Visual Arts: By now, more than 20 years after his death, the facts of Philip Guston's life and work have been cast in a standard narrative.
The story goes something like this: an idealistic figurative painter with a social conscience gets diverted into lyrical abstraction but enjoys a late conversion back to the rightful path of representation. All of which is true, as far as it goes. And Guston, who was born in 1913 and died in 1980, didn't just revert to figuration per se. He devised a self-consciously crude, cartoonish style of facetious illustration. In doing so he influenced the international resurgence in expressionist painting of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Earlier on, as a friend of Jackson Pollock, with other members of the New York School he found critical acclaim in the 1950s, during the heyday of the abstract expressionists. You can see in his work of the time efforts to formulate a stylistic identity in this constellation of egos.
His paintings have been dubbed abstract impressionist because their shimmering, luminous skeins of atmospheric colour, built up with myriad small brush strokes, were in some respects reminiscent of Monet. They consist of masses of indeterminate, soft-edged forms, usually clustered towards the centre of the canvas and dissolving away to nothing towards the fringes, which might be left entirely unpainted.
But by 1960 Guston was already having problems working in this restrictive idiom, and throughout the decade he struggled to find a way to transcend what he saw as its limitations. Part of the problem was that he felt his painting was out of sync with what was happening in the wider cultural and political environment, and he was increasingly out of sympathy with a reductionist, formalist aesthetic. As he put it: "I got sick and tired of all that purity! I wanted to tell stories." When he exhibited the first of his new figurative works, in New York in 1970, they made waves. The offhand technical crudity of his approach to image making underlined his abandonment not only of abstraction but also of the trappings of fine art and good taste in favour of demotic doodling. He eventually employed a recognisable iconography, incorporating the world of the studio and domesticity, a cast of grotesque caricatures including self-portraits, hooded Ku Klux Klansmen and Richard Nixon, and what he termed "crapola", the rubbishy, kitschy landscape of US consumer culture. In this flagrant renunciation of formalism and high culture he was doing something shocking and revolutionary. A comparable rumpus had greeted Willem de Kooning's re-engagement with figuration 20 years previously.
But in time, in the context of neo-expressionism and postmodernism, the later work has been acclaimed and his 1950s abstract phase come to be seen as self-indulgent and aberrant.
The current, substantial retrospective of his work at the Royal Academy of Arts, in London, is designed along lines that reflect this evaluation. The figurative work, both prior and subsequent to the abstract phase, is given the lion's share of the space. There is some bleak humour in his painting, but Guston was not by nature a cheerful person. Born in Canada to Russian immigrant parents, he chanced upon the body of his father, who had hanged himself, when he was just 10 years old. His friend Philip Roth, who got to know him in the late 1960s when they were neighbours, has written of his "emotional turbulence . . . his despair and seismic moodiness". These qualities come through in the cartoonish paintings, which though farcical have an underlying bitterness and bleakness of mood. Yet, picture by picture, the abstracts easily win out over the figurative paintings every time.
Although Guston did a correspondence course in cartooning in his teens, and was a fan of cartoon strips, he didn't have the graphic facility of a great cartoonist. His line is more suited to the multiple hesitancies of his 1950s drawings than the decisive clarity of the later figuration, which tends to expose his limitations. Of course it could be argued that in these works he's not trying to make great cartoons, he's using the idiom to make paintings subversive of high cultural concerns, but there is something self-defeating and intensely misanthropic about these acres of bad drawing writ large.
Picasso once dismissed the work of Bonnard as "a pot-pourri of indecision", a phrase that could equally and as disparagingly be applied to Guston's abstract paintings. But Bonnard in his indecision was holding out for something, deferring, and the act of deferral became something great.
Looking to Sheherazade, Walter Benjamin described storytelling as a way of postponing the future, an idea comparable here to the Lacanian notion of painting as a trap for the eye or as a decoy to keep the eye moving and guessing. Guston's "abstract" paintings are each the result of thousands of instances of indecision, indefinite deferrals. But this is not to say that they, unlike the more obviously illustrative work, have no stories to tell or have turned their backs on the world. Hence the inverted commas around the word abstract. Surely we are never in any doubt that the world is very much and very ominously present within the shadowy gaps of their nervously woven surfaces. What they do, and what they did successfully for a time, was to negotiate and physically constitute a space for Guston himself to be. It's almost disparaging to say that they are beautiful, because the term contrasts with the grubbiness of the cartoon paintings, which are hence presumed to be more honest, more engaged. Yet the earlier paintings are not beautiful in the sense of being pretty or purely decorative.
They too are awkward in their way. Often they are muddied and tenuous and uncomfortable, but they always engross, drawing your eye back time and again. It's much more difficult to write about them than it is about the cartoon works, because the imagery is all self-evidently there in the latter, but in the long run they are incomparably better and more interesting.
• The Art Of Philip Guston is at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, until April 12th
