“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.’”
—Genesis 1:26, ASV
Emerging from a portal made up of cartoon clouds that resemble an elaborate, powdered, blue-tinted wig, a gigantic hand drags a line across the red earth. It’s done with a stick of charcoal held between two fleshy fingers, like someone holding a cigarette. The tool extends God’s wrist and hand—raw, pink, and veiny—to complete the connection between heaven and earth in a primal creative gesture.
Philip Guston painted The Line (1978) late in life. It was eight years after he first exhibited figurative works that broke with his former Abstract Expressionist style. That show at New York’s Marlborough Gallery is the stuff of legend. The new paintings marked a sea of change in the artist’s work, but led to wide disparagement from critics and colleagues, causing Guston to abandon the art scene and withdraw to his studio in Woodstock. There he refined his new painting language, producing the body of work that would eventually prove so influential to later generations of artists.
A Theology Overlooked
He was born Phillip Goldstein to Jewish parents who had fled Odessa, Ukraine for Canada because of persecution, eventually arriving in Los Angeles in 1919. He changed his name to hide his Jewishness, a decision he later looked back on with regret. Gazing at The Line with the knowledge that Guston was Jewish, I think about the book of Genesis in its original Hebrew context, when Jesus and the apostles interpreted and applied it, in the relationship between the Septuagint and Jesus’s teachings in the Gospels, and in how ancient Jewish culture emphasized the creative nature of the Divine and how that idea has influenced my Christian life.
Deceptively simple, The Line is typical of the expressive, cartoonish paintings once reviled and now lauded, which have made Guston’s work so influential to contemporary artists. But it’s also exceptional. The painting’s explicit reference to the Divine seems incongruous with his typical subject matter: the objects in his studio and conglomerations of strange anatomy. Or maybe it’s just a much more obvious reference to the otherworldly, a quality present in much of his later work.
Guston’s paintings and drawings have often been interpreted within an existential framework. Alienated characters and forlorn objects are adrift in ambiguous spaces. Their materiality—their boundedness to the earth—is emphasized by the seemingly crude handling of thick, mottled paint layered in broad strokes and a restricted color scheme. More recent scholarship and a handful of exhibitions have attempted to make sense of Guston within a Jewish cultural context.
Yet unlike most of Guston’s late work, which pictured scenes from the everyday or functioned as political satire (the Ku Klux Klan, Richard Nixon, and social unrest were frequent themes), The Line relates to the sacred. Every time I’ve come across this painting it’s made me pause and wonder. Just what did the artist expect us to make of this sudden reference to God and the doctrine of creation?
I discovered one clue in the hand’s gesture. In the same way the fingers point, the painting itself can be taken as a pointer to something beyond the artist’s familiar concerns. In his reference to the opening verses of Genesis, Guston provides a key to unlocking what is overlooked in conventional interpretations of his work. When I spend time with his paintings, I’m reminded that in the creative act, every artist mimics the Supreme Creator in an imperfect, human way. But in much of his figurative work, Guston’s visual vocabulary and painting method—in which he imbues abject forms with a mysterious inner life— call to mind God’s transformation of formless matter into a cosmic order in an unusually direct way. This aspect suggests that despite the prosaic nature of his subject matter and the fact that he never identified a specific religious impulse in his work, Guston intuitively recognized the theological significance of painting as engagement with the mystery of creation.
He referred to this characteristic in the work of artists he admired:
“I mean that the things I felt and that I enjoyed about certain painters of the past that I liked, that inspired me, like Cézanne and Manet, that thing I enjoyed in their work, that complete losing of oneself in the work to such an extent that the work itself, even though it was a picture of a woman in front of a mirror or some dead fish on the table, the pictures of those men were no pictures to me. They felt as if a living organism was posited there on the canvas, on this surface. That’s truly to me the act of creation.”1
The Line draws attention to this overlooked characteristic in Guston’s figurative paintings, opening up an interpretive framework for understanding his work as an extended rumination on the fundamental creative impulse we share in God. The giant hand is also Guston’s.
