Saying what through and out, a colour just stands
Clark Coolidge, “Dawn — In Philip’s Room”
I went to see the Philip Guston show at Tate Modern in London yesterday and was slow to leave. I knew and admired some of the late, cartoonish pictures, but had been hazy on his earlier career: first as a figurative anti-fascist artist in the Thirties, and then, after the war, as an abstract expressionist. The show did a good job of following these elements through to their alchemy in the spectacularly punkish Seventies work, which almost certainly owes some of its fame to the fact that its flatness reproduces well, photographically. So one of the pleasures of the show was to be able get close to the actual, textured canvases and the fine evidence of busy brushwork in areas of pure colour, where Guston’s subtlety as an abstract painter remains apparent. And this in turn got me thinking about how Guston, late in life, formed an important artistic friendship with Clark Coolidge, a young American poet who was experimenting with the expressive possibilities of abstraction in words.
In the Tate shop afterwards, I resisted the tea towel printed with Guston’s 1978 picture of a kettle — partly because there’s something a bit twee about that giftshop Britishing of the image, but mainly because the reproduction on cotton lost what was apparent on canvas: how the curling steam suggests (like an evaporating hairline) the negative ghost of a face in the darkness — a phantom accentuated by the glinting, horizontal, eyebrow-like brushstrokes I tried to catch in this close-up:
Compare the way that Guston evoked a face in his late Sixties doodles, which stripped pictorial space back to the simplest lines:
I’m not saying that I think the kettle painting is “better” because of this hidden presence, which might be interpreted as a shadowy self-portrait — a biographical trap that some of the curatorial panels for other pictures fell into (e.g. “Sleeping” (1977): “Guston paints a portrait of himself curled up in bed… For much of Guston’s life, he faced the recurring nightmares of a violent and unjust world”). The kettle-face is both there and not there: it’s deftly suggested as an intention, and swiftly denied as worked paint, a few strokes among hundreds. And this, for me, is the more beautiful reading: it comes and goes in meaning, like the wavering of a voice in the darkness, or the rise and fall of a whistling kettle.
The finishing touches of such brushstrokes were, I assume, the kind of thing that Guston discussed with Clark Coolidge, during their many hours of conversation in his studio. Coolidge once remarked that he could look at a new painting and somehow correctly guess the last mark Guston had made. The painter, in return, heard human stories in the poet’s most austere texts:
Even when I got onto the skinny little abstract things, I was so happy to hear Philip say, when he had two lines, “This guy is telling this guy his troubles”.
Their first collaborative work was ING (1968), a book for which Guston provided the cover art, and of which Coolidge said:
CC down to the syllable, PG down to the one line, somehow generatively in parallel
Given the importance of this relationship to Guston’s late work, it was disappointing not to find any acknowledgement of Coolidge in the Tate show, beyond a passing namecheck (although it was good to see poem-pictures that Guston made with his wife, Musa McKim). Of Guston and Coolidge’s collaborations, the critic Craig Burnett has written:
The words, a poem by Clark Coolidge, and the lines in the drawing, have equal value. Quite apart from expressing his affinity with a poet, the drawing encapsulates Guston’s late-life revelation: every line, every mark, can be understood not strictly as a formal ingredient, but as a metaphor, and is therefore free to revel in instability, paradox, and contamination.
The title of the book that collects their work, Baffling Means (1991), nicely sums up this shared aesthetic of puzzlement: is “means” a verb or a noun?
But it’s understandable that the curators of the Guston show may have fought shy of having to account for the bafflings of Coolidge’s poetry too. I’ve long felt frustrated at the failure of literary criticism in the UK to find a way to articulate the value of such writing: a failure perhaps underlined by the fact that among the various books related to the show in the Tate Modern shop, there was none of Coolidge’s verse.
Here is part of what I wrote for Poetry London in 2017 about Coolidge’s Selected Poems: 1962—1985 — and, after that, a Coolidge poem I have by heart, as a touchstone of what “abstract” poetry can do and be.
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