Harry Cooper Recognizing Guston

Recognizing Guston (in four slips)*
HARRY COOPER
A thing is recognized only as it comes into existence.

Ð Philip Guston, 1964
Guston, as always, tells a good story. He is giving a slide lecture at the

University of Minnesota in March 1978, and he has just reached his infamous
Marlborough Gallery show of 1970, when the Klansmen rode into Manhattan to
announce the artist’s return to ® guration:
The paintings have very simple titlesÐ as Harold Rosenberg called
them, laconic titles. This is called A Day’s Work. Before they were shown
at Marlborough, Tom Hess, who was then editor of Art News, heard
something was up, so we went over to the warehouse to see them. He
looked at this painting here, one with a piece of lumber with nails
sticking out, and he said, ª What’s that, a typewriter?º I said, ªFor
Christ’s sakes, Tom, if this were 11 feet of one color, with one band
running down on the end, you wouldn’t ask me what it was.º I said,
ªDon’t you know a two by four with red nails?º 1
The message seems simple enough: just look at what’s in front of you, Tom. The
image is just as clearly a piece of wood with red nails sticking out of it as a painting
by Barnett Newman (about whom Hess had just written the ® rst of two books)2 is
an eleven-foot monochrome swath of canvas with a ªzipº at one end. Trust your
instinct for what’s what, if you still have it after all those years of New York School
nonsense. 3 But look again. Guston must be enjoying the fact that his picture has
* This essay ® rst appeared in somewhat longer form in Philip Guston: A New Alphabet, exh. cat.
(Yale University Art Gallery, 2000). My thanks to Joanna Weber for securing permission to republish
it here.
1. ªPhilip Guston Talking,º lecture transcript, ed. Rene McKee, in Philip Guston: Paintings
1969± 1980, exh. cat. (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1982), p. 53.
2. Thomas Hess, Barnett Newman (New York: Walker and Co., 1969).
3. Compare the exchange in Emile Zola’s Masterpiece (1885): ª`What’s she doing, bathing?’ Sandoz
asked. `Bathing! Of course she isn’t. She’s a Bacchante . . . will be when she gets her vine leaves’ º
(Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 68.
OCTOBER 99, Winter 2002, pp. 97± 129. © 2002 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
98 OCTOBER
gotten Hess to project. Why else would he relish the story, which only casts doubt
on his own representational abilities? Hess, the art-world wordsmith, has seen a
typewriter, his own symbol of ªa day’s work,º and Guston upbraids him for it. But if
the referent is so obvious, why in the same breath that Guston proclaims its self-
evidence does he commit his own parapraxis? Why does he say the nails are red
when in the painting they are clearly black?
Either Guston made the mistake in 1970, looking at the picture in the
warehouse, perhaps a little dark, or in 1978, looking at the slide screen, perhaps
sideways. Or maybe he planted the mistake, for his questionÐ ªDon’t you know a
two by four with red nails?ºÐ sounds a lot like a schoolyard trick one kid uses to
make another feel dumb. (The ensuing dialogue goes, ª Yeah, sure I doºÐ ª Well,
there’s no such thing!º) But intentional or not, the red nails are the opposite of
red herrings. They are clues that we should not take Guston at his word when, a
moment earlier in the lecture, explaining his return to imagery in the Marlborough
show, he says, ªI want to see what it [the motif] looks like. They call it art afterwards,
you know.º 4 Or, as Robert Storr has put it, ªGuston was not toying with codes of
representation. On the contrary, he painted as if speaking directly in the language
of `things.’º 5 The red nails are there to say that the language of things is still a
language (as Storr’s ªas ifº perhaps underscores), subject to all the indirectness
and slippage that language introduces into things. To put it another way, what the
pried-up nails fail to secureÐ what much of Guston’s art, even at its putative
plainest, frustrates as well as stimulatesÐ is recognition.
All of this makes me feel better about my inability to recognize what I came
across two years ago on a storage screen in the Fogg Art Museum. It was one of the
many small Masonite panels on which Guston built his new language between
1968 and 1970. But what was it: a forti® cation with gunports, a toaster seen from
above with too many slots, a building, a book, the tablets of the Law, a bread box?
(At eighteen by twenty inches, it was about the size of a bread box.) It was the
undecidability itself that intrigued me. Here was a picture that wanted to represent
something (for it strongly rendered texture, volume, and weight) and something
familiar at that (for the shape of the thing and the handling of the paint breathed
ordinariness) and yet that thing seemed unknowable. The picture was neither
abstract ( judging from its intention) nor representational ( judging from its
effect). And now, as I read over what I have just written, the word ªUNCANNYº
suddenly appears to me in huge letters. How could I have missed it before? Or is
that the way the uncanny always occurs?
In 1919, Freud described the uncanny as ªthat in which one does not know
where one is, as it were,º 6 which is precisely where Guston’s picture had left me.
This was not Freud’s own view, however, but that of a leading scholar who, wrote
4. ªPhilip Guston Talking,º p. 53.

5. Robert Storr, Philip Guston (New York: Abbeville Press, 1986), p. 66.
6. Sigmund Freud, ª The Ùncanny’º (1919), in Freud, Collected Papers, trans. Joan Rivière (New
York: Basic Books, 1959), vol. 4, p. 370.
Recognizing Guston (in four slips) 99
Freud, ªascribe[d] the essential factor in the production of the feeling of uncanni-
ness to intellectual uncertainty. . . .º Freud discarded that analysis as being both too
inclusive and too cerebral, proposing instead that the uncanny resulted from a
return-of-the-repressed. Was I feeling something of the Freudian uncanny as well?
I will put the question on hold, for my sense of the uncanny was soon dispelled.
A glance at Guston’s subsequent work revealed that the image was a book. In the
1969 drawing The Law, for example, a Klansman props the thing on his knee and
reads it with his ® nger.7 Then there were Guston’s own statements: ªI read, so I
painted books, lots of books. I must have painted almost one hundred paintings of
books. It’s such a simple object you knowÐ a book. An open book, a couple of
books, one book on top of another book.º 8 And there was Guston himself in
Michael Blackwood’s short film from 1972 with this very painting and some
7. Magdalena Dabrowski, The Drawings of Philip Guston, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern
Art, 1988), repr. p. 114.
8. ªConversations: Philip Guston and Harold Rosenberg: Guston’s Recent Paintings,º Boston University
Journal (fall 1974), p. 56.
Guston. Untitled. 1968.

100 OCTOBER
others: ªI wanted to give the feeling of an old . . . crumpled book that had been in
existence for thousands of years.º 9
But just as I was feeling like Hess under Guston’s reproach (ªDon’t you know
a book with stone pages?º) I came across this report of one of Guston’s lectures:
ªHe showed a slide of a semi-abstraction of an open book lying on the table with
downward strokes on it for the writing and at once it occurred to me that it could
also be a contemporary building, a thought that was borne out by Guston saying a
book could become heavy, like a stone or a building.º 10 Guston’s books and buildings
and bricks and boards are all lumpy rectangles scored by a grid of vertical strokes.
Those polymorphous marks (or polysemous morphemes) marched right through
the Marlborough show, lending themselves in their neutrality to endless ® gurative
reuse. It was as if the antiheroes of the exhibition, the Klansmen or ªhoodsº as
Guston liked to call them, had left tracks, as if their nonchalant mayhem extended
from the boards and legs and shoes littering the landscape to the language of
represent ation itself. The downward stroke is their mark, and indeed the
Klansmen are all distinguished by a pair of downward strokes for their eye holes.
(There will be more to say about eyes later.)
Was this pair of strokes the genesis of Guston’s scored grid, just as phonemic
doublings were for Roman Jakobson the root of speech?11 No. According to Dore
Ashton, ªin the beginning, they were identi® ably booksº (and Guston con® rms
it).12 It makes sense that an artist who ªalways talked about `reading’ a painting,
and the `language of paint,’º would make the book itself the marker of a momentous
departure in his work.13 In the beginning was the word. And yet, as I discovered by
chance during a trip to Düsseldorf, there was a prior beginning, an image behind
Guston’s: Picasso’s Open Window of 1919, with its bewildering centerpiece, a grid
of black strokes, two by four, on a white rectangular ground.
This crowning feature of the still life not only bears a striking resemblance
to Guston’s books, it prompts the same question: What is it? A book or perhaps a
newspaper, illegibly schematic, propped among the still-life objects as if the artist
had wanted to read while he was working? A building seen out the window, distant
but unaccountably shadowed by the objects on the table? An upholstered white
9. This footage is incorporated into Blackwood’s documentary Philip Guston: A Life Lived (New
York: Blackwood Productions, ca. 1981), 58 min., color, 16 mm.
10. Ruth C. Kainen, unpublished typescript dated April 20, 1977, p. 6. My thanks to Mrs. Kainen for
making this available.
11. Roman Jakobson, ª Why `Mama’ and `Papa’ ?º in his On Language, ed. Linda R. Waugh and
Monique Monville-Burston (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 309.
12. Dore Ashton, A Critical Study of Philip Guston (Berkeley: University of California Press, [1990]), p.
154 (® rst published in 1976 by Viking Press, New York, under the title Yes, But . . . : A Critical Study of
Philip Guston). In the Blackwood ® lm, Guston says the books ªled intoº the other small paintings.
13. Ashton, ibid., p. 80, reporting the words of Robert Phelps. Guston himself said, ªPainting is a
symbolic process, it’s not making a picture. What’s it symbolic of ? Many, many things, and you have to
learn to read the paintingº (Gladys Shafran Kachdin, Abstract Expressionism: An Analysis of the Movement
Based Primarily upon Interviews with Seven Participants [Ph.D. dissertation, Florida State University, 1965],
p. 142).
chairback, detached from the big white chair ¯ oating in right-facing pro® le? I
favor the building, but it is impossible to decide (and indeed most of the marks in
the painting have more than one referent).14 Picasso’s strange grid not only looks
the same as Guston’s, right down to the raggy, tentative marks and the scrubby
shadow; in its persistent ambivalence, or multivalence, it acts the same.
We know about Guston’s veneration of Picasso, whom he called ªthe master
of the century.º 15 ªPicasso, the builder, re-peopled the earthÐ inventing new
beings.º 16 ªPicasso wasn’t even a painter, he was a volcano.º 17 Ashton traces
Guston’s pursuit of real-life Picassos from the Arensberg collection in Hollywood,
which he ® rst visited around 1930, to the Gallatin collection in New York in the
mid-1930s, to the 1940 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, to the Pulitzer
and Golschmann collections in St. Louis in 1946± 47. And around 1966± 68 he
turned to Picasso with new interest.18 But which Picasso, which spout of the volcano?
Ashton suggest s it was Picasso’s neoclassicism t hat most influenced the
Marlborough manner,19 and indeed Picasso’s female nudes of the early 1920s have
a cartoon clunkiness that must have delighted Guston. But if the ® gurative style of
the Marlborough works owes something to one Picasso, their compositional structure
is rooted in another, in the Cubist device of the ªpile-up.º 20 The jumble of legs,
shoes, and boards stuffed into the trash can of A Day’s Work is second cousin to the
crush of objects teetering on the table in Open Window. ªI taught still life in which
elements were constructed via Picasso and Braque,º Guston told Ashton of his
years in Iowa (1941± 45); he was especially enamored of later, Synthetic Cubist
pictures like Three Musicians (1921), which he had studied at Gallatin’s along with
Lger’s The City (which proposes its own kind of pile-up). 21 Given his bookish
14. For example, the black decorative pattern across the bottom of the picture represents both
the wrought-iron railing of the balcony glimpsed behind the table and the fringe of the tablecloth.
The ® rst reading makes more sense of the speci® c pattern, but the second is supported by the fact that
the pattern falls in front of the table legs.
15. Jan Butter® eld (interview with Guston), ªA Very Anxious Fix,º Images and Issues (summer 1980),
p. 31.
16. Musa Mayer, Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997), p. 181, citing
an undated fragment.
17. Joanne Dickson, ª Transcript of a Conversation with Philip Guston, May 14, 1980,º National Arts
Guide (November± December 1980), p. 38. Parts of this conversation are recorded in Blackwood’s ® lm.
18. Ashton, A Critical Study, p. 20, 40, 46, 72± 73, 145. When Ashton saw Riding Around, one of the
key pictures in the Marlborough show, ªthe ® rst thing I thought of was Picassoº (Dore Ashton, ª That Is
Not What I Meant At All,º Arts Magazine [November 1988], p. 68).
19. ª The manner of painting recalls Picasso and Lger in the period after Cubism, a period that
had always interested Guston. The manner is emphatic. The purpose is to present the object as ® rmly
as possible. . . .º (A Critical Study, p. 173) Guston had associated Picasso’s neoclassicism with his earlier
work: ªI did a Mother and Child that came out of Picasso’s Roman period. . . .º (William Berkson,
ªDialogue with Philip Guston,º Art and Literature: An International Review [winter 1965], p. 66).
20. I am borrowing this term from Archie Rand (ª The Victory of the Futile,º Arts Magazine
[November 1988], p. 62): ª When he [Guston] does poach an image, it is often from the sympathetic
metaphysical pile-up of painters like Alberto Savinio.º But I am arguing that it is the pile-up itself
Guston borrows, and directly from Cubism, not one of its offshoots.
21. Ashton, A Critical Study, pp. 53, 40. ªGuston himself remembers a tremendous effort to reconcile
® fteenth-century artists with Picasso, Braque, and Lger,º Ashton notes.
102 OCTOBER
temperament, it would not be surprising if he

