Yannis Kounellis

'I was called an artist in the 1960s because they didn't know how to define a pile of coal. But I am a painter, and I claim my initiation in painting. Because painting is the construction of images and doesn't refer to as manner or a technique... I am asked if I am a realist painter, and the answer is no. Realism represents while  I present'. Yannis Kounellis, 1993.

Yannis Kounellis at Tate Modern.

Yannis Kounellis (1936-2017) was born in the Greek port city of Piraeus, and lived and worked in Rome from 1956. His early paintings were inspired by words and graphics found in street signs, which he gradually reduced to letters, numbers and basic symbols arranged over plain backgrounds. Though he soon expanded his practice to include performance and sculpture, he considered himself primarily a painter. Whether making pictures or using materials and objects that share the same space as us as viewers, he aimed to create powerful images, mundane and strange at the same time.

In the late 1960s Kounellis became a key figure of the Italian Arte Povera (poor art) movement. Artists associated with Arte Povera used ordinary materials of both natural and industrial origins and hoped to bring the experience of art closer to everyday life. At the time, Italy was undergoing a period of rapid social change, torn between industrial and agrarian life, tradition and innovation, antiquity and modernity. Kounellis' works express this clash of values by bringing together contrasting elements such as raw wood and steel beams, or strings of colourful glass hanging next to a mound of black coal.

Many of Kounbellis' installations subtly change the architecture of the gallery, like the stones blocking the passage between two rooms. Some suggest the presence and actions of people: in a work bringing together painting, sculpture and performance, an empty chair lies waiting for a cellist to play a painted musical score. Other works carry strong associations both sensorial and cultural, like those including bells and coffee beans. These objects have a rich history, evoking sounds and smells familiar to many.

Untitled, 1960-98, (steel panel, enamel on paper on 2 canvases, fabric, coal, 3 metal hoods and metal rod)

In this work, the artist hangs two fragments of drawings from the early 60s near the top of a steel panel. Kounellis often utilises metal sheets as blank backdrops or 'sheets of paper', on which he assembles his images. The two drawings on canvas are partially covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, while a sack of coal hangs from as metal rod. The composition draws attention to the physical properties of these objects, like the weight, gesture and pliability. Kounellis' use of these ordinary materials reflects the ambitions of Arte Povera aiming to unite art with everyday experience.

Untitled (Sack with Z), 2001 (steel, burlap sack, coal, paint and glass)

From 1989 to 2005 Kounellis made a series of boxes, produced in many ideantical copies, incorporating recurring elements from his past works. The stencilled letter Z on the sack resembles the letters, numbers and symbols of his early 'alphabet paintings'. The sack of coal in this work might allude to trade and commerce, recalling the artist's place of birth, Piraeus, the busy port city near Athens. Kounellis considered steel sheets as a kind of canvas of paper and his assemblages of real materials as paintings, 'because painting is the construction of images and doesn't refer to a ... technique'.

Untitled, 1960, (polyvinyl acetate paint and tempera on canvas)

Part of the series of canvases known as Figures and Letters or Alfabeti, made between 1959 and 1963. Kounellis painted them on large pieces of canvas, burlap or bedsheets he'd stretched across the walls of his house, like a mural. Initiallly he reproduced details of hand-made signs found around the city, such as placards from local shops. Here, the synmbols suggest a code or mathematical formula but ultimately carry no decipherable meaning. He also associated the signs with phonetic sounds, and sometimes he expanded these paintings into performance by reading them out loud.

Untitled, 1993, (steel bedsprings, metal hook and paint on wall)

A recurring element in Kounellis' work since the 1960s, the bedframe symbolises the measurements of the human body and how this shapes our living environment. A real bedframe, suspended from a meat hook, contrasts with the flat, yellow, painted square behind it. Its shape refers to one of the earliest works of geometric abstraction, Kasimir Malevich's Black Square, 1915. Kounellis often connected the colour yellow to the sunflowers and suns in Van Gogh's paintings, as well as to the gold background of religious icons. The work may be a dialogue between reality and abstraction, or between materiality and spirituality.

'I have seen the sacred in the common object. I have believed in weight as the right measure... I want the return of poetry by all means available: through practice, observation, solitude; through language, image and insurrection'. (1987)

Bells, 1993, (bronze bells, wooden beams, rope)

Kounellis was interested in the significant presence of church bells in the everyday life of Southern European communities. When this work was first displayed in Pistoia, Italy, the city's Romanesque cathedral was visible from the gallery windows. The artwork's hanging bells visually echoed those in the cathedral's tower, creating a dialogue between its solemn architecture and the sculpture's simple, raw materials.  Tethered to the beams, Kounellis' bells are now silent, but they also hold the potential to ring again. 'Bells represent language, a magnified human voice - and the enthusiastic roar of liberation'.

