In Praise of Texture: Philip Guston and Frank Auerbach

Philip Guston, Ride (1969)

For me, one of the most enjoyable art reviews of 2021 (so far) is Susan Tallman’s “Philip Guston’s Discomfort Zone” (The New York Review of Books, January 14, 2021). I’m not a fan of Guston’s cartoon imagery. His potato-head creatures and convertible-riding Klansmen do nothing for me. But what I do like is Tallman’s description of it. For example:

So how is it that Philip Guston, dead these forty years, is still pushing our buttons? Until a few months ago, he seemed to conform to the anticipated arc—early show of talent, challenging departure from status quo, posthumous popularity. An eminent Abstract Expressionist, he had flummoxed the art world in 1970 with a late-career tack into figuration, nudging paint into the shapes of bottles and bricks and comical, conical white hoods with oversized hands and the creepy softness of the Pillsbury Doughboy. Between lovely painterly passages, the patched and dowdy hoods smoked cigars, drove around town, worked at easels, and beat themselves up, in both senses. 

Note that “lovely painterly passages.” To me, that’s the key to enjoying Guston’s late work. My first exposure to his crazy Klansmen was the cover of Sanford Schwartz’s great 1990 essay collection Artists and Writers. It shows a close-up detail of Guston’s Untitled (Two Hooded Figures in a Car). What grabbed me wasn’t the bizarre imagery; it was the rich, thick texture of the paint. In one of the book’s essays, “Polk’s Dots, or, A Generation Comes Into Focus,” Schwartz compares Guston’s paint strokes to butter: “These marks – they’re the size of pats of butter, and have a buttery texture.” Yes, they do. That “buttery” description has stayed with me down through the years, and influenced my personal aesthetic. I love the buttery texture of thickly applied paint. I love the work of painters who paint this way. 

I thought of Schwartz’s “buttery” description when I read his recent “A Painter’s Performances” (The New York Review of Books, March 11, 2021), a marvelous review of an exhibition of Frank Auerbach’s “head” paintings. Like Guston’s Klansmen, these Auerbach images aren't to my taste. Schwartz describes them as “mangled,” and that seems exactly right. In a delightful passage, he says, 

They are pictures in which Auerbach, looking at people straight on, from the side, or from below, continually outdoes himself in delectable color choices and displays of seemingly impromptu, brilliantly zigzaggy brushwork—displays that can leave a head resembling a piece of hacked wood, a wad of chewing gum, bodies wrestling, or an abstract shape recalling a bird’s nest.

Frank Auerbach, Head of J.Y.M. (1978)

Auerbach’s heads, especially the early ones, e.g., Head of J.Y.M. (1978), are thickly painted. “Thick and luscious” is how Schwartz describes them. That’s the quality I relish. My eyes devour them, not as strange imagery, but as delicious texture.