had tracked down other major Picassos from
that period, such as Open Window.
Could Guston have seen this particular
picture? Before it arrived in Düsseldorf in 1966,
it was in the well-known collection of the artist
Mary Callery in New York. If Guston did not see
it at her home, perhaps he made the trip to see
the 1945 exhibit ion of her ªPicasso Lgerº
collection at the Philadelphia Museum. Or he
might have seen it at the Baltimore Museum,
where the picture was on loan with several
other Caller y paintings from 1959 to 1964,
especially since his friend Ashton wrote an
article about the loan (reproducing the paint-
ing) for the museum newsletter in 1961. Or he
might even have seen it in the pages of Cahiers
d’Art, where it appeared in 1931.22
Or was the whole t hing just a weird
coincidence, a bit more of the uncanny (in the
ever yday sense)? The visual ev idence that
Guston had relied on the Picasso did not seem
to rise above reasonable doubt, especially given
the simplicity of the marks in question and the
ubiquity of the grid in modernism. But then I came across a picture that had been
in front of my nose all along, Guston’s own Open Window (1969), which was included
in the Marlborough show and reproduced in the catalogue.
Like the grid, the open window is a famous device in modern art, from the
Fensterbildern of Friedrich to the abstract windows of Matisse and Motherwell.23 But
that did not explain what the spitting image of Picasso’s ªbuildingº with its telltale
brushstroke-windows was doing smack in the middle of Guston’s window. The only
real difference is that Guston renders the building in® nitely more tangible and
unambiguous, as if to say, ª Yes, it is a building after all (and here are a few more of
them).º But just to the right and the left of the window, the same brushstrokes
appear on stretched and hung canvases, making ® nished abstract pictures, as if to
add, ª Yes, but they are only marks (and voilà a short history of modernism).º In
short, the relationship between Guston’s Open Window and Picasso’s is too
22. The information in this paragraph is from Werner Schmalenbach, Bilder des 20.Jahrhunderts: Die
Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1986), p. 240. According to
Ashton (A Critical Study, p. 16), the Cahiers had become a bible for Guston and his friends starting in
1930, a pipeline connecting Los Angeles to the School of Paris.
23. In ªGridsº [1978], Rosalind Krauss locates an early appearance of the modernist grid in the
mullions of Friedrich’s windows. See her The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths
(Cambridge, Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 1985), p. 16.
Pablo Picasso. Open Window. 1919. © 2002 Estate of

Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
articulate and pointed (Guston’s signature is strangely centered, right below the
window, just like Picasso’s) to be accidental. But of course Guston is doing more
than just borrowing. The Picasso is a foil, and Guston is pointedly mistaking it,
announcing his difference from the master.
To begin with, there is the difference between opacity and translucency. In
Guston’s picture, ever y object , be it window shade or stretched canvas or
apartment building, is opaque and thick, as if objectness itself were de® ned by
those properties. Like a child who has just learned perspective, Guston registers
thickness with comical diligence by revealing just enough of the side of each
object to show its depth. This was the culmination of a dissatisfaction he had been
feeling in various ways since about 1960, as he explained in Blackwood’s ® lm:
ª What equipment did I lack? It was a stronger contact with the thickness of things.
I suppose I was reacting against being too imaginative and wanted everything to
come from things.º
Picasso’s picture, by contrast, is built from translucent planes without thick-
ness. Take the ªbuilding.º The fact that it seems to block out the dark rectangular
halo around the vase that intersects it at left suggests that it lies in front of the
vase, and is therefore no building at all but perhaps a newspaper held up to the
Guston. Open Window. 1969.

104 OCTOBER
sun with the bare outline of the vase visible behind it. Or is the dark halo the ¯ at
schematic side or shadow of the flat schematic building, glimpsed with the
building through the glass of the vase? Such is the logic, or illogic, of the whole
picture: with careful choices along the gray scale, Picasso orchestrates impressions
of overlay that are then contradicted by the play of shapes and contours. His Open
Window is all screens and shades whose spatial sequence is impossible to determine.
Translucency, which ªseems to promise an immediate communicability,º 24 ends up
producing a contest of hints, an interpretive openwork.
Of course, it is not exactly that the translucency creates the multiple readings;
they are a result of the semiotic principle, which Picasso lays bare, that meaning is
a matter of differences and relations. (Thus the square shape that functions as the
sound hole of the mandolin has a very different function when it appears to the
right in triplicate. 25) But translucency does encourage referential multiplicity,
creating a spatial analogue of semantic shifts. The identity of the ªbuildingº
would not be so uncertain if it did not seem composed purely of light, allowing it
now to ¯ oat forward of the vase, now to recede behind it into airy distance. The
picture is a play of substitutions, both spatial and semantic.
We are in the register of metaphor, which Jakobson de® ned, in distinction to
metonymy, as based on the association of similar, substitutable entities.26 To take
another example, the object to the right of the ªbuildingº seems to be either a
¯ owerpot or a skull depending on whether one reads the three ¯ oating squares as
solids or voids. I favor the skull, given the highlighting of the edge that nicely
turns the form, and the way the cheekbone seems to embrace the left-hand eye
socket. But the sockets ought to be dark: their lightness suggests ¯ owers, and the
ªjawº of the ªskullº looks more like a pot. Once again we are ® rmly between readings.
It is not that the ¯ owers are metaphors of the sockets or vice versa, as we might
expect in a poem. Picasso’s metaphorics is more egalitarian: each is a metaphor of
the other, in fact an extended metaphor. If the squares are blossoms, then the
central image is rain; if they are sockets, then it is a calendar or grim tally sheet,
and the large central oval is a mirror, a staple of vanitas images. For each object in
the picture we try one line of interpretation after another while the translucency
of Picasso’s planes keeps our metaphoric gaze a¯ oat.
In Guston’s Marlborough manner we are also faced with case after case of
multiple identities (typewriter or board with nails, book or building, etc.). The
difference is that we feel sure that the object has a single ® xed identity, even if we
cannot decide what it is. This conviction of ® xity is encouraged by the opacity and
thingness of Guston’s handling, just as the feeling that all interpretive balls are in
the air is encouraged by Picasso’s juggling of planes. Or, to put the difference
24. Y ve-Alain Bois, ªKahnweiler’s Lesson,º in his Painting as Model (Cambridge, Mass. and London:
MIT Press, 1990), p. 74.
25. For a discussion of the arbitrariness of the sign in Picasso’s Synthetic Cubism, see ibid.
26. Jakobson, ª Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,º On Language, pp.
114± 33.
another way: the metaphorical substitutions in Guston, as in Picasso, are every-

