Nude Philosopher in Space-Time

In an exhibition review of 1935, a critic for the Hollywood Citizen-News noted that visitors "will find... a surrealistic piece by Phillip Goldstein, a nightmare that would be simply lovely as a decoration for a chamber of horrors."[1] Nude Philosopher in Space-Time, then shown under Philip Guston’s birthname, certainly exhibits an uncanny, even perturbing dream-like quality. An impassive male nude stands amidst a smattering of body parts, shadows, and mysterious, galactic imagery; his placid expression and idealized musculature recall the Italian Renaissance models that informed many of Guston’s early works. To the left, a female companion has been deconstructed into a constellation of images and anatomies. Her shadow falls from beyond the foreground onto the block at lower-right. An ambiguous rendering of her silhouette appears on curling paper. A light bulb drops from the ceiling, and a pelvis hangs from a nailed bit of string casting the shadow of a heart. An egg—another bodily symbol—rests nearby. Between the contemplating philosopher and his fragmented muse, and against the swirling celestial form in the distance, Guston interlaces allegories of creative production and biological reproduction in scales ranging from the cosmic to the embryonic.

At the time that he made Nude Philosopher, Guston was part of a circle of artists gathered by the couple Lorser Feitelson (1898–1978) and Helen Lundeberg (1908–1999). Together, the pair initiated a movement they ambitiously referred to as "new" or "subjective classicism." European Surrealism, they argued in their writings, had ossified into "expressionist" and "Cubistic" tendencies.[2] The former, guided by automatism, resulted in unsubstantial and arbitrary artmaking; the latter, overly committed to the classical tenets of painting, ignored the artist’s individuality and personal feeling. Subjective Classicism bridged the two camps. Lundeberg described this achievement in terms that readily apply to Guston’s painting: "Seeking, and failing to find, a rational significance and relationship of these forms to each other and to their surroundings, the mind takes refuge in a sort of mysticism. The commonplace objects take on a strangeness, a meaning which cannot be analyzed."[3]

Subjective Classicism’s influence on Guston was forceful enough that he seems to have borrowed the light bulb motif in Nude Philosopher from one of Feitelson’s pictures, Genesis #2 (1934; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.). It reappears in Guston’s later figurative work, where in paintings like Alone, The Studio, and related drawings, it signifies the inspiration—or lack thereof—in everyday artistic labor. Further still, the light bulb carried outsize personal resonance for Guston. As he described in an unpublished biographical note drafted two years before his death, "As a boy I would hide in the closet ... I felt my remoteness in the closet with the single light bulb. I read and drew in this private box... It was so good to be away. I was happy in my sanctuary."[4]

[1] Herman Reuter, "Western Foundation and Ebell Salon Exhibits," Hollywood Citizen-News, April 6, 1935, p. 8.

[2] Helen Lundeberg, "Explanatory Text for Six Paintings by Helen Lundeberg" (1934), reprinted in Post Surrealism, ed. Michael Duncan (Logan: Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University, 2002), pp. 21-22.

[3] Lundeberg, "Explanatory Text," p. 21.

[4] Philip Guston, unpublished text (1978), quoted in Musa Mayer, Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston, 2nd ed. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997), p. 24.