“No revolution, no heresy is comfortable or
easy. For it is a leap, it is a break in the smooth evolutionary curve,
and a break is a wound, a pain… Of course, to wound oneself is
difficult, even dangerous. But for those who are alive, living today as
yesterday and yesterday as today is still more difficult.”
Yevgeny Zamyatin, ‘On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters’, 1923 in: Yevgeny Zamyatin: A Soviet Heretic, Chicago 1970, p.112 “Old men ought to be explorers”
Extract from T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, 1943

Meditative and elegiac, Lamp is
a superb example of Guston’s painting from the final phase of his
career. Having made his name as an Abstract Expressionist alongside
Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, Guston’s elegant paintings began to
transform from delicate jewel-like mosaics of colour in the 1950s into
dense and brooding compositions of pinks, greys and blues in the
following decade. In 1968, Guston left New York for Woodstock, where he
worked for two years in preparation for a show at Marlborough Gallery in
1970. Upon the opening of the show, it became clear that the “high
priest of the Abstract Expressionist painting cult”, as he had become
known, had radically altered his artistic direction (Christoph Schreier,
‘Path to an Impure Painting Style’ in: Exh. Cat., Kunstmuseum Bonn, Philip Guston,
1999, p. 9). In place of the carefully considered abstracts of his
earlier aesthetic were unapologetically banal and naively styled images
of objects such as shoes, cigarettes, lightbulbs and ominous hooded
figures. Characterised by an elusive sense of foreboding, the paintings
sought to challenge the viewer, and represented a milestone moment in
post-war art.

Vastly influential and entirely revolutionary,
Guston’s change of focus in the late 1960s is analogous to Pablo
Picasso’s shift from the soft contours of his Rose period to the hard
edges of his Cubist phase. Just as Guillaume Appollinaire described
Picasso’s shift as his “carrying out his own assassination with the
practiced and methodical hand of a great surgeon”, Guston’s latest
offerings were equally lambasted by critics at the time (Guillaume
Apollinaire, ‘Les Peintres Cubistes’ in: Herschel Browning Chip, Ed., Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics,
Berkeley 1968, p. 232). However, as the great Russian satirist Yevgeny
Zamyatin astutely declared in 1923: “No revolution, no heresy is
comfortable or easy. For it is a leap, it is a break in the smooth
evolutionary curve, and a break is a wound, a pain… Of course, to wound
oneself is difficult, even dangerous. But for those who are alive,
living today as yesterday and yesterday as today is still more
difficult” (Yevgeny Zamyatin, 'On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and
Other Matters', 1923 in: Yevgeny Zamyatin: A Soviet Heretic,
Chicago 1970, p.112). Its sentiments rang true for Guston, who was
delighted to discover Zamyatin’s contemplative passage in the 1970s.

Lamp is
a mesmerising example of this final phase of Guston’s output. Light
sources had been an important part of Guston’s unique artistic
vernacular since 1968, with lightbulbs in particular recurring many
times as a ubiquitous image of intrusive modernity. However, the
accompanying sense of threat was not confined to this implication of
disruption. Just as the windows in Guston’s paintings are commonly
depicted with a blind and pull, implying that the brief vision providing
respite from the claustrophobic interior of his works could be
eliminated by a tug on the cord, the lightbulbs feel as though they
might be, at any moment, extinguished. Indeed, in Lamp, this
sense of volatility is intensified by the prominent inclusion of the
valve. The single flame has long served as a poignant emblem for the
transience and ephemerality of life, and has an extensive basis in art
history as a memento mori. It is hence deeply significant that
this was one of Guston’s final paintings: in March 1979 Guston had a
heart attack, and did not paint again before his death in June 1980.
Thus, the flickering flame depicted in the present work takes on further
poignancy as a symbol of Guston’s life force and creativity against the
encroaching darkness of death.

From Joseph Wright of Derby to
Vincent van Gogh, the history of painterly depictions of fire is
prolific. However, the contrast between the present work and other
contemporary depictions of the subject, such as Gerhard Richter’s Kerze series
(begun 1982), is vast. Unlike Richter’s highly finished paintings,
Guston’s faux-naïve style is elemental to his aesthetic. The light
emitted is highly textured, as though it is visible as a solid entity
with tangible weight. However, the white impasto that creates a halo
around the bulb has another function altogether. Unlike the paintings of
Van Gogh or Richter, where the warmth of the flame spreads throughout
the canvas, the light emitted here is minimal, a flame against the gloom
that does little to alleviate it. In this, the lamp is reminiscent of
the bulb in the sky in Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, a jagged
explosion of light abbreviated by the blackness of the composition. And
yet, unlike all of these artists, there is nothing to illuminate here.
The light is entirely without context, placed on an ambiguous black line
indicative of a table, or perhaps a floor. Like the various seas that
populate the artist’s paintings from the mid-1970s, the line across the
bottom of the canvas grounds the composition yet takes nothing from the
subject itself; a weighty object that juxtaposes the accumulation of
dark objects that constitutes the base with the bright white of the
light above.

A masterful play on the qualities of light, and a reflective meditation on his own mortality, Lamp is
a profound work from Philip Guston’s mature period. At once resolutely
contemporary and in dialogue with the masterworks of the past, Lamp encapsulates
the style, colour and emotional impact of Guston’s greatest paintings.
Markedly opposed to Abstract Expressionism, utterly divorced from
Minimalism and entirely dissimilar to Pop art, both aesthetically and
thematically, Guston’s late work occupies a liminal space between
movements and defies neat classification. In conversation with Willem de
Kooning at the opening of Guston’s 1970 show in New York, de Kooning
inquired: “Philip, do you know what the real subject is?”, to which both
artists in unison exclaimed, “Freedom!”. Guston added, "That's the only
possession the artist has – freedom to do whatever you can imagine"
(Philip Guston and Willem de Kooning cited in: Dore Ashton, A Critical Study of Philip Guston, Berkeley 1990, p. 186).