whereÐ a book looks like a building looks like a painting, et ceteraÐ only these
substitutions are, thanks to Guston’s insistence on opacity, merely potential, waiting
to be realized in the next picture, or, as in his Open Window, in the next object within
the picture. As Guston says, ªa book could become heavy, like a stone or a buildingºÐ
could become, not (as with Picasso) is. In commentaries on post-1970 Guston, the key
word has been ªmetamorphosisº not ªmetaphor.º ªMetamorphosis, which Dante saw
as the most terrifying of all phenomena, takes over.º 27 And in metamorphosis, the
comparison is not simultaneous but sequential: a narrative, a rcit. Guston free-
associates on canvas: ªYou’re painting a shoe; you start painting the sole, and it turns
into a moon; you start painting the moon, and it turns into a piece of bread.º 28 ªThis
painting started out as a hand with a brush and it turned into a paw.º 29
The bare adequacy of Guston’s rendering and his economical recycling of
basic elements greases the skids of this metamorphosis, but so does the content.
As if in reaction to the scandal of the pictures’ ªlaconicº (recall that Guston liked
Rosenberg’s word) handling of their Klan theme, we ¯ y down the associative path
Guston offers. Hess was not wrong about A Day’s Work: the board with nails does
look like a typewriter after all, at least the one invented by Guston’s favorite
cartoonist, George Herriman, for the cockroach-poet Archy.30 But it is also the
head of a Klansman, or rather it was. The body and most of the vertical forearm
are still there (compare the other two ® gures) and the shape of the board still
conforms roughly to the size and shape of a hood, but there is no mistaking the
board for a hood. 31 ª When you paint things they change into something else,
something totally unpredictable.º 32 Metamorphosis is not only shocking but, at
least in Kafka (The Metamorphosis was one of Guston’s favorite stories33), irreversible.
It is a chain, not a switch.
27. Ashton, untitled essay in Philip Guston: New Paintings, exh. cat. (Boston: Boston University
School of Fine & Applied Arts Gallery, 1974), n.p. Storr (Philip Guston, p. 66) agrees: ª Thus, despite his
concern for facts and the apparent realism of his new imagery, Guston’s imaginative world was subject
to constant, urgent metamorphosis, and the state of any image represented but one possible incarnation
of its basic form.º See also Dabrowski (Drawings of Philip Guston, p. 39): ª The forms never have only one
meaning; they are multivalent symbols that, from their placement within the composition, can evolve
into an entirely different form and symbol. . . .º See also Kenneth Baker, review in Boston Phoenix (April
2, 1974): ªObjects recur in Guston’s painting with haunting regularity; and sometimes they change
identity from one picture to another.º
28. Guston, interview with William Berkson, ª The New Gustons,º Art News (October 1970), p. 44.
30. See Don Marquis, The Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel with Pictures by George Herriman (New
York: Doubleday & Co, 1950), p. 243. Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker (October 3, 1988) notes that
Guston and Robert Crumb both ªadapted a style that had been invented by George Herriman in the
1920s, in his illustrations for the Don Marquis Àrchy’ poems.º
31. Another such subreading is put forth by Kenneth Baker (ªPhilip Guston’s Drawing: Delirious
Figuration,º Arts Magazine [June 1977], p. 89), who sees in Guston’s ªsheriff’s head,º an untitled 1970
drawing related to the painting Sheriff of the same year, the secondary, unintended image of a ªsquat,
massiveº wooden door, ªanother image of closure.º
33. See Mark Stevens, ªA Talk with Philip Guston,º The New Republic (March 15, 1980), p. 26.
106 OCTOBER
No doubt it was this one-thing-after-another aspect of metamorphosis that

prompted Guston’s friend (and one of his best critics) Ross Feld to write that his
Marlborough manner was one of ªmetonymy, not metaphor.º 34 Jakobson de® ned
metonymy, in contrast to metaphor, as an operation based on the association of
contiguous, conjoinable entities. He related it to the horizontal axis of language,
e.g., the combinat ion of different parts of speech in a sentence, whereas
metaphor he related to the vertical axis, the implicit choice of each word in the
sentence from a stack of similar units. No doubt Guston’s insistence on physical
presence and novelistic detailÐ the pull-cord of the shade, the nails on the canvas
edgeÐ also led Feld to think of metonymy, which Jakobson associated with literary
Realism (in distinction to Romanticism and Symbolism, which for him were
essentially metaphoric): ªFollowing the path of contiguous relationships, the
Realist author digresses from the plot to the atmosphere and from the characters
to the setting in space and time.º 35 In Guston’s Flatlands (1970), Feld continues,
ªwhat you see is metonymy: objects placed next to each other, a sort of slum
neighborhood of the real.º
But if digression and metamorphosis are fundamentally metonymic, the
mechanism of Guston’s changes still seems metaphoric. The book with text turns
into a building with windows, or the hood with eye holes turns into a board with
nail holes, thanks not to contiguity but to similarity. The book is not a predicate, a
concomitant, a part, or a setting of a building; it looks like a building. In an
earlier essay Feld speaks of ªvisible metaphors here, enigmatic, but also utterly
explicit.º36 So what are we dealing with, metaphor or metonymy?
For Jakobson the distinction is not absolute, which is why he insists on
metaphor and metonymy as ªpoles.º No act of association is just metaphoric
(based on similarity) or metonymic (based on contiguity), for it has both positional
(syntactic) and semantic (meaningful) aspects, each of which themselves may be
marked by similarity or contiguity. Positional similarity obtains between words
that belong to the same or similar parts of speech (e.g., a proper noun and a
pronoun), while semantic similarity obtains between synonyms (which are always
positionally similar as well). Different parts of speech that could combine to form
a sentence have positional contiguity, while nonsynonymous words that might
follow one another in a chain of association have semantic contiguity (a very loose
category, it should be noted). ªIn manipulating these two kinds of connection
(similarity and contiguity) in both their aspects (positional and semantic),º
Jakobson concludes, ª an individual exhibit s his per sonal st yle, his verbal
predilections and preferences.º 37
34. Ross Feld, ªGuston in Time,ºArts Magazine (November 1988), p. 44.

35. Jakobson, ª Two Aspects of Language,º p. 130.
36. Feld, ªPhilip Guston,º in Philip Guston, exh. cat. (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art, 1980), p. 25. Feld is writing in 1980 about works from 1975, but he sees them as being of a piece with
the 1968± 70 works (which in 1988 he called metonymic), a re® nement of the same ªpersonal symbology.º
37. Jakobson, ª Two Aspects of Language,º pp. 129± 30.
If, taking Feld’s apparent vacillation about metonymy and metaphor in

Guston as a hint, we conclude that the ªpersonal styleº of the Marlborough works
is mixed, then perhaps Jakobson can help us describe it. It is easy enough to see
that Guston’s work has plenty of both semantic similarity (e.g., the book/building
metaphor) and semantic cont iguit y (e.g., the metonymy, one of Guston’s
favorites, of a single dangling lightbulb standing for the painter’s whole studio).
But can Guston’s paintings be said to have positional similarity and/or contiguity?
For that matter, does painting have positionality, i.e., syntax, at all? On the analogy
of parts of speech, one would need to identify different categories of pictorial
signs or marks and the rules for their combination, most likely an impossible task.
To stop here, however, is simply to force one language (pictorial) to obey the
definition of syntax appropriate to another (verbal). If painting does have a
syntax, it will be found not on the model of the linear, unfolding sentence, but in
the simultaneously present spatial array of the conventionally rectangular surface.
In other words, if verbal syntax speci® es rules of ordering, pictorial syntax should
specify rules, or at least principles, of placement. More than one theorist has
attempted to chart the different qualities and valences of the available positions
(center, axis, edge, corner, etc.).38 For now, however, let us be content with the
following conjecture, which proposes not an entire syntax of painting but simply a
division of the concept of pictorial syntax parallel to Jakobson’s division of linguistic
syntax:
depicted objects have positional (syntactic) similarity if they share the same set of
signifying marks (like the building and book in Picasso’s Open Window)
and positional (syntactic) contiguity if they are contiguous or clearly aligned (as
the paintings in Guston’s Open Window communicate with the buildings
and themselves along an implicit grid).
So Guston’s Open Window, at least in the realm of positionality or syntax, moves

away from its met aphor ically or iented ª sourceº (the Picasso) toward the
metonymic pole.
Once we realize this, the metaphoric pole of Guston’s Open Window begins to
fade altogether. True, the picture does propose at least one plausible semantic
similarity, that between a window with its sill and a tenement with its roof: a simple
inversion of one silhouette produces the other, and the operation is recom-
mended to us by the fact that the buildings are ªinº the window. But the principal
metaphoric claim of the image, that buildings look like paintings, is entirely
arbitrary, for the similarity (beyond the rectangularity they share with so many
things) is merely an artifact of Guston’s ubiquitous downward strokes. The
appearance of these marks in the paintings-within-the-painting is what makes the
38. See Meyer Schapiro, ªOn Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in
Image-Signs,º in his Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society: Selected Papers, vol. 4 (New York:
George Braziller, 1994), especially pp. 12± 22.
108 OCTOBER
paintings look like the buildings next door. It is as if the marks that Guston used
to represent windows in a building or eye holes in a hood or letters of a text simply
slid onto an adjacent object, a painting on the wallÐ or, to put it the other way, as
if the marks remained ® xed in a st ate of potential signi® cation while various
objects (book, building, painting) slid under them, borrowing them as they went
to signify ªbookº or ªbuildingº or ªpainting.º
ª We are forced, then, to accept the notion of the incessant sliding of the
signi® ed under the signi® erºÐ I have admittedly been working toward Jacques
Lacan’s dictum, his image of language as a ªchainº that will always ªsignify something
quite other than what it says.º And this basic slipperiness of language, this dif® culty
that the signi® er and the signi® ed have in cleaving to one another, Lacan continues,
has a name: metonymy.39 So when Guston mistakenly calls the nails in A Day’s Work
red instead of black, the signi® er (red paint) had simply slipped from the contours
of the board, which are indeed red, to the nails within, which are not (and if we
follow Lacan, we are encouraged to believe that Guston’s slip was real, not planted,
since metonymy is the language of the unconscious). Guston’s slip reveals
slipperiness, or metonymy, to be the fundamental logic of the picture itself.
Let us begin again, with another slip:

The Marxist philosophy of the John Reed Club . . . interested my father
greatly. With his friend from Otis [Art Institute], Reuben Kadish, Philip
painted portable murals for the walls of the club on the plight of the
American Negro, speci® cally the famous case of the Scottsboro Boys. On
one occasion, the so-called Red Squad of the L.A. Police Department
broke into the club and shot out the eyes and genitals of a fresco he’d
painted depicting a black man being ¯ ogged by Ku Klux Klansmen.40
Guston’s daughter Musa Mayer is referring here, in her 1988 memoirs of her
father, to an incident that was documented in the February 13, 1933, issue of the
Los Angeles Illustrated Daily News. The newspaper photograph shows the situation
of two murals after the raid. The one on the left, which must be the work of
Kadish, has been methodically vandalized: ªA heavy instrument has been driven
through the head of each of the Negroes in a careful program of mutilation,º reads
the caption. In addition, the support has been ripped in a wide gash extending from
the mouth of the standing ® gure to his waist. Guston’s mural did not receive such
precise treatment. It seems to have been ripped in four places: one gash runs diago-
nally from the left eye of the Klansman across his hood and onto the left shoulder of
39. Jacques Lacan, ª The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason since Freud,º in his
Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1977), pp. 154± 56.
40. Mayer, Night Studio, p. 19.
the black ® gure, a parallel lower gash goes across the torso of the black ® gure, a third
obscures the area around his head, and a fourth extends between his knees.
Mayer must not have had this picture in front of her, for her description of
the damage is confused. There are indeed holes that could have been made by
gunshots (although the caption says a blunt instrument), but they are in Kadish’s
mural, not Guston’s, and they have been made on the ® gures’ foreheads, not their
eyes or genitals. Indeed, no genitals are depicted in either mural. The ripping of
Guston’s mural has effaced an eye, it is true, but rather haphazardly (the other
one is intact), and it belonged to the Klansman. The black ® gure did not have eyes
at all, for in the mural’s undamaged state, recorded in a photograph, his face is
largely hidden by the post to which he is tied. Mayer was describing something
that happened over a half-century ago, so she must have been relying on her
father’s account. 41 Indeed, Ashton reports: ªas Guston recalls with a shudder,
[they] shot out the eyes and genitals of the ® gures in his completed work.º 42
The ªsubstitutive relation between the eye and the male member,º and more
speci® cally between blinding and castration, is of course at the heart of Freud’s
41. It is also possible that Kadish’s memory may have in¯ uenced her, since she was married to his
son for about ten years.
42. Ashton, A Critical Study, p. 27. In ªPhilip Guston Talking,º Guston says simply, ªSome members of
the Klan walked in, took the paintings off the wall and slashed them. Two were mutilated.º This
appears to be the most accurate report, except that Guston means Red Squad, not Klan. In the
Blackwood ® lm, which pans over both the newspaper clipping and the photo of the mural before
damage, Guston says, ªwith lead pipes and guns [the KKK] shot through the eyes of a black guy being
whipped by a Klansman,º p. 52.
Left: Photograph, Illustrated Daily News, Los

Angeles. February 13, 1933. Right: Guston.
Fresco panel (destroyed). 1930 or 1931.
110 OCTOBER
theory of the Oedipus complex: ªIn blinding himself, Oedipus, that mythical law
breaker, was simply carrying out a mitigated form of the punishment of castrationÐ
the only punishment that according to the lex talionis [law of retribution] was
fitted for him.º 43 We are back at the uncanny, for this declaration occurs in
Freud’s essay of that name in the course of his brilliant analysis of E. T. A.
Hoffmann’s story ª The Sand-Man,º the tale of a young man who is haunted for
years by his nanny’s threat: If you do not go to bed a man will come to throw sand
into your eyes and then steal them.
In the story, the young man, having associated the sand man with his
father, ® nds himself unable to have a successful sexual relationship following
his father’s early death and finally kills himself. Freud takes this plot as evi-
dence for the Oedipal equat ion of castrat ion and blinding, and, more
generally, as a reason to adopt Schelling’s definition of ªuncannyº or (in
German) unheimlich as ªsomething which ought to have been kept concealed
but which has nevertheless come to light.º Freud concludes that ªan uncanny
exper ience occur s either when repressed infant ile complexes have been
revived by some impression, or when the primitive beliefs we have surmounted
seem once more to be con® rmed.º 44
Guston’s spontaneous production of Freud’s blinding-castration equation
in misremembering the events surrounding his Scottsboro mural, along with his
dread at the recollection (Ashton’s ªwith a shudderº), strongly suggests the
return of Oedipal material. This leads to several questions. What in the mural
triggered this return of the repressed? Exactly what returned? And speaking of
returns, what do we make of the return of the hoods themselves to Guston’s art
in 1968± 70? This last quest ion is central to any consideration of Guston’s
Marlborough manner.
Behind Guston’s Scottsboro mural lurks another painting, Conspirators (ca.
1930), which Guston exhibited in 1933 in a Los Angeles bookstore and sold to
its owner.45 This was the twenty-two-year-old painter’s ® rst exhibition and ® rst
sale. The painting is lost but a photograph remains and so does a preparatory
drawing from 1930. Clearly, Guston used only a part of the drawing for the
paintingÐ the rear group of Klansmen, which he condensed from eight ® gures
to three. The Klansman in the foreground of the drawing he used not for the
painting but for the mural, translating the ® gure quite directly in its general
pose as well as the rendering of the hood, the left hand, and the drapery below
the waist (which in turn recalls the drapery of the seated ® gure in Picasso’s Three
Women at the Spring, [1921]). The principal change in the ® gureÐ the raising of
the right hand to whip the victimÐ is an adaptation to the demands of the new
subject, and a rather awkward one at that, since the persistence of the old pose
43. Freud, ª The Ùncanny,’ º p. 383.

44. Freud, ª The Ùncanny,’ º pp. 401, 394, 403.
makes the whipping action seem directed to a

nonexistent figure on the Klansman’ s left
rather than the one on his right. This suggests
that the mural may have been a rush job. But
for wh ate ve r r ea s on, t h e d r aw in g for
Conspirators is emphatically, even intrusively
p re s en t in t he m u r a l, s o t h e t r i g ge r fo r
Guston’s slip of memory about it can in some
measure be referred back to the drawing.
Th i s c r u c ia l w ork , wh i c h D a bro ws k i
placed at the beginning of the retrospective of
Guston’s drawings at the Museum of Modern
Art in 1988, has always struck me as deeply
au tobiograp hica l. No doubt my fe elin g is
partly the retroactive effect of knowing about
Guston’s embrace of the Klansman as an alter
ego in the Marlborough works. But it is also a
response to the somehow sympathet ic por-
trayal of the central ® gure, who is contemplating
a short length of hangman’s rope and perhaps
also the two irregular shapes at his feet. The
sensitive rendering of his shadowed hood and
the shadow it casts onto his body seem like the
analogue of a troubled reflection spreading
outward, the psychic becoming somatic.
Behind this autobiographical mood lies, I
believe, a specific content, namely the most
harrowing event of Guston’s life, the suicide of
his father some seven years earlier. The story is
not often told (Ashton omitted it entirely from
her monograph, possibly at Guston’s request)46
but Guston’s daughter recounts it:
My grandfather’s despair worsened
until finally, in 1923 or 1924 (the
exact date isn’t certain), he took his
own life. It was my father, then ten
or eleven, who found his father, the
body hanging from a rope thrown
over the rafter of a shed. Sometimes,
decades later, when Philip was deeply
depressed or drunk, or both , h e
46. Guston reviewed the ® rst draft in 1974 and worried to Ashton in a letter: ªDo you think the
Top: Guston. Conspirators . ca. 1930. Bottom:

Guston. Drawing for Conspirators. 1930.
112 OCTOBER
would mention his father’s suicide to close friends. ªCan you imag-
ine how it feels to ® nd your father like that?º he would ask.47
One of the people in whom Guston con® ded was the poet William Corbett: ª That
March [1980] Philip told me that he had found his father . . . dead, hanging from a
rope `thick as a hawser’ and had cut him down.º 48 Perhaps not surprisingly, few
commentators have broached this horrible subject. Michael Auping is an exception,
but he quotes from Mayer’s account only to note that ªevaluating the effects of
such a brutal experience on so young a person is dif® cult, if not impossible.º 49
One dif® culty, aside from the overwhelming nature of the psychological
material, is the entanglement of private and public trauma in this drawing. As
Marjorie Welish has pointed out, Guston proposed quite deliberately ªto align
political awareness with personal painº throughout his career.50 This alignment
came naturally to him: for a Jewish boy growing up in Los Angeles between the
wars, the Klan was a real threat. Ashton writes: ªAt the time Guston was working
on this painting [Conspirators] it was estimated that there were 4.5 million
members of the Klan in the United States, a great many of them residing in Los
Angeles, where they burned crosses and raised hell all during Guston’s child-
hood and youth.º 51 Guston said, ª 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 ¯ oggings, cruelty and evil.º 52 As this state-
ment suggests, from the very first Guston’s pictorial imaginings of the Klan
went beyond his direct experience to include the greater violence the Klan was
perpetrat ing in the South against blacks. And the drawing for Conspirators
embraces a larger history still, comparing lynching to crucifixion and from
there calling up art-historical precedents then very much on Guston’s mind,
from Piero to de Chirico.
Into this already rich territory of the drawing enters the episode of the
suicide of Guston’s father, principally by means of the rope, ªthick as a hawserº
frequent use of `crisis’ and ànxiety’ gives the impression that I am in constant pain?º (Mayer, Night
Studio, p. 105). A similar worry might have impelled him to delete the central tragedy of his life from
the book. A manuscript with Guston’s annotations exists, but I have not seen it.
47. Ibid., p. 12.
48. William Corbett, ª What a Miracle Images Are!,º Arts Magazine (November 1988), p. 51. A hawser
is a rope for mooring ships.
49. Michael Auping, ªA Disturbance in the Field,º in Philip Guston: Gemälde 1947± 1979, exh. cat.
(Bonn: Kunstmuseum Bonn, 1999), p. 28. Auping goes on to emphasize the Scottsboro mural incident
as another great trauma of Guston’s young life (p. 31): ª The experience of seeing the effect of art on
life and life on art never left Guston.º I could not agree more with Auping’s assertion of the signal
importance of these two episodes.
50. Marjorie Welish, ªI Confess: The Drawings of Philip Guston,º Arts Magazine (November 1988), p.
48. She continues: ªEarly on in his career, the theme of confession takes the form of assuming the
burden of political guilt on behalf of the polis. Later in life . . . [he] portrays the individual admitting to
sin.º I am arguing that on some level Guston was doing the latter all along.
51. Ashton, A Critical Study, p. 7.
52. Mayer, Night Studio, p. 149, from notes for a 1977 lecture.
indeed, needlessly thick for the task at hand, and having far more physical pres-
ence than anything else in the scene. The rope disappears abruptly on the far
side of the Klansman’s left thigh before reemerging below his knee, creating an
apparent cut that recalls the fact that Guston had had to cut his father down
from the rafter. The fact that the cruci® x in the background is steeply angled
implies that a deposition (literally a ªtaking downº), not just a cruci® xion, is
present in the image as well as in the mind of its central actor (given that the
angle mirrors that of his inclined head). In this context of tragic, sin-struck
reflection, the gesture of holding the rope, indeed fingering it, recalls the
telling of the rosary, and the two blocks at the Klansman’s feet, one supporting
the carefully draped rope, suggest the pieces of a puzzle that do not quite ® t
together.
If we treat more schematically the relationship between the drawing and
Guston’s report of ® nding his father and deposing him (and we should remember
that it is only a report, with all that that implies about factual distortion and
psychological truth), if we overlay them like two screens, then two equations
become evident: ® rst, the equation between a Klansman (or Klansmen) hanging a
black man and Guston’s father hanging himself; and second, the equat ion
between a Klansman cutting down a black man and Guston cutting down his
father. In the fir st equation, the father is identified with both perpetrator
(Klansman) and victim (black man); in the second, Guston displaces his father in
the role of perpetrator, leaving the father to occupy the role of victim only. But
these two equations are not equally present in the drawing. The first one is
embodied by the group in the middleground, the conspirators of the title, while
the second is embodied by the dominating foreground ® gure. Indeed, we might
read the drawing in early Renaissance fashion as a progression of three temporal
moments distributed through pictorial space: Conspiracy (middleground),
Lynching (background), and Deposition and Expiation (foreground). These
three moments/locales are formally united by the vector of the cruci® x rising
from a fourth space (far background) to nearly link up with the main Klansman’s
hood (foreground)Ð although, given the anachronism of this irruption, one
might say it comes from another space and time entirely, a (Christian) prehistory
symmetrically opposed to a (contemporary) aftermath.
By placing the aftermath in the foreground, Guston gives prominence to
the second equation, that between the Klansman cutting down the black man
and Guston cutting down his father. This second equation allows Guston to
assume the guilt for his father’s suicide by identifying himself with the Klan and
its lynchings; but it also allows him to achieve some measure of identi® cation
with his father through the very fact that in assuming the role of Klansman he
has taken the place that was his father’s in the ® rst equation. Support for this
latter ide nt ific at ion (Gus ton e qu als fat h er) c an be found in Gu ston ’ s
contemporaneous painting Mother and Child. The mother holds the child with
the same hands (slightly rotated) that the Klansman holds the rope, and her pose is
Guston. Mother and Child. ca. 1930.
the mirror image of his, suggesting a kind of pendant relationship between the two
works, a pair of parents.53
The Oedipal wish, then, appears in the Conspirators drawing in the consciously
acceptable form of guilt mixed with melancholy.54 This melancholy is conveyed
not just by the central ® gure’s lassitude and empty ® xation, but in the iconography
as well, for he is posed, and disposed, in a way similar (in reverse) to the ® gure in
one of the prints that always hung in Guston’s studio, Dürer’s Melancholia. 55
Backed by walls, both ® gures seem lost in meditation, heads bent, hands forgotten
and ® ddling. The shaded blocks at the Klansman’s feet are a distorted recollection
of the large geometrical solids, spherical and pentagonal, in Dürer’s image, and
the angled cruci® x has its counterpart in an angled ladder in the print, also
pointing at the protagonist’s head.56
53. Ashton notes (A Critical Study, p. 7) that the painting is based in large part on Max Ernst’s Virgin
Chastising the Christ Child.
54. Freud saw melancholy as mourning interrupted and diverted by narcissist ic regression.
(ªMourning and Melancholia,º Collected Papers 4, pp. 152± 70.) He observed that melancholia and mania
often go together (pp. 164± 66), as they certainly did for Guston, who wrote (describing with apparent
innocence a chronic manic-depressive condition), ªthe counterpart of melancholy can become
unbearable excitement. . . . You’d think I’d be familiar by now with all these going onÐ but that’s not
the way it works, is it?º Letter to Ashton, August 11, 1975, cited in Mayer, Night Studio, p. 172.
55. See Ashton, A Critical Study, pp. 54± 56.
56. Much later, in 1968, the Dürer will return to provide another springboard in addition to
Cubism for Guston’s investigation of logic of the pile-up.
And if melancholy and guilt cover the underlying complex in Guston’s

drawing, then the uncanny effects will be subtleÐ a matter of the way that all life
in the scene seems to have migrated from the colorless ® gures into the barely pink
bricks, and death into the slightly sallow ¯ agstones, or the way that the posts
surmounting the wall, in addition to being a classic defensive multiplication of the
phallus, take on an anthropomorphic, watching quality. (Freud noted that the
confusion of organic and inorganic, and of living and dead, were characteristic
features of the uncanny.) We are dealing in short with a private, unmastered
uncanny, not a public, theatrical one. The psychic material has risen not into the
full light of day, but only into the preconscious half light of anxiety and foreboding.
When Freud writes that the uncanny occurs ªwhen repressed infantile complexes
have been revived,º he leaves it pointedly unclear as to how far that revival may
extend into consciousness.
Exactly what might have triggered the return of this psychic material is hard
to say, but since 1930, the year of the drawing, Guston took his ® rst steps toward
professional and romantic maturity, which certainly means that conditions were
favorable for a resurgence of an Oedipal struggle with an absent father over whom
(with his suicide) too easy a victory had been won. The year 1930 was a huge year
for Guston. He left home (though not L.A.), met his future wife Musa McKim, and
became involved in radical politics. It was probably also the year that his older
brother died of gangrene after being hit by a car, a shock that must have
redoubled the trauma of his father’s death.57 And in 1930 Guston began his post-
secondar y study of art, at Otis Art Institute and then privately with Lorser
Feitelson, discovering the modernists in the Arensberg collection and the artists
of the Italian Renaissance, the two sets of masters who would stay with him as a
distinctly paternal pantheon.58
Thus the mixed feelings that must have accompanied the young boy’s discovery
of his dead fatherÐ guilt, anger, shock, betrayalÐ found belated expression in the
double-edged identi® cations activated by and ranked in the very structure of the
Conspirators drawing. The drawing captures a crucial symbolic substitution of son for
father (and thus an equation as well), one whose con¯ ictedness is proven by the fact
that Guston proceeded to split the structure back in two, using the middle-
ground ® gures for the painting and the foreground ® gure for the mural. (Here it is
worth noting that Guston’s pre-1948 ® guration was explicitly received as symbolist.)59
57. Mayer, Night Studio, p. 17. She writes that Guston’s ªleaving home at seventeen º (he was born in
1913) ªmust have been close to the time of Nat’s death.º
58. Guston’s ® lial relationship to the old masters is clear from an interview near the end of his life.
ªQuestion: Mr. Guston, 500 years from now, in the history of art, if you could be remembered for just
one thing, what would you like it to be? Guston: I would like to be in the same place as Goya would be,
where Manet would be, and where Czanne would be. I wouldn’t mind a pat on the back from them
saying, `Not bad, sonny! Pas mal.’º See Dickson, ª Transcript of a Conversation,º pp. 38± 39, and the
Blackwood ® lm.
59. See, for example, the article in Life magazine of May 27, 1946, ªPhilip Guston: Carnegie winner’s
art is abstract and symbolic.º In 1949 J. L. Shadbolt called Guston a ªnew symbolist.º
116 OCTOBER
A crucial symbolic subst itu t ion: We seem to be back at Jakobson’ s

