Alone

Like much of Guston’s late figurative work of the 1960s and 1970s, Alone centers on a cramped domestic interior. A figure lies in bed, tucked within a shallow, boxlike space. His head is cast downwards, suggesting a melancholy mood. The buildings glimpsed through the window hint at the world beyond, but their gray hue blends with the wall, seeming to further enclose the solitary protagonist. A motley array of objects—boxes, tubes, balls, books, and a single lightbulb—crowds the room. The composition and motifs of Alone, props called "strange goings-on" by Guston,[1] reverberate across his career, from the painting Stationary Figure to sketches of 1967.

Alone is also one of a handful of paintings related to Poor Richard, a series of drawings produced by Guston in the summer of 1971. Inspired by the novel Our Gang, written by his friend Philip Roth and published the same year, Guston satirized the then president Richard Nixon through caricatured sketches of the politician’s early life and career. In 1971, the Nixon administration faced strong public criticism, especially following the publication of the so-called Pentagon Papers, which exposed the U.S. government’s covert actions in Vietnam. "I was pretty disturbed about everything in the country politically," Guston later recalled, "the administration specifically, and I started doing cartoon characters."[2]

Several Poor Richard drawings and relatedstudies depict Nixon as an undergraduate at Whittier College outside Los Angeles. The future president is portrayed lying in bed, dreaming wistfully of his political future. However, the young student in Poor Richard brims with ambition while the figure in Alone seems less optimistic. Here the claustrophobic interior and profusion of objects suggest a character more trapped than energized, more inert than galvanized; not even the basketball, perched on a slope, evinces the possibility of movement.

Whereas Poor Richard featured pointed, even grotesque digs at Nixon, in his late figurative work Guston rarely ventured into pure polemic. Guston drew parallels between the Nixon figure in Alone and his own identity as a painter. "Here in the studio—just finished a large image of a guy (me?)" he mused in a letter in early 1972.[3] For the artist, solitude was a painful requirement to produce good work. "You have to be more alone to paint," he once offered.[4] "You hope even your own ideas get out of the room, so that you’re really alone with nowhere to go."[5] Both the painter and the politician, Guston suggests, are figures caught between privacy and publicity, forced to face themselves as much as they court the wider public, whether that public be art viewers or the national electorate.

[1] Philip Guston. Letter to Bill Berkson, January 4, 1972, quoted in Musa Mayer, Resilience: Philip Guston in 1971 (Hauser & Wirth Publishers, 2019), p. 169.

[2] Philip Guston. "On the Nixon Drawings." In Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conservations, edited by Clark Coolidge (University of California Press, 2011), p. 228.

[3] Guston. Letter to Berkson, p. 169.

[4] Guston. "Interview with Karl Fortess." In Philip Guston, p. 74.

[5] Guston. "On Survival." In Philip Guston, p. 237.