The Divine Basis of the Creative Act
The first thing the Bible tells us about God is that he created: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). After creating the heavens and the earth God made “man in his own image” (Genesis 1:27). Being in the imago Dei, we reflect God’s creative nature. In his celebrated essay on aesthetics, “Art and Scholasticism,” the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain identifies the artist as exemplary in this regard:
“From this point of view he is first and foremost a man who sees more deeply than other men and discovers in reality spiritual radiations which others are unable to discern.”2
He also describes the difference in nature between divine and human creativity:
“The human artist or poet whose mind is not, like the Divine Mind, the cause of things, cannot draw this form complete out of his creative spirit: he goes and gathers it first and foremost in the vast treasure of created things, of sensitive nature as of the world of souls, and of the interior world of his own soul.”3
Man takes what is given by God and, “he must to some extent, deform, reconstruct and transfigure the material appearance of nature.”4 In the creation narrative, the author of Genesis uses the words yasar and melaka, the original Hebrew meanings being “to form” and “work.” Both refer to human artistic activity and to God as a craftsman who forms living beings out of the dust (Genesis 2:7) and ground (Genesis 2:19).
In Genesis 1:28 man is commanded to “fill the earth and subdue it,” this being the cultural mandate to exercise dominion over the earth and to develop its latent potential. Creating culture means making our world habitable in ways that give glory to God. As the image and likeness of God, man possesses creative agency. His organizing and structuring mirrors God’s creative work as he builds on what God has provided. It’s in this parallel relationship—the Divine Creator forming the cosmos and the imago Dei producing culture—that art acquires its unique status.
Sharing in God’s dominion as his representative on earth, man is given authority over the material world through the cultural mandate. Art is one way that man exercises control over nature and manipulates raw material to produce meaningful forms. Seen in this way, art making is a fulfillment of divine purpose.
But there’s another important parallel to mention. God’s creation of the universe was a free act of divine love, a gift. In the same way, art is a vocation freely chosen. The Holy Spirit acts through the artist to produce cultural gifts. Art’s value doesn’t rely on utility, but, instead, goes beyond any external purpose. Indeed, great art has a generous nature. Thus, it both manifests as abundance and integrates the transcendent.
The Painting Comes to Life
Guston had started out as a figurative painter, but from the period when he began experimenting with abstraction in the early 1950s, he regarded his practice as an ongoing dialogue with the material of painting. Similar to other abstract expressionists, his painting process was one of indeterminacy, one in which the final image was discovered as the result of an ongoing negotiation with the painted surface. Beginning in this abstract period, Guston began to relate to elements in his paintings like beings that were extensions of himself as well as things which had their own life outside his control. The spectral fields of his abstract period, layered with thick crosshatched strokes, remind me of the reflective surfaces in Monet’s expansive water lily paintings. Yet they appear to be in a state of continual flux, as though something within them is struggling to surface. This tendency becomes more pronounced in his paintings from the second half of the decade, as paint strokes begin to congeal into more distinct forms.
The presence of this life force increases in the cartoonesque objects scattered through his late paintings. And, in fact, Guston did speak about painting as life-giving:
“I have a studio in the country—in the woods—but my paintings look more real to me than what is outdoors. You walk outside; the rocks are inert; even the clouds are inert. It makes me feel a little better. But I do have a faith that it is possible to make a living thing, not a diagram of what I have been thinking: to posit with paint something living, something that changes each day.”5
As God breathed life into the nostrils of Adam, Guston’s brush breathed life into the objects about his home and studio. He infused the palette and gestural abstraction of his earlier work with the expressive qualities of caricature. Sometimes stylized beyond recognition, the same subjects appear repeatedly, like characters performing scenes in an uncanny narrative. Brushes, palettes, stretcher bars, and paint cans identify Guston’s occupation. Food and cigarettes reveal his appetites. The various tools, clocks, domestic items, and dangling light bulbs schematically depict the environment in which he worked.
