The Mazurki Code
A Philip Guston Drawing Reveals Multiple Meanings Over Time
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Philip Guston, "Mazurki," ink on paper |
By John Seed
johnseed@gmail.com
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On November 13, 1980 I purchased a drawing called "Mazurki" by Philip Guston for $4,300.00 from Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco. I still have the receipt, but sadly, not the drawing. When I bought it, I was twenty three years old, a recent college graduate working as an art salesman in a shopping mall. I didn't have the $4,579.50 -- the total with tax -- needed to pay for the Guston, but I did have a $500.00 deposit, and the very trusting Ms. Anglim let me take the work home, assured that I would make the payments of $500.00 per month.
What on earth was I doing spending forty-five hundred dollars on a work of art? The drawing cost more than double what my car, a used Volkswagen sedan, had cost me the year before. Come to think of it, since gas sold for eighty-five cents a gallon at the time, the Guston was equal to about 5,000 gallons of gas.
Looking back, there were really several motivations for my grand purchase.
A few years earlier, during my Junior and Senior years as an art student at Stanford University, I had worked as an intern to the collection of Harry and Mary Anderson, better known as "Hunk and Moo." Being surrounded by the Anderson's vast collection, and visiting their home often, I became familiar with the what it felt like to be surrounded by challenging works of modern art. Working for the Andersons had introduced me -- in a big way -- to the pleasures of collecting.
One afternoon in 1979 I was standing in the foyer of the Anderson's home with a group that included some Stanford art students and faculty when I found myself standing in front of "The Coat II " their freshly acquired Philip Guston painting.
Dr. Albert Elsen, a Professor of Art History, and a very intimidating man, mumbled to me that the Andersons had wasted their money. Dr. Elsen was not alone in his feelings: it is important to recognize that few collectors were supporting Guston at this point in his career, and that the Andersons were among the few who believed in what the aging artist was doing. What most collectors wanted were Guston's graceful abstract paintings from the 1950's, not the lumpish, ragged late works that had caused New York critic Hilton Kramer to call Guston "A Mandarin Pretending to be a Stumblebum."
Responding from my gut instinct, I told Elsen that "I loved the painting," and he brusqely asked me "Why?"
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Philip Guston, "The Coat II" 1977, Oil on Canvas, 69 1/8" x 92 1/8 inches The Anderson Collection |
Dr. Elsen's blunt question totally stumped me. I babbled something and
felt the flush of embarassment at the total inadequacy of my answer. One
reason I may have later been compelled to buy a Guston was so that I could
develop a deeper understanding of the man's work and answer Dr. Elsen's question for myself.
The following year I had was totally bowled over by a retrospective exhibition of Guston's work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His shaggy, maudlin late paintings, many of them still smelling of linseed oil, made a powerful impression on me and deepened my interest. They had something to say, it seemed, that respresented hard won wisdom and courage.
The Guston show was very strong stuff. I remember seeing the exhibition with a friend who was in medical school and she literally couldn't handle one painting that featured a pile of legs. I could handle the Gustons -- I saw poetry in the violence -- but I was grossed out a few months later when the same friend took me on a tour of her lab at UCLA where she was slicing brains with a Hobart meat slicer.
Guston died in June of 1980, a month after the opening of the San Francisco show, and that also brought a certain urgency to my feelings about his work. By the time I heard about a show of his drawings being held at the Anglim Gallery in November I was convinced that Guston's art was somehow crucial to me. "I will buy a Guston," I thought to myself grandiosely, "the way that Matisse bought the small Cezanne that became a cornerstone of his artistic life."
When I arrived at the gallery I remember seeing maybe eight or ten spare black and white Guston images. More than half were already sold, and "Mazurki" -- which was still available -- caught my attention. It featured two horizontal rows of blunt, hieroglyphic images that I found interesting and a bit peculiar. It wasn't long at all before it was hung on the wall of my rented room, radiating mystery. Owning "Mazurki" made me feel that somehow I had a foot in the door of the art world, a very imposing social and economic hierarchy that I wanted to be part of.
The Guston drawing certainly gave me something to contemplate, and to puzzle over, but I was never really able to identify all the objects that it contained, or to give the work any kind of fixed meaning. I knew that there was a Polish dance called a "Mazurka" so I assumed that the title meant "a lot of mazurkas" and left it at that. Knowing that Guston had been born in Russia somehow seemed connected to that.
After staring at it for a few months I decided that the work somehow involved assocations the artist had about his father who had been a railway machinist. I saw a gear and a cam, a beer mug and beer bottle, and a book filled with vertical dashes. I also thought over the fact that the drawing had been made as an illustration for a book of poetry, "ENIGMA VARIATIONS" by Guston's friend Bill Berkson. Although I never tried to obtain a copy of the original poem I kept it in mind that my drawing was "enigmatic" along the lines of the poetry that it had accompanied.
By 1981 I had enrolled in UC Berkeley as a graduate student in painting, and the Guston was part of my small collection that included a painting by Robert de Niro Sr. and several drawings by David Park that I had purchased for $200 each. Friends and visitors to my studio rarely commented on it and few would have recognized it as anything of value. One exception was the ceramicist Robert Arneson who visited during an open studio day, and he was mightily impressed.
By 1984 I had finished graduate school and had student loans and credit cards to pay. Foolishly, and a bit desperately, I looked for a buyer for the Guston, and eventually traded it for a work by Patrick Hogan which I then promptly sold for $2,700. A friend of mine says "Never sell real estate" and that is some good advice. I wish someone had told me as a young man "Never sell off your art collection."
