THE EARLY WORKS OF artists, who became famous for their successful experimentation in style and expression (such as Matisse, Picasso, Van Gogh, Miro, and Hockney), began by making quite conventional figurative pictures – always competently executed. Such was also the case with the artist Philip Guston (1913-1980), who was born in Canada, son of Jewish parents who had migrated from Czarist Russia. Born ‘Goldstein’, he later changed his surname to ‘Guston’. His family moved to Los Angeles (USA) in 1922. His childhood was filled with trauma: his father committed suicide, and soon after that his brother was killed in a motor accident. He began to be involved with art as a way of dealing with these sad events. In the 1930s, he engaged with political activity, fighting racism and anti-Semitism at a time when the Ku Klux Klan was enjoying some prominence. Several of his paintings depict hoods, such as were worn by the Klan.

There is a retrospective exhibition of Guston’s works at London’s Tate Modern until the 25^th of February 2024. The paintings are exhibited chronologically on the walls of eleven interconnecting display areas. Like the artists listed at the beginning of this piece, Guston’s early works are figurative and very beautifully painted. Many of these powerful images reflect his concerns about the adverse political developments he observed during the 1930s. Later, in the 1940s, he became friends with artists like Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning, and he moved successfully from figurative painting to abstraction. He became well-known as an abstract artist. After that, in the 1960s, his art seemed to my eyes to go downhill.

Guston’s later works, which are partly figurative and partly abstract, and created in and after the late 1960s, were undoubtedly created to send messages to the viewer. However, I found them to be crudely executed in comparison with his earlier abstract and much earlier figurative works. Whether this crudeness was deliberate or reflected a decline in the artist’s ability I cannot say. These later works express the artist’s personal crises and his reaction to injustices and other global catastrophes, but they did not do much for me from an aesthetic point of view. Had I left the exhibition without seeing them, my admiration for Guston would have been higher than it is having seen them.