The paintings give us scenes from the artist’s life. In this way, they are autobiographical; however, the objects of Guston’s world have their own life. Each of these character objects is a shape-shifter, continually transforming according to its role from one drawing or painting to another. Sometimes these objects are scattered like an exploded still life, drifting into new configurations as they settle clumsily into one space or another, following an indecipherable logic. In Guston’s world, the normally inanimate has a life of its own, mimicking the anthropomorphism of the cartoon world his work resembles. Familiar things, organic and mechanical alike, morph in awkward or crude ways. Vestiges of the body become a jumble of strange objects. The commonplace mutates or births something ambiguous, abject, enigmatic.
Guston pictured himself as well, sometimes as a disembodied head with a massive glaring eye, or as a klansman, perhaps most famously in The Studio (1969), which depicts the hooded artist smoking and painting a self-portrait. In images such as this, Guston was commenting on anti-Semitism and a Jewish childhood lived in fear of the Klan. But he was also ruminating on his own capacity for evil, his own complicity in the white hegemonic power structures of America. He was painting his shadow self.
In other pictures Guston is surrounded by canvases. Reduced to a cyclopean head with a bloodshot eye, he assesses what was produced in the wee hours of the night before. Despite not having a mouth, the head smokes. These avatars appear in studios, bedrooms, and attics, littered with the debris of an artist’s life. The stacks of clothes, shoes, and other personal items have been interpreted as references to the belongings of holocaust victims, like stand-ins for missing bodies. In both drawings and paintings, the simultaneous objectivization of the artist’s body and subjectification of his belongings suggests a coterminous relationship between humans and their creations. Swallowed by domestic clutter, heads, arms, and legs are heaped into piles that include books and architectural fragments. The human creator, his raw materials, and the culture he makes are set loose in a morass that floats through large swaths of viscous paint.
Theologically, Guston’s work is also noteworthy for its emphasis on the relationship between the human creator and culture itself. As if to illustrate the fulfillment of God’s instruction in Genesis, Guston’s figurative work includes scenes of cultural production, as, for example, the painter wrestling with the materials of his craft, along with an otherworldly representation of the artist’s existence.
It should be remembered that Guston’s art had always been inspired by history and the role of culture in defining a civilization. In the 1930s and ‘40s, his early figure paintings as well as his murals for the Works Progress Administration are full of art historical references. Additionally, he was strongly influenced by modern poetry and the Italian art of the Renaissance, and in 1948 he won the Prix de Rome. This gave him a year to soak up the great paintings and architecture of Rome and Venice, which deepened his appreciation for the old masters.
He returned to Italy in 1970 after his breakthrough exhibition of figurative painting, for a residency at the American Academy in Rome. There he continued to develop his new visual vocabulary, influenced by his surroundings and the frescoes of Piero della Francesca. Guston’s melding of antiquity and contemporary modes of painting are among the reasons why, ever since his passing in 1980, he’s been considered a painter’s painter. And the private world of the studio, where the artist struggles with the creative act, remained a central theme throughout his figurative works.
Guston’s images overflow with an accumulation of symbols representing art and culture both past and present. Self-portraits that feature the artist painting, smoking, or staring at a bottle of alcohol are set in tight, airless spaces. The routine of a creative life is filled with tensions. Guston’s avatars are often adrift in cryptic landscapes filled with studio elements and raw materials for building: slabs of wood bearing twisted nails, funky bricks, and stubby tablets impersonating high-rises. The flotsam and jetsam of culture bobs about in a painterly swamp in which objects seem alive and figurative references are scrambled. Out of this a world takes shape.
Just as God created from the formless, Guston’s images erupt out of an undifferentiated flow. In Deluge II (1975), epic floodwaters like those in chapters six and seven of Genesis wash away civilization. A torrential downpour is alluded to with crude, simple strokes of red paint in the upper left, with the cosmos indicated in an equally cursory manner just opposite. These celestial bodies hover above a torrent of red paint that carries away a host of disembodied, mute heads and legs, submerged amongst domestic and studio objects, all flowing through a typical Guston field of fleshy pink. [View Deluge II by Philip Guston]
This painting, like so many works from Guston’s late period, describes a liminal space. In spiritual terms, this is where transformation often begins, with the disorientation of being caught in unfamiliar territory. Following upon the interpretation of existential suffering commonly ascribed to these works, can we not see in them a deeper lesson, that to become more whole, more fully ourselves, we must journey through our darkness, surrendering to that which seeks to transform us?
