The artist is in his studio working on a self-portrait, a smaller version of this larger painting. He wears a Klansman’s white hood. It has vertical slits for eyes and hyphenated stitches, which he is getting down on canvas with one gigantic red hand, while the other totes a cigarette. The clock ticks, a bulb glows and the day is starting to fade. But still the painter keeps at it.
Philip Guston’s The Studio (1969) is such a fierce cartoon, wilfully awkward, self-satirising, all pictorial intelligence. It presents the artist as nicotine addict – fag and brush in jutting parallel (he chainsmoked Camels) – and as foolish antihero, trying to paint his own likeness in a hood. But Guston catches himself red-handed, complicit, fingers cocked like a gun. “I almost tried to imagine I was living with the Klan,” he wrote about the painting. “What would it be like to be evil?”
This mordant masterpiece (incidentally planted with homages to past artists, from Diego Velázquez to Kazimir Malevich) can be seen in Tate Modern’s magnificent Guston retrospective, notoriously delayed over supposed concerns about the hoods in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. American versions of this show have included trigger warnings and “additional perspectives” for anyone who cannot catch the tragic-comic tone of his powerfully anti-fascist art. Tate Modern is braver. It opens with a shocking photograph of 1920s Klansmen advertising “lectures” around town in a ludicrous jalopy and then leaves it all up to Guston.
The youngest of seven children, Guston was born in Montreal in 1913 and died of a heart attack in New York in 1980. His life keeps pace with modern art right through the first act of this show: cartoonist, surrealist, New Deal muralist, early member of the New York school, who shifts to Zennish abstract impressionist, before suddenly abandoning abstraction for the great, wild, nearly cartoons that shocked the art world (and lost him friends) in the 1960s. He was, he said, embarrassed to be fiddling about with ethereal tones with news of Vietnam on the radio.
The hoods ride about in their dumb Disney cars, gather like spectres on chalky blackboards (white supremacy taught early in US schools), or sit speechless like idiots in their dunces’ hats. The slits reappear, as skyscraper windows in blood-red cities, processions of paintbrushes, script in inscrutable books. The stitches become studs in boots, battleship rivets, Bash Street stubble, horrifying spatters of blood.
Two hoods drive by against a tangerine dream of a dawn, early birds chirping on a wire. But they are dark harbingers. The bleeding ankles and feet of a man crucified by the Ku Klux Klan project from the boot. Look closer and tatters of cloud hang lynched from the line.
You see the late, great paintings building all through the previous decades. It is there in the blood reds and sonorous blacks, out of Francisco Goya; in the motifs and the mounting anger. A self-portrait at 31 shows him pale as a Pierrot, and it will be years before he summons the courage, as he wrote, to face up to himself again; but when he does, it is in the ominous storm cloud of dark strokes coalescing into a head in a tremulous abstraction from 1963. Turn a corner into the narrow corridor that separates the two acts of this retrospective and you see Guston’s actual face, rising wild-eyed above a painted parapet. He is on his way to the allegorical self-portraits.
What is so unusual about this show is its emphasis on the way he made images. The drawings in the fifth gallery are amazing. Two hyphens meet, face to face, as it were, in comic impasse. A faltering circle doesn’t quite complete, the fractional gap turning it into a mouth, or deflating balloon. A single line almost bends over, but can’t quite pluck up the courage. Piero della Francesca and Krazy Kat were Guston’s gods, and here you see him drawing cartoonery into a new language of high art.
Guston’s daughter has lent the startling array of small canvases that used to hang in his Woodstock studio like a visual primer. They are arranged exactly as he displayed them. The cigarette, the boot and the lima-bean eyeball, the pyramidal hood passing by a wall, the nails, blank canvases and lightbulbs dangling from their cords. (Guston discovered his father hanging from a noose at the age of 10.)
This vocabulary of forms seems ancient and modern, inflected by both in-jokes and tragic history. Horseshoes speak back to Guston’s love of Paolo Uccello, heaps of human shoes to the murderous violence of Auschwitz. Bristling cartoon legs pound forwards in the street, or pile into frightening white fascist scrums.
It’s night in Talking and we’re down to one arm on the wristwatch but two fags in the hand. Smoke spirals upwards, the colour of life’s blood, conversation swirls in bubbles. In Sleeping, the artist’s vast eyelash fringes the blanket in which he is huddling like a child against the darkness. In Couple, he enfolds his ill wife in bed, still clutching a fistful of brushes in the other hand.
This is a show for anyone with even the smallest interest in modern art, but also for anyone who believes in the power of images to rouse and disturb, or in paint’s potential to transmit passions of every kind – moral, political, emotional, pictorial. A painting, Guston said, felt lived out to him, not painted.
One of the most famous works here is Painting, Smoking, Eating, from 1973. Guston depicts himself as a cartoon Cyclops stuck in bed with his weak-willed sloth, beneath a plate of big fat chips. He is anxiously eyeing a heap of his own waiting motifs. The artist is not painting, or eating, just smoking himself into oblivion. The picture is a call to arms: get up and get on with the urgent art. But of course he has – the painting is itself the evidence.
At Tate Britain, Sarah Lucas: Happy Gas is rude, lurid and peculiarly repetitive. It seems her repertoire of pervy one-liners hasn’t changed much now the sculptor is 60. Here are the soiled lavs, multiplying fags and plaster casts of pudenda, the bums jammed with ciggies, the chairs fitted with erect penises or mechanical wanking arms. Here are the giant allotment marrows, ho ho, and the gross-out Sunday Sport covers. If you don’t like Rude Britannia, don’t go.
An entire gallery is filled with Lucas’s long-running adaptations of Louise Bourgeois’s stuffed stocking sculptures, minus the strangeness and pathos. Sprawled tights, toes knotted into sagging nipples, or crammed into heels, are splayed, heaped and tangled across numerous chairs. And then reprised all over again in papier-mache or bronze. It’s hard to see the vaunted feminism here.
Lucas’s gift is for the visual equivalent of rhyming slang. The sculptures of fluorescent tubes probing away at poor battered sofas hold their devastating significance. The gigantic ham sandwich is a sardonic take on men’s prurient gags. A burnt-out car, ashtray charred, stands for a cancerous lung (alas, more than once).
But the one-offs are the sharpest. Who can forget her 1996 self-portrait with two fried eggs for breasts (one in the eye for the great British breakfast), or her collapsed mattress with upright cucumber and toppled kitchen pail? Apparently, they can at Tate Britain. This retrospective is a curatorial anomaly: it leaves out the best of her work.
Star ratings (out of five)
Philip Guston ★★★★★
Sarah Lucas: Happy Gas ★★
• Philip Guston, Tate Modern, London, until 25 February 2024
• Sarah Lucas: Happy Gas, Tate Britain, London, until 14 January 2024
