FROM GORKY TO GUSTON

8^th August 2012

Frankly, having long admired the paintings of Philip Guston, I  did not know much about the evolution of his Art.  These two Documentaries are a useful start:

Philip Guston: A Life Lived (MBP, 1981) [HERE]

Philip Guston, Odd Man Out (BBC4 arts documentary, 2004) [HERE]

And attached here:

Craig Burnett, Philip Guston. The Studio, Afterall Books (One work), 2014.

Naturally there is a mass of critical material on Guston,  but these are a few samples. 

GORKY

Just Finished ‘My Apprenticeship’ by Maxim Gorky, which is the middle part of a Trilogy of his life. I was delighted to see that the complete Trilogy was filmed and is available on the Mosfilm site – so I will watch those soon.  Of course, in Russian, with subtitles.   The visuals are superb and the director Mark Donskoy captures an almost Caravaggio version of Russia in the 19^th century (example above).

But I like this quote, where he berates the Saturnine aspects of the human psyche, the inability to move from fixed and entrenched positions.  Love S.

“Later, after I had met many such people among the intelligentsia, as well as among simple folk, I realized that their persistence was nothing more than the passivity of people who had nowhere to go beyond the point already reached, and who, indeed, had no desire to go further, caught as they were in a tangle of obsolete words and outworn conceptions. Their will had become enervated and incapable of developing toward the future and had they been suddenly emancipated; they would have rolled mechanically downhill like a stone on a mountainside. They were kept imprisoned in a graveyard of dead ideas by the lifeless force of backward- lookings and by a morbid love of suffering and persecution. Once deprived of the opportunity to suffer, they would be drained of all substance, and vanish like clouds on a fresh, windy, day.

The faith for which they sacrificed themselves so eagerly and with such false pride, was unquestionably a firm faith, but it resembled old garments, so caked with dust and dirt as to be inaccessible to the ravages of time. Their thoughts and feelings had grown used to being tightly encased in prejudices and dogmas, and the fact that they became deformed and earth-bound did not disturb them in the least.

   This faith-by-habit is one of the most vicious and regrettable phenomena of our life. Within the bounds of such faith, as in the shadow of a stone wall, anything that is new grows slowly twisted and anaemic. Too few rays of love penetrate that dark faith, and too many of vengeance, malice, and envy, blood-brothers to hate. The light of such faith is merely the phosphorescent glow of decay.”

THE TRILOGY ONLINE HERE:

The Childhood of Maxim Gorky (1938)

On His Own (1939)

My Universities (1939)