Coal Sculpture with Wall of Coloured Glass, 1999, (glass, steel, coal and paraffin lamp)

According to Kounellis, coal and iron are 'the materials that best evoke the world of industrial revolution'. The paraffin lamp alludes to the process of ore mining. Many of the suspended glass lumps appear to be natural: like coal, glass can form over millenia through the heat and movement of the earth. Both coal and glass speak of the encounter between geological process and human industry. Kounellis considered all his works to be subject to change and often adapted them to different contexts or architectural settings. He made this installation in 2005 by combining two separate works.

'I cannot separate the use of such a mass of coal from the dramaturgy which puts humanity at the forefront. The human being as protagonist of a social drama, of a suffering and marginalised humanity, the human being as a protagonist, with his body and gestures, of an epic which inhabits my imagination'.

Untitled, 1969, (stone)

Every time this work is displayed it's always installed in a doorway, performing the same physical 'blockage' of the threshold. The artist's instructions are to use stones that are sourced locally from the place where the work is exhibited. The wall is executed in a simple masonry style using blocks of irregular sizes,  often seen in farmland walls, and appears out of place in a gallery interior. The work may also allude to the blocked doors and windows of abandoned houses, heightening its suggestion of exclusion and threat.

Untitled, 1969, (burlap, chickpeas, coffee beans, green lentils, green peas, kidney beans, white beans and maize)

Seven burlap sacks filled with beans and pulses line up on the floor, evoking our personal connections to these staple foods. 'Burlap sacks... are tied to the idea of maritime commerce. You can find them in every Levantine harbour. But also in New York or in South America, the whole world over...A sack is also something which contains something else. A ship or a burlap sack are things which are grandiosely maternal'.

Untitled, 1979, (charcoal, paper, arrows and stuffed birds)

The outline of an imaginary 19th century townscape and smoking factory chimney may symbolise the rise of industrialisation. Two birds pierced by arrows, a jackdaw and a hooded crow, suggest that this was a violent and traumatic change. The chimney evokes the combustion process that produces the charcoal used to draw it: a process both creative and destructive. The birds were part of the original work made by Kounellis in 1979, the charcoal drawing is remade each time the work is shown. 

The five works on paper depict women's heads and loandscapes, also etched into thick and soot-like layer of charcoal. Kounellis compared these to images traced on a water surface: fleeting memories of people and places destined to disappear.

Untitled (Hanging Knife), 1991, (steel, knife, metal hook, etching on paper and glass)

Kounellis used knives in many of his works, often suspended or facing out towards the viewer in a way that suggests impending threat or violence. Here a single butcher's knive hangs from a meat hook over an etching featuring a hand-drawn circular motif. The spiralling lines evoke an energetic scrawling gesture. This hints at a similarity between the knife and the pencil: both are pointed instruments capable of leaving marks. The familiar and pristine appearance of the hanging blade, contrasting with the chaotic scribbled lines, only heightens the atmosphere of suspense and potential menace.

Philip Guston

'Probably the only thing one can really learn, the only technique to learn, is the capacity to be able to change'.  Philip Guston.

Philip Guston

at Tate Modern.

1. Restlessness:

This exhibition charts Guston's 50-year career, his varying approaches to painting as well as his artistic, philosophical and social concerns. Living through much of the 20th century, Guston watched on and responded to wars, racial injustice, violence and political and social upheavals. These works raise questions about injustice and accountability. Throughout his life, he thought about the artist's responsibility to bear witness to what he called 'the brutality of the world' and to challenge oneself creatively. Consistently changing and reinventing, he sought to make work that embodies life's complexities, its beauty, absurdity, humour and suffering.

Painter, 1980, (lithograph on paper)

Guston presents himself covered in plasters but still resiliently at work. This series of prints were some of the last works he produced. Sidney Felsen commented: 'his imagery is languid and sleep-charged ... The time frame is non-linear, mixed, zigzagging elusively between the present and the past. Nor are we certain at any given moment as to whether Guston is awake or asleep or, implausibly, both'.

Legend, 1977, (oil on canvas)

 

Legend is littered with items from the studio, including an empty bottle, cigarette butts and a wooden wedge used to stretch canvases. Guston's late paintings are often enigmatic and dreamlike, their compositions showing  objects in precarious balance.

Humorously, this composition also makes visual parallels between a horse's rear end and Guston's sleeping head. The horse may be a reference to one of his favourite books, Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry which narrates events of the Polish-Soviet War (1918-21), including persecution of Jews in what is present-day Ukraine, the area Guston's parents had fled.

