Philip Guston's Uncomfortable Brilliance at Gallerie dell'Accademia

A review of the exhibition 'Philip Guston and The Poets' at Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice highlights the artist's temporal disorientation and defiance of art historical categories. Guston (Montreal, 1913 – Woodstock, 1980) began by looking to the past, to Italian humanist tradition, then found himself at the center of Abstract Expressionism with the New York School in the 1950s. After his 1970 solo show at Marlborough Gallery in New York, his work became harder to place—either lagging behind European Expressionism or anticipating the figurative revival of the 1980s postmodernity. The exhibition juxtaposes Guston's works with paintings by Masaccio and Bellini, and references poets like Lawrence, Yeats, Stevens, Montale, and Eliot. Despite these nods to tradition, Guston's obsessive universe of eyes, hands, feet, shoes, cigarettes, clocks, and KKK figures remains raw and honest, reflecting his anxiety about 1960s-70s American reality. The show presents him as an uncomfortable guest, autonomous and indifferent to external schemas.