Philip Guston's Poem-Pictures
Debra Bricker Balken
Untitled, Acrylic on paper, 1976
While Philip Guston always placed a premium on his friendships with poets and writers, during the late 1970s his literary relationships became especially meaningful. With the hostile critical reception to the quirky mix of imagery that began to flood his once abstract work around 1967/68, along with the New York School of painters disavowal of this development, Guston retreated from New York to the solitude of rural New York. His primary social and literary contacts were with a largely younger generation of poets which included Bill Berkson, Clark Coolidge, and William Corbett. These alliances had a tangible impact on Guston's late work: the texts of many writers were frequently incorporated as integral elements in his drawings, a feature that adds to their ambiguity and layers of content.
Philip Guston's Poem-Pictures (his own designation) comprise a remarkable body of work that has recently been assembled in an exhibition at the Addison Gallery of American Art. As a collective entity, these drawings number in the range of one hundred and twenty works, all of which date from around 1975/76. The Poem-Pictures incorporate passages, lines and, in some cases complete stanzas from poems by Berkson, Coolidge, Corbett, Musa McKim (Guston's wife), Stanley Kunitz (an old friend from the 1950s), among others, along with Guston's now trademark images of light bulbs, paint brushes, books, clocks, shoes and Cyclops-type heads that Guston recycled throughout his late work. As such, these drawings represent a form of collaboration that counter the ongoing modernist reading-with all their elaboration on subjectivity and the centrality of self-expression-that have been brought to bear on Guston's work.
Although no mutual decision-making or dialogue informs the generation of the Poem-Pictures-Guston clearly had the upper hand here-the conjunction of text and image on a single sheet of paper reads as a unit. For the first time, the artist shared the white space of his drawing paper with someone else. The emphasis in the Poem-Pictures is on interaction, connection and synthesis with the result that no one aesthetic viewpoint prevails. The possibilities for invention, for adding to the imagery of his late work, Guston realized, were greatly enhanced by the duality of image and language.
more Philip Guston poem-pictures
Philip Guston's Poem-Pictures opened at the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts, September 24, 1994 and remained there until January 8. It is now traveling nationally under the auspices of the American Federation of Arts.
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 Books in print by Philip Guston
 Books in print by Debra Bricker Balken
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