met aphor ic pole. If, as I proposed earlier, the distinct ive sign of pictorial
metaphor is positional similarity de® ned as two objects occupying the same set of
signi® ers,60 then the ® gure of the central Klansman is clearly metaphoric, for
under his hood he represents in condensed fashion both Guston and his father.
But it is not just at the level of formal grammar that the drawing is metaphoric.
Jakobson himself suggested that the metaphor-metonymy distinction might be
applicable to psychoanalysis (and every other sign system). Toward the end of the
essay he briefly applies the distinction to Freud’s categories of dream work,
associating displacement and condensation with metonymy, identi® cation and
symbolism with metaphor. 61 It was Lacan who spun this suggestion into the
sketch of a theory.
Extending his de® nition of metonymy (see above) as the fate of language ªto
signify something quite other than what it says,º Lacan invokes the ªrailsÐ eternally
stretching forth towards the desire for something elseÐ of metonymy.º Thus metonymy
is not just a signifying but also a desiring chain, and metaphor (if I read correctly)
is the initial substitution that sets the chain in motion and continues to haunt it:
ªBetween the enigmatic signifier of the sexual trauma and the term that is
substituted for it in an actual signifying chain there passes the spark that ® xes in a
symptom the signification inaccessible to the conscious subject in which that
symptom may be resolvedÐ a symptom being a metaphor in which flesh or
function is taken as a signifying element.º Or, as Lacan suggests next, metaphor is
the ª suspension point of the signifying chain where the memor y screen is
immobilized and the fascinating image of the fetish is petrified.º 62 Whether
metaphor for Lacan is a symptom or a fetish, a behavior or an object, it is what
gets substituted for the repressed memory of a sexual trauma, allowing desire
(metonymy) in some fashion to continue functioning.
If the fundamental trauma according to Freud is the threat of castration and
the fetish is a phallic substitute, in Lacan’s abstracting reinterpretation the sexual
trauma is rooted in a manque (lack) or what he sometimes calls a manque-à-être
(which he translates as ªwant to beº). Metaphor attempts to reinstall being
through a substitution or condensation,63 but metonymy frustrates that move by
extending the initial substitution into an endless chain of displacements, a
ªveering off of signi® cation.º In this way Lacan, as he himself concludes, ªlinks
60. The difference between this and the centerpiece of Picasso’s Open Window is that this is a
ªsecond-order semiological system,º as Roland Barthes would have put it, for here it is a signi® ed (a
Klansman) and not just a signi® er (a grid of marks) that calls up two further signi® eds (Guston and his
father). See Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Hill & Wang, 1972), pp. 114± 15.
61. Jakobson, ª Two Aspects of Language,º p. 132.
62. Lacan, ªAgency of the Letter,º pp. 166± 67.
63. Here Lacan implicitly corrects Jakobson, who had linked condensation as well as displacement
with metonymy. Compare Lacan, ª Agency of the Letter,º p. 160, to Jakobson, ª Two Aspects of
Language,º p. 132. Perhaps Lacan did not want to mar his ªhomageº to Jakobson (see his note 20) by
pointing out his departure.
metaphor to the question of being and metonymy to its lack.º 64 Desire, one might
summarize, is metonymical, but to the extent that one is a fetishist it is metaphorical.
What Lacan’s gloss on Jakobson’s distinction suggests, indeed insists on, is
that far from being alternate ªpersonal styles,º metaphor and metonymy are
linked by a psychological logic that prescribes a movement between the two,
generally from the former to the latter. Earlier we found an instance of this move-
ment in the relationship between Guston’s Open Window and its Picasso source.
Now we are prepared to map it again, in the shift from the metaphoric structure
of the Conspirators drawing, via the abstractions of the 1950s and ’60s, to the
metonymic logic of the Marlborough manner, a manner marked not coincidentally
by the return of the Klan theme.
Guston is clear about why the hoods rode back into town in 1968: ª They
became my subject matter and I was ¯ ooded by a memory.º The memory, Guston
explains, was the Scottsboro mural incident, and what triggered the memory was
ªthe [Vietnam] war and the demonstrations.º 65 But as usual with Guston, the
political and the personal intertwine. Early in 1966 Guston stopped painting,
broke off an affair with a photographer, and moved with his wife from Manhattan
to Woodstock, New York, in an effort to rebuild his personal life and career. For
two years he did hundreds of drawings, alternating violently between abstraction
during the day and figuration at night, between what he called ªpureº and
ªobjectº drawings. In 1968 he decided in favor of ® guration and returned to
painting, and what followed were ªthe two most intense and proli® c years of his
whole careerº 66Ð an avalanche of books, shoes, cars, buildings, all revolving
around the hoods. Guston described them this way:
They are self-portraits. I perceive myself as being behind a hood. In the
new series of ªhoodsº 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. Then I started conceiving an imaginary city
being overtaken by the Klan. I was like a movie director. . . . Then I
started thinking that in this 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.67
64. Lacan, ªAgency of the Letter,º pp. 160, 175.

66. Mayer, Night Studio, pp. 131± 42, 149.
67. ªPhilip Guston Talking,º pp. 52± 53.
118 OCTOBER
The most emblematic, programmatic hood painting is The Studio of 1969,

which appears to show a Klansman painting his own portrait. If the hoods them-
selves are self-portraits, as Guston always suggested, then this is a self-portrait
squared, a doppelgänger producing his own double (and here we should recall
that Freud considered the theme of the double a cardinal instance of the uncanny
in ® ction68). The result is a double-hooding or distancing, a simultaneous donning
and denying of an alter ego. This accords well with the ambivalence in Guston’s
Guston. The Studio. 1969.

statement above, in which, while admitting that the Marlborough hoods were
more personal than his earlier Klan ªillustrations,º he assumes the roles of movie
director and satirist, as if to fend off any breast-baring confession. And of course
the cartoon-like rendering has the same emotionally distancing effect.
There is a telling photograph of Guston in his studio with The Studio. The
artist (Guston) points with a cigarette-wielding hand to the artist (Klansman) who
points with a cigarette to the artist (his emergent self-image) while painting him
with the other hand. This instigation of a chain of identities is at odds with the
logic of the self-portrait, which proposes an enclosed dyad of artist and image
directly regarding one another. In Guston’s picture of a self-portrait in progress
there is something amiss: The image of the artist is not looking back at its creator
but rather mimics his left-facing pro® le. This is surely a joke about the conventional,
stereotypical appearance of his Klansmen, almost always caught in Egyptian
pro® le, but it is also a recon® guring of the genre of self-portrait into a series of
displacements or metonymies. (The relation of this to the screen or displacement
that Lacan operates within the gaze is striking, but I will not belabor it.) It is, as
Guston himself said, ªa very sophisticated picture.º 69 And it could not be farther
from the enclosed and fundamentally metaphorical circuitry of the disguised
double portrait (self and father) of the Conspirators drawing.
The structure of a metonymic chain so clearly announced in The Studio is
central to the Marlborough manner. It is even re¯ ected in the episodic, additive
syntax of Guston’s statement above (ªthen I started thinking . . . then I started
conceiving . . .º). The pictorial equivalent of this is the implied lateral movement
69. ªPhilip Guston Talking,º p. 53. It might be objected that the Klansman is not painting his self-
portrait but another Klansman. As Guston said, they ªpaint each other or paint self-portraits.º But this
indifference is just the point: It doesn’t matter, since the Klansman are not individuals, but simply
slightly varied links of a chain.
Guston with The Studio. 1969.

Photo by Frank Lloyd.
120 OCTOBER
across the canvas found in all of Guston’s Marlborough work. The Klansmen are
never really just ªr iding aroundº (the title of one of the key works in the
Marlborough exhibition, which depicted three Klansmen in their convertible
driving right out of the picture); they are riding through, emphatically pointing
and looking across the space at right angles to the beholder’s line of vision. When
they are on their feet, they tend to wander busily at cross-purposes. They embody,
even thematize, pictorial metonymy, the ªpositional contiguityº of one thing next
to another, leading to another, pointing at another. (And the fact that the hoods
rarely have bodies, that they stand for whole ® gures, is a perfect part-for-whole
metonymy, thus an instance of ªsemantic contiguity.º)
For Guston to adopt this kind of vectored narrative structure in 1968 was a
departure almost as great as his embrace of a demotic, cartoon-like ® guration. One
has to go back to paintings like Gladiators (1938) or Martial Memory (1941) to ® nd
equally strong lateral movements. In the ® fties this kind of movement all but
disappeared from Guston’s workÐ not because he turned to abstraction, but because
of the type of abstraction he turned to. In every picture there is an insistence on
centered and frontal presentation, which only gets stronger the more Guston puts
out compositional feelers from center to edge. Indeed a virtual contest between
forms for the center develops in the later 1950s, with acid colors trying to make
inroads by sometimes going around, sometimes crawling directly over competing
hues, producing a characteristic central thicket. This game of king-of-the-hill is the
abstract equivalent of what I de® ned earlier as positional similarity, or rather it is the
struggle for it.
The structurally metaphoric aspect of this effort of each form to displace or
substitute for another is thrown into relief by a rare ® gurative drawing from the
period, Head: Double View of 1958. David McKee, Guston’s devoted dealer, notes of
this drawing that Guston ªconsidered it to be the ® rst manifestation of the head and
the beginning of his disaffection with abstraction.º 70 The drawing takes Picasso’s old
trick of condensing front view and pro® le and radicalizes it by multiplication,
turning the face into a grimacing, illegible road map.71 Rather than the double
view of the title, we get a view whose multiplicity is barely contained by the head’s
outline. At the same time the drawing, in its pulling apart of the face, inaugurates
a disarticulation of the center, something that Guston took further in other
drawings that year, such as Drawing No. 21, which he signi® cantly retitled ªForms
in Changeº at the time of his 1980 retrospective. 72 The ferment is veri® ed in
Mayer’s memoirs: ªDuring the last three years of the decade, Philip painted
dozens of small gouaches and oils. When his work was changing rapidly, my father
70. David McKee, artist’s questionnaire prepared for the Department of Drawings, Museum of
Modern Art, July 24, 1984, cited in Dabrowski, The Drawings of Philip Guston, p. 47, n. 23.
71. Or is it a portrait of Guston’s friend the composer John Cage? The shape of the head and the
prominence of the ears recall Guston’s ca. 1955 caricature of Cage, reproduced in Storr, Philip Guston,
p. 31.
72. Philip Guston (San Francisco, 1980), pl. 28, which gives both the old and the new titles.
often worked smallÐ as he did again,
a decade later, producing a ¯ ood of
small panels of shoes and booksÐ as if
gathering momentum for the state-
ment of larger work.º 73
The larger work was a series of
paintings in gray, relieved at ® rst by
orange, red, blue, and green, then
(from 1963 on) only by pink, which
Guston showed at his Jewish Museum
exhibition in 1966. They were distin-
guished by one or more ¯ oating dark
blobs, often central but never quite
centered, that Guston referred to,
with some reservation, as heads: ªSometimes I know what they are. . . . But if I
think `head’ while I’m doing it, it becomes a mess . . . I want to end with something
that will baf¯ e me for some time.º 74 The referential lability of the ªheadsº was echoed
by their locational one. Guston said he was after an image that ªmust feel as if it’s
been in many places all over this canvas, and indeed there’s no place for it to settleÐ
except momentarily. . . .º 75 This was a deliberate working method, as Arnason reports:
ªHe was painting rapidly and continuously and increasingly felt that he was living in
the painting. As the forms shifted from place to place, were scraped out, reconsti-
tuted, developed new relationships with other forms, they acquired a past, a history
which became part of their existence and motivation in the ® nished work.º 76
74. Berkson, ªDialogue with Philip Guston,º p. 66.
75. Helmut Wohl, ªPhilip Guston and the Problems of Painting,º Harvard Art Review (spring± summer
1967), pp. 28± 30.
76. H. H. Arnason, ªPhilip Guston,º in Philip Guston, exh. cat. (Guggenheim Museum, 1962), p. 33
(based on his 1962 interview with the artist).
Above: Guston. HeadÐ Double

