It's been a while since I laid my eyes on Philip Guston's paintings at the Tate. But I made notes. Plus, it was very memorable. After running through a few rooms of abstract paintings, I was stopped in my tracks by black and white drawings depicting books. The simple objects looked archaic, like stone tablets or ancient manuscripts. Guston had touched upon something. He called it "the thickness of things".
In the paintings that followed, the things didn't lose their thickness despite the pink peachy colours that took over the black and white. It was to be found in "Shoes. Rusted Iron. Mended rags. Seams. Dried bloodstains. Pink paint. Bricks. Bent nails and pieces of wood. Brick walls. Cigarette butts. Smoking. Empty booze bottles."
Guston's friends were shocked about his sudden turn in the sixties. John Cage said: "You were living such a beautiful country." Some were supportive: "What did they think? That we're all in a baseball team?" smirked Willem de Kooning. Guston himself didn't seem to care. In a documentary, his only regret is that he wasn't painting like this when he was thirty years old.
The world that Guston painted wasn't fun. Thickness has a gravity that pulls downwards, and so do the hooded Klansmen eating hamburgers, having a beer and driving cars. "I don't think it is pessimistic. It is doomed," says Guston. And he points out some white spaces in between the masses of pink flesh: "These little openings. Otherwise you couldn't breath."
That doesn't mean there is not a lot of joy to get from Guston's work. He himself was having a good time, and he says so repeatedly while looking at his work: "I really enjoyed myself painting this", "It was fun to paint". He remembers all the details, even the dinners around it. The Tate's exhibition A Life Lived has its title from a Guston quote: "Not so much a painting. It is a life lived."
And maybe that's what goes to the bone while looking at his work: "What you're doing, is trying to stay alive." There is something at work here, Guston calls it a rhythm that passes through him. What I felt was that if you come up close to the paintings, this rhythm will also pass on to you.