Some Tumblr-user posted this painting with the #abstract tag, which is funny because Philip Guston was run out of the country when he became the first major NYC artist to show not abstract work in a gallery in the '70s.

Well, he chose to leave, said he needed a vacation, but the gallery dropped him and the critics tore him apart so it’s not like sticking around would have been much fun. The way he tells it, after his survey at the Jewish Museum he got “stuck on shoes,” he just couldn’t help it, did “hundreds of paintings of shoes.”

Guston learned how to art as a WPA mural painter, so it makes sense that abstraction wasn’t really his thing. He was much more interested in painting creepy little gollums than pink cloud washes. In fact he wasn’t into the whole painting-as-a-surface thing at all, he called it a “popular and melancholy cliche.” Guston was prone to a Russian affliction called rasidrat dushu, a proclivity to “tear out one’s soul,” in his case onto a canvas. And his soul was full of visible things that he thinks are “abstract and mysterious enough.” Rothko apparently also suffered from this ailment, but his soul must have just been full of colors.

Really Guston couldn’t be an abstract artist, there was too much terrible shit going on in the world to paint ~meditations on color.~ Guston was an activist early in his life, the KKK once helped the police destroy a show of his works in LA, so the turmoil of the '60s had him in and out of despair. And led him to shoes.

He liked to sit in his studio and pretend to be an evil dude, with a bunch of evil friends, in an evil movie and then paint what that world would look like. Those eight shoes under the red-headed fellow’s arms, what dastardly scheme is he using them for? Are there bodies still attached to them? This is grindhouse humor, like not sure if it’s more creepy or more silly. But Guston’s jokes and social critiques sit backseat to his real motivation to paint. A reporter once asked him a dumb question about his paintings and instead of answering the question he said “what you are doing is trying to stay alive and continue and not die.”