View (Drawing No. 20). 1958.
Left: Guston. Afternoon. 1964.
122 OCTOBER
These works can be seen as a declaration of the rights of the individual

form over against the compositional whole, a dissent from the secretly strict
compositional dictates of ® fties ªgesturalº abstraction that Guston himself had
done much to put in place. First among these rights was that of freely erring
across the canvas. (Guston explained that he used white as a means of correcting
and moving the black forms, thus the resulting ® eld of grays.) His regret over the
ªloss of the objectº in contemporary art and his longing to restore ªthe thickness
of thingsº 77 led to a mode of organization in which newly enfranchised forms
attracted and repelled one another in their wanderings, drawing near but
(unlike the works of the late 1950s) avoiding all overlapÐ another instance of the
connection between opacity and metonymy (positional contiguity) that we saw in
Guston’s Open Window.
As Ashton implies, it was the meandering structure of the gray paintings that
anticipated the Marlborough manner : ª Those drunken shapes, shambling
through the large paintings or sitting incongruously in the midst of nowhere in
the small gouaches, were the prototypes of later, frankly satirical works.º 78 This is
not to say that all the Marlborough works are compositionally errant. In The Three,
77. Ashton, A Critical Study, p. 111; Blackwood ® lm.
Guston. The Three. 1970.

for example, partly shadowed hoods and the buildings behind them are neatly
rendered by an interlocking structure of white, gray, and (inverted) red triangles.
What could be more classical? But this monumental group of ® gures towering
above the horizon, far from being static, is given a lateral shove by the pointing,
gesticulating riders and by the strip of sky that dislodges them from the right
edge of the painting.
Where are the hoods going in all their metonymic motion? We have been
tracing one rather formalist and genealogical answer, namely that they were escaping
the impacted, condensed abstractions of the late fifties, with the transition
provided by the early-sixties gray paintings. Of course, this answer undoes its own
formalism as soon as one recalls that this transition from a ªmetaphoricº or
centered to a ªmetonymicº or displaced abstract structure coincided with the
obtrusion of a human or psychological image, ® rst in Head: Double View of 1958
and then with the ªheadsº of the gray paintings. Which in turn suggests that the
metonymic hoods may equally have been escaping an earlier metaphoric struc-
ture/image, the uneasy condensation of father and son in the Conspirators drawing.
Guston made a point of showing that drawing and commenting on it in his
1978 University of Minnesota lecture:
This drawing (for the Conspirators) was done in 1930. I discovered it
about ® ve years ago in a drawer, in a package of old drawings. It’s a
sketch for one of the early Klan paintings, 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 ® nished, nothing is ever ® nished until you leave.
Here Guston reveals that he had lost track of the drawing until about 1973, and
he takes the rediscovery as evidence of his circling unconsciously around the same
themes over the years. It’s a moving statement, partly because of the contradiction
between Guston’s sense of a return and his insistence that the ªlater Klan paintings
are totally differentº from the earlier ones, which he had called illustrations. Of
course, the Conspirators drawing is about as far from mere illustration as one can
get, as we have seen. In fact, insofar as it is a self-portrait, it is totally the same as the
later Klan paintings.
Is it simply an accident that this drawing had such a checkered historyÐ
that the painting it proposed was never really executed; that the psychologically
central ® gure of the Klansman holding the rope was dropped when the image
was split into two destinations, an easel painting and a mural (one of which was
vandalized and both of which were eventually lost); that the drawing was itself
lost by Guston until 1973? Is it too much to suggest that the ªlossº was a moti-
vated slip Ð that the psychical- structural met aphor ic of the drawing was
something that Guston simply could not face, at least not until 1973, after the
Klansmen rode back out of town for good (ªwhen I came back [from Italy], I had
finished with the hoods, they were done, you can’t redo a thing once it’s
124 OCTOBER
doneº 79), at which point he rediscovered the drawing simply by pulling it out of a
drawer? Isn’t it conceivable that the drawing was not really lost, but remained
present as a central absence in Guston’s career, a vanishing point from which
much of his subsequent work was projected?
I have skipped a moment between Conspirators and the Marlborough show

when the Klansmen brie¯ y poked their heads up: Guston’s Tormentors of 1947± 48.
As in 1930 and 1968, they came at a crisis in Guston’s life:
He had, by the age of thirty-four, won most of the major honors avail-
able to American artists of the time. He was deeply admired by students
and colleagues . . . [but] Guston’s sense of having completed a phase in
his artistic life was profound enough to ® ll him with uneasiness. . . . He
was already mentally preparing for a struggle with himself that would
end, after two academic years in St. Louis [1945± 47], in what Guston
has at various times called a kind of breakdown.80
The timing is striking: since Tormentors was Guston’s farewell to ® guration and the
Marlborough hoods were his return, that means that these two (the only two) post-
1930s appearances of the hoods are bookends for Guston’s practice of abstraction
between 1948 and 1968. It is as if he needed the Klansman as a chaperon in the
passage back and forth between abstraction and ® guration, an apotropaic object, a
fetish.
Why the need for magic? Guston himself suggested an answer in 1978: ªI
think it’s the devil’s work. You know damn well you’re dealing with `forces.’ It’s
hubris. We’re not supposed to meddle with the forcesÐ God takes care of that. He
says cherish what I’ve made. The ten commandments tell us not to make graven
images.º 81 Guston (born Goldstein: he always felt bad about having changed his
name82) was Jewish enough that the Mosaic bilderverbot or image prohibition
carried a special sting. ª The dif® culties begin when you understand what it is that
the soul will not permit the hand to make.º 83 Recall too that Guston saw painting at
its best as God-like: Picasso ªre-peopled the earthÐ inventing new beings.º
In this internal debate, what weighed in favor of painting was the possibility
of bearing witness. In a public conversation with Morton Feldman at the New York
Studio School in 1969, Guston began by proposing that the sole psychological

80. Ashton, Yes, But, cited in Mayer, Night Studio, pp. 37± 38. Although Mayer’s footnote does not
clearly say so, this passage must be drawn from Ashton’s 1975 manuscript rather than the published
book, in which the last sentence does not appear.
81. Dickson, ª Transcript of a Conversation,º p. 39.
82. See Mayer, Night Studio, p. 229.
83. Philip Guston, ªFaith, Hope and Impossibility,º Art News Annual (1966), p. 101.
Guston. The Tormentors. 1947± 48.
motivation of Holocaust survivors had been the need to testify, and he went on to
turn this into a parable of the artist.84 This was a role ingrained in Guston since
his early days as a muralist with Siqueiros in Los Angeles and Mexico, and then,
albeit in less ªcommittedº fashion, as a very successful WPA muralist. But witness
was not always a viable option, as Guston’s turn to abstraction just after the war
indicates. If painting had to ªquestion itself constantly,º 85 his questioning in the
1950s took the form of an investigation of the medium itself.
What accounts for this refusal of representation after Tormentors, this retreat
into what Guston later referred to as ªa family club of art loversº?86 Was it the
impossibility of bearing witness so soon after the war? Was it the need to focus on
questions of painting without the distraction of ªcontentº? Was it the peer pressure
exerted by the examples of de Kooning and Pollock? OrÐ without denying these
possibilitiesÐ was the retreat Guston’s act of penance for having made illusionistic
images, an attack by the artist on his own eyes?
One of the main drawings for Tormentors features a rare combination of eyes
and hoods. The eyes at far left, heavy-lidded and flatly gazing (in a word,
84. Audio tape, New York Studio School library. Guston also said more than once that his piles of
shoes and legs, which appeared ® rst as the work of the Klan (in paintings like A Day’s Work) and then
rose up in the mid-1970s to became horrible self-supporting monuments, were his response to photos
of the liberation of the camps.
85. ªI have an uneasy suspicion that painting really doesn’t have to exist at allÐ I mean, it didn’t
come down from Mount Sinai; it’s not written in the ten commandmentsÐ unless it questions itself
constantlyº (ª Philip Guston Talking,º p. 50).
86. ª Too much of a collaboration was going on. It was like a family club of art loversº (ªPhilip
Guston Talking,º p. 50). Also: ªI got sick and tired of all the Purity! wanted to tell Stories!º (Berkson,
ª The New Gustons,º p. 44).
126 OCTOBER
melancholy), avert themselves from a jumble of hoods with blank, armor-like

visors made by the semicircles of horseshoes or hobnailed boot soles. A strongly
modeled arm gropes from left to right across a kind of ® rewall to grasp a central
hood. Further right the hoods lose de® nition, trail off, become no more than
disconnected, triangular thoughts about structure. (In the painting this narrative
is entirely suppressed thanks to the elimination of both the head and arm.) We
are witnessing the birth of a reaction-formation, another kind of magic. Guston
flees the reappearance of the Klansman with his load of impossible Oedipal
material by, of all things, donning his hood. Of White Painting (1951), arguably his
first total abstraction, Guston said, ªI forced myself to paint the entire work
without stepping back to look at it.º 87 This not quite white on white picture, which
also includes pale ochers, grays, and greens not mentioned in the title, presents
(far from the in® nities of Malevich’s White on White) a limit of visibility. We are
confronted everywhere by the texture of paint and canvas, in some sense a view
from inside the hood.88
87. Arnason, Philip Guston, p. 21.

88. I owe this suggestion to Sarah Boxer. The equation of raw canvas and white hood anticipates
Guston’s more explicit metaphorizations of painting, e.g., a bloody whip is a red paintbrush, of his
Marlborough period.
Guston. Drawing No. 1 (for Tormentors). 1947.

