating stuff in relation to that series of paintings. In 1970 I had a large show [at the Marlborough Gallery] of the theme relating to this. Pictures of big heaped-up bodies and terrible things happening and goings-on. Whipping each other. Beg pardon?
Interview 1974
AUD: I'd like to speak to Mr. Guston. You had a painting exhibition at the school and it was mostly Ku Klux Klansmen. For the past few years, you've been working mostly with Ku Klux Klansmen. I notice that in the paintings here you're working with a new image of the sleeping figure. I was just wondering what you foresee about this image as an image. Are you going to explore it as you did the Klansmen?
PG: Yes, they're really very recent, these recumbent figures. Actually, I think of them as the painter in bed. One of them, the one with the French fries, is called “Painting, Smoking, Eating.” Paint cans on his chest, imagining a painting above him. Thinking now about them, they are mostly about painting. They're paintings about the painter. In the paintings of 1968-70, I also made the hoods into painters. There were pictures where the hoods became artists. My favorite group, the ones I keep, that I find I take out and look at, enjoy the most, are where they are painters. I took one down the other day to show to someone who hadn't seen the work, and I found the first picture I pulled out was where the hooded figure is painting another hood. I also had them discussing art, become art critics. I had one looking at an abstract painting.
HR: Are there any where you think of a left political show?
PG: No, I'm not that interested in a direct political interpretation. HR: But you are interested in politics.
PG: Sure. Everybody's interested in politics.
HR: In the last show, I mean the political experience, I remember you talked about it a lot.
PG: Yes, I was very influenced by what was happening, when the hoods were doing things, beating people there, tying up bodies, patrolling, driving around cities. But now I think they're thinking about it. Now they're more meditative about the whole thing. Reflective.
HR: That's why they're lying down.
PG: That's a good statement of reflection, yes.
HR: They're not riding around in an automobile.
PG: It'd be silly to have them ... I would know more put them in a car now, there would be no reason.
HR: So you think times have gotten more peaceful.
PG: Oh, no. Peaceful? No.
HR: Well, the people aren't running around piling up bodies.
PG: No. Well, I was never concerned about illustrating it anyway. I wanted to go deeper into meetings and overtones. Now they're thinking about it all. It's more inside. I have to dig for the images that come out.
Lecture 1978
As a young boy I was an activist in radical politics, and although I am no longer an activist, I keep track of everything. In 1967-68, I became very disturbed by the war and the demonstrations. They became my subject matter, and I was flooded by a memory. When I was about 17-18, I had done a whole series of paintings about the Ku Klux Klan, which was very powerful in Los Angeles at that time. The police department had what they called the Red Squad, the main purpose of which was to break up any attempts at unionizing. Remember, this was 1932, 1933. I was working in a factory and became involved in a strike. The KKK helped in strike-breaking, so I did a whole series of paintings on the KKK. In fact I had a show of them in a bookshop in Hollywood, where I was working at the time. Some members of the KKK walked in, took the paintings off the wall, and slashed them. Two were mutilated.
This was the beginning. They are self-portraits. I perceive myself as being behind a hood. In the new series of “Hoods,” my attempt was really not to illustrate, to do pictures of the KKK, as I had done earlier. The idea of evil fascinated me, and rather like Isaac Babel, who had joined the Cossacks, lived with them, and written stories about them, I almost tried to imagine that I was living with the Klan. What would it be like to be evil? To plan and plot. Then I started conceiving an imaginary City being overtaken by the Klan. I was like a movie director. I couldn't wait, I had hundreds of pictures in mind, and when I left the studio I would make notes to myself, memos: “Put them all around the table, eating, drinking beer.” Ideas and feelings kept coming so fast; I couldn't stop, I was sitting on the crest of a wave. In the picture “Cellar”, I wondered what it would look like to have a bunch of figures, scared, diving down into a cellar. I painted it in almost four hours without any erasures. And when it was done I said, “Ah, so that's what it would look like.” And that's what I mean about primitive art or cave art, so that's what it looks like. I want to see what it looks like. They call it hard afterwards, you know. Then I started thinking that in the city, in which creatures or insects had taken over, or were running the world, there were bound to be artists. What would they paint? They would paint each other, or paint self-portraits. I did a whole series in which I made a spoof of the whole art world. I had hoods looking at field paintings, hoods being at art openings, hoods having discussions about color. I had a good time.
This drawing was done in 1930. I discovered it about five years ago in a drawer, in a package of old drawings. It's a sketch for one of the early Klan paintings [“Conspirators”], though later Klan paintings are totally different. So one never forgets anything, one never goes forward and forward, you are always moving in a circular way, and nothing is ever finished, nothing is ever finished until you leave.
Notebooks 1970-78
"About these hooded men." The KKK has haunted me since I was a boy in L.A. In those years, they were there mostly to break strikes, and I drew and painted pictures of conspiracies and floggings, cruelty and evil.
Also, I made a connection with my attraction to medieval and Renaissance paintings, the flagellation pictures of Piero, Giotto, and Duccio. Violence in a formal painting.
In the dream of violence, I feel like Isaac Babel with his Cossacks; as if I were living with the Klan.
What do they do afterwards? Or before? Smoke, drink, sit around their rooms (light-bulbs, furniture, wooden floors), patrol empty streets; dumb, melancholy, guilty, fearful, remorseful, reassuring one another?
Why couldn't some be artists and paint one another? Soon I'll paint a picture of some of them eating around a table (great chance to paint food: spaghetti, hamburgers, beer, etc.). I tried one last year of two of them shaking hands. It didn't work out-yet.
Pictures should tell stories. It is what makes me want to paint. To see, in a painting, what one has always wanted to see, but hasn't, until now. For the first time.