Guston’s images convey the tragicomic nature of our human condition—that it’s our resistance, our inability to accept our own failure and limitations that keeps us from growing in our intimacy with God, despite his closeness. It’s the absurdity of how we cling to things, and the fragility of our concepts of self and world, that Guston’s uncanny vignettes address us in their union of dread and farce.
But his paintings also express the notion of an embodied spirituality. In both the clunkiness of his subjects and the deliberate choice of painting in a de-skilled manner, Guston’s paintings are thoroughly physical. They picture plodding and awkward bodies that seem like they would be difficult to inhabit, and, like in his earlier abstractions, the artist’s touch is always present. Although uncanny forms abound in his late drawings and paintings, images of himself or klansmen emphasize the creaturely.
In Painting, Smoking, Eating (1972), Guston lies passively in bed, the human creator in his creaturely condition surrounded by the elements of his habitat. A plate of indistinct food items balances precariously on his chest. These are rendered in an ambiguous perspective, like a Cézanne still life. They appear ready to slide off the bed cover, which binds the human figure like a straitjacket. The cigarette jutting out of the place where Guston’s mouth would be looks like a chimney, and it subliminally transforms the plate into an ashtray. Awash in his usual red, pink, and white, the objects of Guston’s world arise and dissolve behind him in the material of paint, their forms inconclusive and mutable, as always. Here the artist lies inert as he contemplates the production of man, as though entombed beneath the weight of life’s detritus. [View Painting, Smoking, Eating by Philip Guston]
Tributaries of Religion and Culture
Guston’s search for self and his return to figuration proceeded along the path of Italian art and culture, which until the end remained an abiding influence on his practice. But in his adoption of Italy’s visual language, Guston was also assimilating the tradition of Catholic veneration. This overlap between Christian visual culture, an approach to painting that embraced doubt (evident in Guston’s own statements and in his method of layering and erasure), and reflection on Jewish experience are mutually inclusive in Guston’s late work. His art harkens back to the contemplative dimension of Renaissance paintings on Catholic themes that reflect the Church’s history with mystics, reaching back to Jewish roots.
For Guston, the embrace of doubt was the only way to truth, a way to invite mystery into his creative process. At the same time that Guston wrestled with his estrangement from Judaism, ironically, his brushes imbued raw matter with life as the Creator did in the Hebrew Bible. Since the Genesis account of divine creation is shared by both Jews and Christians, a Christian interpretation of Guston’s work that doesn’t deny his Jewishness is possible. It’s also true that the Christian Renaissance paintings on which Guston cut his teeth reflect the mysteries of the earliest Hebrew writings that also fed the Christian mystics I’ve come to love. Mimicking the Creator by giving life to the inanimate matter of paint (what he called “colored dirt”) and to everyday objects, Guston reminds us of the divine source at the heart of human creativity.
1. Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics, edited by Clifford Ross (Abrams Publishers New York, 1990), 66.
2. Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism with Other Essays, translated by J.F. Scanlan (Charles Scribner’s Sons New York 1949), 49.
3. Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, 48-49.
4. Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, 49.5. Philip Guston, Clark Coolidge, Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations, (University of California Press, 2011), 54.
(A version of this essay appeared in Dappled Things)
Arthur Aghajanian is a Christian contemplative, essayist, and educator. His work explores visual culture through a spiritual lens. His essays have appeared in a variety of publications, including Ekstasis, Tiferet Journal, Saint Austin Review, The Curator, and many others. He holds an M.F.A. from Otis College of Art and Design. Visit him at https://www.imageandfaith.com