2. Struggle and Solidarity:

'I grew up politically in the 30s and I was actively involved in militant movements and so on, as a lot of artists were... I think there was a sense of being part of a change, or possible change'.

Guston's birth name was Philip Goldstein. Born in 1913, he was the youngest child of Jewish immigrants who had fled antisemitic persecution in present-day Ukraine. The family moved first to Montreal before relocating to Los Angeles in 1922. They had little money and faced several tragedies. His father, who worked as a scrap collector, took his own life when Guston was still a child. His brother died a few years later after a car accident. He turned to art as a way of dealing with the impact of these traumas in his formative years.

Young Guston took an interest in drawing and cartooning, spending hours at the library poring over Italian Renaissance art books. His teenage friends, including artists Jackson Pollock and Reuben Kadish, shared his interest in modern art from Europe, particularly surrealism and the work of Pablo Picasso. His early paintings, such as Mother and Child, show him responding to this wide range of interests.

Guston began to engage with politics while he was still a teenager in LA. The 1930s was a time of growing anti-immigrant, antisemitic and racist belief in the USA, contributing to the rise of hate groups. Most notably, the Ku Klux Klan saw a resurgence in the 1920s and 1930s.

Guston and his friends were involved with socially-engaged art, creating large-scale narrative-driven murals and paintings. They joined the Bloc of Painters formed under Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. Through their art this group aimed to support workers' rights and protest against racial injustice in the US.

Nude Philosopher in Space-Time, 1935, (oil on canvas)

Mother and Child, 1930, (oil on canvas)

Guston made this painting when he was 17 years old and it featured in his first exhibition at a bookshop in Hollywood in 1933. It incorporates masny different artistic influences: the subject references depictions of Mary and Jesus in Renaissance painters; the monumental mother figure alludes to Picasso's paintings while the surroundings recall Giorgio de Chirico's ghostly cityscapes. He would go on to be inspired by these artists throughout his life. 

From the wall to the easel:

' I would like to think a picture is finished when it feels not new but old. As if its forms had lived a long time in you... It is the looker not the maker, who is so hungry for the new. The new can take care of itself'.

Guston began working as a muralist during the Great Depression of the 1930s. He was inspired by Italian Renaissance fresco paintings of the 1500s, seeking to channel their monumentality and iconography. In 1934, he and friends Reugen Kadish and Jules Langsner secured their first major mural commission, creating a massive fresco in Morelia, Mexico. Called The Struggle Against Terrorism it shows people's resistance to persecution and violence from the medieval period through to the Ku Klux Klan in the US and the rise of Nazism across Europe.

The revolutionary mural movement had been flourishing for more than a decade in Mexico. Initiated after the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) and at first funded by the government, these murals retold stories of Mexican history on public walls and buldings.  David Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera, two of the most prominent artists associated with the movement, steered Guston, Kadish and Langsner to their first major commission: a gigantic wall in a historic building then run as a museum by the Universidad de San Nicolas in Morelia. They produced a monumental and startling work.  

A video of the work was exhibited in the gallery and I took photographs of the images as they were unfolding. Difficult to photograph, difficult to get a sense of the whole - this is a work I would really like to see. Below are some of the photographs I took.

The work's complex imagery presents a history of persecution with the image of a tortured woman at its centre.

The mural also draws visual links between the hooded priests of the Spanish Inquisition and Ku Klux Klan.

At its completion in 1935, Time magazine wrote that the left half of the wall depicts nude workers knocking down 'a colossal figure supposed to represent the Medieval Inquisition...

The other half of the wall is given over to the Modern Inquisition...

In the extreme upper right, Communists with sickle and hammer are rushing to the rescue'.

Left of the main wall on the upper floor, a scene of lamentation. The artists signed their names beneath a surrealist-inspired scene of abduction on the ground floor. The mural's criticism of the Roman Catholic Church and its depiction of nudity may have contributed to it being hidden from view in the early 1940s. Covered by a false wall until 1973, today it is preserved and maintained by the Museo Regional Michoacano, which is working with the Guston Foundation to conserve it.

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After this, Guston produced one final mural in LA before relocating to New York in 1936. There he was joined by artist Musa McKim, who he married the following year. His work continued as a muralist through government-funded programmes. It was also when he changed his name to Philip Guston to mask his Jewish identity, as many others were doing at a time of growing antisemitism.

