Inside

"Toward the end of the 1950s I was slowly evolving toward a different kind of figuration. Sort of black heads on fields of gray. Again I began to feel the necessity for a subject. It’s a different contest when there’s both subject and structure […] It was a feeling I had, in about ‘What would happen,’ I thought, ‘if I eliminated everything except just raw feeling and the brush and ink, the simplest of means without even the seductions of color?’ It was like testing myself, to see what I am, what I can do. You see, at that point in the 1960s, I wanted to be a stranger to myself […] My concept always has been that artists should change all the time. Clement Greenberg once said that some artists, like de Kooning and me, were ‘homeless.’ He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but we accepted it as one." Philip Guston (P. Guston in Philip Guston in Conversation with Mark Stevens, 1980, www.hauserwirth.com (accessed 10.20.2024).