Feldman recalls an experi-
ence, probably in the mid-sixties,
of waking up from a nap he was
taking in Guston’s studio: ªHe was
still painting, standing almost on
top of the canvas, lost in it, too
close really to see it, his only reality
the innate feel of the material he
was using. As I awoke he made a
stroke on the canvas, then turned
to me, confused, almost laughing
because he was confused, and said
with a certain humorous helpless-
ness, `Where is it?’º 89 Guston was
paint ing discrete forms at this
point, or at least the ªthickness of
things,º but he was sure to keep it
all uncertain: ªI want my work to include more,º he told Harold Rosenberg in
1966. ªI am therefore driven to scrape out the recognition, to efface it, to erase it. I
am nowhere until I have reduced it to semi-recognition.º 90
No surprise then that Guston’s return to imagery in 1968 was so dif® cult.
Speaking of his two-year contest in 1966± 68 between figurative and abstract
drawings, he told Ashton, ªIt wasn’t a transition in the way it was in 1948, when
one feeling was fading away and a new one had not yet been born. It was two
equally powerful impulses at loggerheads.º 91 One of the ® rst hoods to emerge from
the struggle was Hooded Self-Portrait of 1969, one of the only cases (other than the
Tormentors drawing and the Conspirators works) of hoods and eyes in a single
image.92 He looks shell-shocked. The eye-holes reveal two staring pupils, one
normal and the other a cat-like vertical slit. For all subsequent Klansmen the slit
of the left eyeball becomes the slit in the hood itself, hiding the eyes. The mask
reached for by the arm in the Tormentors drawing is donned just in time to expiate
the Old Testament crime of picturing. The books (or buildings or bread boxes)
stand by in all their Mosaic tablets-of-the-law solidity, the ¯ oodgates open.
Guston woke each morning to create new adventures for his klan of
Klansmen. ªI was like a movie director.º What could be more God-like for a boy
from Los Angeles and an idolizer of Fellini, to whom he dedicated a major painting?
But of course, what Guston discovered was not some Edenic set of natural names,
some divine ªlanguage of thingsº (to recall Storr’s phrase), but a slippery mess.
With the logic of metonymy unleashed, each stroke represented not too little but
always possibly too much. Guston had traded the underrecognition of the gray
89. Ashton, A Critical Study, p. 105, citing Morton Feldman, ªAfter Modernism,º Art in America
(November± December 1971).
90. ªPhilip Guston’s Object: A Dialogue with Harold Rosenberg,º in Philip Guston: Recent Paintings
and Drawings, exh. cat. ( Jewish Museum, New York, 1966), n.p.
92. After writing this essay I saw another work like the Hooded Self-Portrait (also showing eyes under
the hood) in a private New York collection.
Guston. Hooded Self-

Portrait. 1969.
128 OCTOBER
paintings for the no-more-stable condition of overrecognition. Which is why he

was careful not to describe it as a simple movement from ambiguity to clarity: ªin
time I tired of this kind of ambiguityº; he was after a ªsharper enigma of solid
forms in an imagined space,º but an enigma still.93 Do the thick outlines and
chunky modeling of Guston’s return to ªrealismº really offer us anything more
convincing than the ¯ oating heads of the sixties? The new characters are ªthick
shellsº not solid presences, ªprops or symbols of peopleº waiting to be recognized
or not.94
For Guston, recognition was at once a perceptual problem and a historical
one. The same 1966 conversation in which he announced his desire to ªscrape out
the recognitionº included this exchange: ªRosenberg: You want to go into new
territory. Guston: New territory has to have recognition in it too. R: What kind of
recognition? G: It has to be new and old at the same time, as if that image has been
in you for a long time but you’ve never seen it before. When it comes out, it must
have this double experience in yourself.º 95 What is this kind of dja-vu but the way
we greet the uncanny when it comes across the threshold? And not just the
Freudian uncanny. Guston’s art allows us to think back together the psychoanalytic
and the gothic versionsÐ the uncanny as return-of-the-repressed and the uncanny
as anguished uncertainty, category confusion, a place where (recalling Freud’s
description of that view) ªone does not know where one is, as it were.º Guston
himself explicitly connected the problems of memory and locatability:
It’s the unsettling of the image that I want. . . . It must of necessity be an
image which . . . has not only not made up its mind where to be but
must feel as if it’s been in many places all over this canvas, and indeed
there’s no place for it to settleÐ except momentarily. Yet it must have
its past. It must feel as if it’s lived. A picture is ® nished when it’s in this
unsettled, hovering state; not indecisive, though, because it’s lived a
long time everywhere else, lived in me, lived in previous paintings of
mine, and now in this picture it’s in a new and very particular situation . . .
it’s won its freedom from inertia, you might say.96
This remark, made in 1967, applies equally to the wandering hoods of 1968± 72, the
wandering heads of the mid-sixties, and the purblind abstractions of the ® fties.
Guston’s invocation of ª unsettlingº br ings us back to the uncanny or
unheimlich, literally ªunhomelike,º which is not far from ªhomeless.º Guston

94. Alex Schwertfeger, ªPhilip Guston and the Expendable Conventions of Abstraction,º unpub-
lished student paper, Harvard College, May 24, 1999, p. 6.
95. Guston said much the same thing in 1960: ªI would like to think a picture is ® nished when it
feels not new, but old. As if its forms had lived a long time in you, even though until it appears you did
not know what it would look like.º ªPhiladelphia Panelº [transcript of a Philadelphia Museum School
of Art discussion, March 1960]: It Is (spring 1960), p. 36.
96. Wohl, ªPhilip Guston,º p. 30.
remarked once, ªClement Greenberg once said that some artists, like de Kooning
and me, were `homeless.’ He didn’t mean it as a compliment but we accepted it as
one.º 97 Actually, Greenberg had written not of homeless artists but ªhomeless
representation,º referring to the fact that the kind of strokes used by de Kooning
and Guston seemed to have a representational intention without a representational
effect.98 Guston’s slip in paraphrasing Greenberg makes reference to the immigrant
status he shared with de Kooning, and perhaps also to the fatherless condition he
shared with many of the other Abstract Expressionists.99 But as Freud pointed out
about the uncanny, ªthe pre® x ùn’ is the token of repression,º 100 and the same is
true of the suf® x ª± less.º The other side of Guston’s celebration of homelessness
is the ambivalent desire for a homecoming. 101
Nostalgia can be freezing and ® xating, ªthe place where the memory screen
is immobilizedº (recalling Lacan on the fetish), and Guston seems to have been
on his guard. In all his near-returns he found paradoxical reinvention, a ªfreedom
from inertiaº that exploded the most impacted psychological and historical
determinants. Perhaps what Merleau-Ponty said of psychoanalysis in applying it to
Czanne is equally true in the case of Guston: it ªdoes not make freedom impossible;
it teaches us to think of this freedom concretely, as a creative repetition of ourselves,
always, in retrospect, faithful to ourselves.º 102
97. Stevens, ªA Talk with Philip Guston,º p. 27.

98. Clement Greenberg, ªAfter Abstract Expressionism,º Art International (October 1962), p. 25.
Greenberg wrote that ª`homeless representation’ is neither good nor badº except if it ªhardens into
mannerismº (and here he mentioned the mid-® fties work of de Kooning, Guston, and Kline).
99. When Franz Kline was about eight years old his father committed suicide; when Mark Rothko
was about ten his father died; when Jackson Pollock was about nine his father abandoned the family
(and died twelve years later); and when de Kooning was about three his father left home due to a
divorce and had little further contact with his son. In addition, Arshile Gorky’s mother died before he
was ® fteen. No doubt there are other cases of the early loss of a parent among artists in this circle, yet
no interpretation has treated this striking commonality.
101. He once said about his 1968 revolution that he was hoping to recapture a sense of wholeness
remembered from childhood.
102. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ªCzanne’s Doubt,º in his Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Herbert L. and
Patricia A. Dreyfus (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1964).

Harry Cooper Recognizing Guston

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Harry Cooper Recognizing Guston

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Recognizing Guston (in four slips)*

A thing is recognized only as it comes into existence.

Guston, as always, tells a good story. He is giving a slide lecture at the

4. ªPhilip Guston Talking,º p. 53.

Guston. Untitled. 1968.

temperament, it would not be surprising if he

Pablo Picasso. Open Window. 1919. © 2002 Estate of

Guston. Open Window. 1969.

another way: the metaphorical substitutions in Guston, as in Picasso, are every-

No doubt it was this one-thing-after-another aspect of metamorphosis that

34. Ross Feld, ªGuston in Time,ºArts Magazine (November 1988), p. 44.

If, taking Feld’s apparent vacillation about metonymy and metaphor in

So Guston’s Open Window, at least in the realm of positionality or syntax, moves

Let us begin again, with another slip:

Left: Photograph, Illustrated Daily News, Los

43. Freud, ª The `Uncanny,’ º p. 383.

makes the whipping action seem directed to a

Top: Guston. Conspirators . ca. 1930. Bottom:

And if melancholy and guilt cover the underlying complex in Guston’s

A crucial symbolic subst itu t ion: We seem to be back at Jakobson’ s

64. Lacan, ªAgency of the Letter,º pp. 160, 175.

The most emblematic, programmatic hood painting is The Studio of 1969,

Guston. The Studio. 1969.

Guston with The Studio. 1969.

Above: Guston. HeadÐ Double

These works can be seen as a declaration of the rights of the individual

Guston. The Three. 1970.

I have skipped a moment between Conspirators and the Marlborough show

79. ªPhilip Guston Talking,º p. 53.

Guston. The Tormentors. 1947± 48.

melancholy), avert themselves from a jumble of hoods with blank, armor-like

87. Arnason, Philip Guston, p. 21.

Guston. Drawing No. 1 (for Tormentors). 1947.

Guston. Hooded Self-

paintings for the no-more-stable condition of overrecognition. Which is why he

93. ªPhilip Guston Talking,º p. 50.

97. Stevens, ªA Talk with Philip Guston,º p. 27.

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