In the 1940s Guston's work transformed after he began teaching at universities in Iowa City and Saint Louis. Working from a studio, he turned away from public art and muralism focusing instead on easel painting and portraiture. He painted allegorical scenes often of children playing and fighting. Affected by the trauma of WWII and the Holocaust, he turned to increasingly abstract compositions. As the figures broke apart, so did Guston's practice, 'everything seemed unsuccessful', Guston said. 'I couldn't continue figuration'.

Gladiators, 1940, (oiol and graphite on canvas)

3. New Beginnings:

In the late 1940s, Guston's practice began shifting dramatically. He travelled to Europe for the first time in 1948 after he was awarded a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. Confronting a creative crisis, he grew increasingly unsatisfied with figurative painting. He recalled, 'the forms I wanted to make couldn't take the shapes of things and figures... I felt torn... between conflicting loyalties... The loyalty to my own past, and the other loyalty of what you might still do'. He did little painting and destroyed nearly all the works he made in Rome. 

After travelling across Europe and seeing art, Guston felt inspired to paint again. On returning to New York, he immersed himself in the growing scene of abstract painters. He became good friends with Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. In his paintings from this period, he tested himself by working intuitively in long bouts without stepping back from the canvas to analyse the composition. In 1957, he explained: 'when I work, I am not concerned with making pictures, but only with the process of creation... I feel that I have not invented so much as revealed, in a coded way, something that already existed'.

Beggar's Joys, 1954-55, (oil on canvas)

Dial, 1956, (oil on canvas)

4. Image maker:

By the mid-1960s, Guston, restless and always challenging himself to evolve, entered a new phase. He drained most of the colour from his work, largely restricting himself to using black and white pigments. In these paintings, dark shapes, usually identified as heads, seem to emerge from grey backgrounds. He spoke about the miraculous feeling of reaching a point 'when the paint doesn't feel like paint... And you feel like you've just made a thing, like a living thing is there'.

Fighting with an impulse to paint figuratively, Guston described how he was 'driven to scrape out the recognition' of images in his works. 'The trouble with recognisable art is that it excludes too much. I want my work to include more. And 'more' also comprises one's doubts about the object, plus the problem, the dilemma, of recognising it'.

He gave up painting for around 18 months and eventually began producing simple drawings. 

Painter III, 1963, (oil on canvas)

Untitled, 1966-67 (ink on paper on board)

Untitled, 1968, (charcoal on paper)

5. What kind of man am I?:

'The war in Vietnam, what was happening to America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything - and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?'

Guston often grappled with the role art could play in the face of violence, racism and polarised political views in the US and across the world. While he had stopped making directly political art in the 1930s, he remained politically engaged. For instance, he served as co-chair for Artists for CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) in 1966. 

In the 1960s, like many around the country, Guston watched as a cataclysm of national and world events unfolded. In particular, the police violence against protestors at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago stood out for him. Such violence triggered Guston's memories of the Ku Klux Klan, prompting him to make new images featuring hooded figures. That same year, also thinking back to the horrors of the Holocaust, he articulated his view of the artist's responsibility of 'unnumb' oneself to the brutality of the world. He said; 'that's the only reason to be an artist ... to bear witness'.

Untitled, 1968, (acrylic on board)

Group I, 1968, (charcoal on paper)

6. Hoods:

Guston's desire to make narrative work to address the nightmarish injustices he saw in society led him to create large-scale paintings of hooded figures at the end of the 1960s. He saw them as symbols of evil, commenting that 'my attempt was really not ... to do pictures of the KKK, as I had done earlier. The idea of evil fascinated me ... I almost tried to imagine that I was living with the Klan. What would it be like to be evil? To plant and plot'. The hooded figures can be seen driving around town, waiting at home or making art. By using cartoons' capacity for satire, the paintings challenge projections of strength and intimidation, presenting these figures instead as ridiculous, yet unsettlingly commonplace.

The paintings also point to racist systems and institutions as well as society's broader complicity in evil acts. He commented, 'well, it could be all of us. We're all hoods'.

In 1970, he revealed over 30 of these new paintings at a solo show at Marlborough Gallery. The exhibition shocked critics and many of his closest friends who were dismayed with this new direction, particularly his change of style away from abstraction. The negative reviews were devastating, calling his work 'crude' and 'out ot touch'.  Art critic Perrault wrote: 'it's as if De Chirico went to bed with a hangover and had a Krazy Kat dream about America falling apart... It really took guts to make this shift this late in the game, because a lot of people are going to hate these things, these paintings. Not me'.

The Studio, 1969, (oil on canvas)

Blackboard, 1969, (oil on canvas)

Here, hoods appear on the blackboard, infiltrating the classroom. Education was a key priority throughout the US Civil Rights movement. 'There would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom', wrote Carter G. Woodson, the early 20th century historian whose contributions helped establish Black History Month in the US. The image of the hooded figures on the blackboard points to power dynamics and  white supremacy in schools, as well as the consequences of what is taught and what is excluded from the curriculum.

City Limits, 1969, (oil on canvas)

By the Window, 1969, (oil on canvas)

Painter's forms:

Soon after the Marlborough show opening in 1970, Guston and McKim travelled to Italy for several months. Guston soon began a series of works on paper inspired by Rome's gardens and ancient ruins. In these strange landscapes, hooded figures mingle with bricks and hedges, morphing into new forms like triangular pink trees. Living in New York for the rest of the decade, Guston remained out of the spotlight of the art world. It was the most productive period of his career, making hundreds of works each year full of his strange and uncanny imagery.

The everyday life of the painter, his memories as well as his personal hardships flooded his paintings. Painter's Forms shows a head vomiting out objects, or sucking them in - an unusual kind of self-portrait. Guston also began to represent himself as a wide-eyed cyclops in many of his paintings of the period. He depicted piles of objects, which he sometimes called 'crapola' or junk, in compositions that are dream-like and often have an offbeat humour.

Open Window, 1969, (oil on board)

Flatlands, 1970, (oil on canvas)

Painting, Smoking, Eating, 1973, (oil on canvas)

7. Poems and Pictures:

'Paul Valery once said that a bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning'.

For Guston, the poetry of image-making was all about ambiguity and open-endedness, combining the familiar with the uncanny. He said: 'My own demand is that I want to be surprised, baffled. To come in the studio the next morning and say, 'did I do that? Is it me? Isn't that strange!'. In Guston's personal iconography, objects seem to morph and rearrange. 

In the 1970s, Guston forged close friendships with a younger generation of poets. He said: 'The few people who visit me are poets or writers, rather than painters, because I value their reactions'. He created images for various poets and writers, making 'poem-pictures' incorporating verses alongside his characteristic assortments of everyday objects. This section contains several poem-pictures he made with McKim's poetry, often representing her in his works by her forehead and parted hair.

Wharf, 1976, (oil on canvas)

Aegean, 1978, (oil on canvas)

The Ladder, 1978, (oil on canvas)

8. Night Studio:

'A painting feels lived-out to me, not painted... So the paintings aren't pictures, but evidences - maybe documents, along the road you have not chosen, but are on nevertheless.'

Guston conjured up a world of lonely objects, bustling body parts, lively flames and sleeping figures. For years, he worked in the studio long into the night, painting and smoking. In the late 1970s, Guston and McKim struggled with health problems. McKim had a stroke in 1977 that kept her from writing poetry. Guston thought continually about his own mortality. Some of the paintings of these final years show colours emerging from thickly layered black paint. The imagery moves between nightmarish and comic.

A few weeks after the opening of his retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1980, Guston died aged 66 of a heart attack. This exhibition led to a renewed interest in his work, which has continued to grow ever since.

Throughout his career, Guston's practice shifted as the world around him also changed. Often preoccupied with life's nightmares, he was also wrapped up in his artistic dreams. His paintings, where shapes and meanings are never fixed, continue to provoke, puzzle and inspire conversation. 'A picture should tell stories', he wrote. 'It makes me want to paint. To see, in a painting, what one has always wanted to see, but hasn't, until now. For the first time'.

Talking, 1979, (oil on canvas)

Talking is one of Guston's last self-portraits. It is distilled to a single extended arm, caught mid-gesture in conversation. His watch is pointing backwards and he has a paint-splattered sleeve and two cigarettes in hand, their blood-red smoke crossing paths with a pull chain or an unseen light.

Sleeping, 1979, (oil on canvas)

Kettle, 1978, (oil on canvas)

Couple in Bed, 1977, (oil on canvas)

In this double portrait, Guston shows the artist clinging with equal measure to his paint brushes and to his partner, McKim. The painting was completed after McKim suffered a series of strokes that left Guston shaken and thrust him into the role of caretaker. Here, the couple's shared tenderness is made visible.

Web, 1975, (oil on canvas)

The Line, 1978, (oil on canvas)

Descending from the sky like a bolt of lightning, a hand grasps a stick of charcoal and draws the most basic of artistic forms, a straight line. The painting might reflect Guston's great ambitions and his equally great doubts about artistic ctreation. 'I think it's kind of like devil's work... Only God can make a tree'. Perhaps this is also a reflection on Guston's spontaneous method of working, as though he was guided by something he did not completely control. Elaborating on this, Guston recalled something John Cage once said to him: 'When you start working, everybody is in your studio - the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas... But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one and you are left completely. Then, if you're lucky, even you leave.