Philip Guston’s teenage drawings reveal a lost world of funny pages

Before Philip Guston developed the loud, lavish face of his fame, before anglicizing his last name as an adult, the 12-year-old known as Philip Goldstein joined the artistic staff of the Los Angeles Times Junior Club.

The son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants from Montreal who had moved to Los Angeles, Philip was a student at Manual Arts High School, where he befriended a young Jackson Pollock and joined a youth organization that produced The Junior Times, a Sunday supplement of the Los Angeles. Times for essays, poems, puzzles and illustrations by children, for children. From 1925 to 1929, in these pages, Guston honed his pen for the audiences of the West Coast’s largest home delivery service.

A few afternoons ago, I revealed 20 of his drawings that, like “Steamboat Willie,” Winnie the Pooh, and other classic characters, are now in the public domain. Could they enrich our understanding of Guston and his art?

The Junior Club itself seemed to be the boy’s muse. In several panels from 1928, one of his characters, Kolly-Jit, an overenthusiastic schoolboy whose name is a pun on “college,” welcomes the new members of the Junior Club with a “Hello!” In one strip, Kolly visits a Junior Times columnist, Tony Correra, who, in real life, lived a few blocks from Guston in South Los Angeles.

In a 1926 comic strip, we meet Skinny Slats, an ironically portly boy who emerges from an inkwell. Skinny is alone and confused until six cartoonists from the Junior Club – including Hardie Gramatky, who became a watercolorist admired by Andrew Wyeth – enter the frame and warmly greet the boy.

The “merry band of feather pushers,” as Guston described the teenage illustrators in a stylish, George Herriman-esque panel from July 1928, would themselves pursue artistic careers: Louie Frimkess founded the company Advertising Designers, Philip Delara joined Warner. Brothers; Minnesota native Bill Zaboly inherited the Popeye design after EC Segar’s death, while Manuel Moreno, the brightest face of Guston’s group, set up a short-lived studio in Mexico after animating for Walter Lantz, the creator of Woody Woodpecker.

Art history is aware of Guston’s nobler influences – his mentor in West Coast surrealism, Lorser Feitelson, or the Hollywood collectors of Duchamps and Brancusis, the Arensbergs – but these local fun pages, with their collaborations and their encores, were a laboratory for him and for budding artists of all predilections.

While Junior Clubs were “a generic form that newspapers large and small could adapt” on a national scale, newspaper historian Paul Moore said in an interview, “the LA Junior Times seems to have been reminded of unique way over the following decades as the starting forum for several artists and illustrators. »

Sandra Gabriele, co-author with Moore of “The Sunday Paper: A Media History,” added by phone that “the symbolic indication is that this paper does more than just bring you news.” Through competitions, prizes, subscriptions and events, Gabriele explained, Junior Clubs “really aimed to act as a cultural and civic agent in society itself.”

Thirteen-year-old Guston confided in the editor of one of his first issues: “I just joined your wonderful club and have already won a prize for a comic strip. I just can’t express the feeling I had when I saw the postman put a blue letter in the mailbox. I am certainly proud to be a registered member of the largest and most energetic club in the world.

Through political cartoons and inside jokes, Guston’s voice takes shape. His ink strokes for New Year’s Eve 1929 predict the individualized daubs that would distinguish him among the abstract expressionists of 1950s New York. Vocabularies also mixed. Check out the strange Cyclops artist drawn by one Ronald Gwinn of South Pasadena, with the shaggy easel and screaming light bulb recognizable from Guston’s later works.

Race also stands out to the modern reader. Guston’s first strip for The Junior Times, a sparse strip drawn when he was 12, featured Little Snowball, a black youth with an exaggerated racial physiognomy and dialect. In its early days, Snowball quarreled with a Hollywood director. In the next issue, published on Guston’s 13th birthday, Snowball phones his girlfriend.

Two years later, in 1928, Guston resurrected him across three issues as Snowball the Bell-Hop, this time well-dressed, more deftly drawn, delivering lines in his hotel uniform. Although his English now follows textbook grammar, Snowball’s minstrel-like qualities remain.

“Sambo” and the subsequent denigrations were unfortunately part of a long and pervasive graphic tradition. “Discrepancies may not be published,” Moore said of the ubiquity of tropes. “It speaks to existing ways of thinking, existing ways of being in society.”

Invented during Reconstruction to “muzzle” freed black Americans, as historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. put it in “Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow,” these caricatures continued to fill the amusing pages from the 1920s, providing the Junior Club’s many young cartoonists with stable models – Gasoline Alley’s mom, the primitivized natives of The Gumps, Winnie Winkle’s ragamuffin.

Sally Radic of the Guston Foundation, which represents the painter’s work, said in a statement that he was “devoted to drawing.”

“He submitted his work to the LA Times,” she said, “and he received first prizes. He was involved in comics (drawings). Yet, not having preserved sketchbooks or anything similar, we cannot say much about artistic attitudes or social concerns. We know that as a young man he was socially conscious.

Indeed, at age 17, Guston had left the Junior Club for the left-wing John Reed Club. As he recalled in interviews, the 1931 Scottsboro Boys case — a racial miscarriage of justice presaging the Central Park Five — spurred him to greater demonstrations of racial solidarity. Guston’s social justice paintings from the 1930s depict members of the Ku Klux Klan in unambiguous acts of terror, some with black victims.

Could the embarrassment caused by Snowball have fueled the intensity of these early paintings?

Robert Storr, author of a 2020 monograph on Guston, reviewed the early drawings with me. “Did he just feel uncomfortable with his own prejudices, as teenagers sometimes do?” he wondered. “Was he reprimanded for this by his party colleagues? What happened ? Guston left no trace beyond the comics themselves.

After years as an abstract painter, Guston returned to figuration in the 1960s. Klan members also returned his canvases, this time in nursery school pinks and blues, performing jokes instead of barbarities : driving, smoking, socializing and – tellingly – painting on easels.

When these documents persuaded curators to postpone his 2020 retrospective, believing the work needed more context, debate resurfaced over what these later Klansmen might have meant.

“They are self-portraits,” Guston said in 1978, in a much-quoted statement since the retrospective. “I feel like I’m behind the hood.” In a Self-portrait from 1968 during the show (which ended this spring in London), he left a palimpsest of the hood barely visible behind his face.

“I have long been intrigued by Philip Guston’s willingness to see himself under the hood of the Klan,” Storr later wrote to me. “Was it an amorphous liberal guilt that many white people felt in the radical ’60s or something else? Well, a quick perusal of Guston’s (then Goldstein’s) apprentice cartoons in the LA Times provides a worthy answer.

“They are painful to look at and think about today,” Storr continued, “and it must have been painful for their author to remember them in the aftermath of the civil rights era. His private shame and ambivalence are written all over the fanciful hooded marauders he deployed in his later paintings and differentiate these figures from his crude, overtly political depictions of lynchers doing their dirty work in the 1930s.”

Unless a long-lost diary resurfaces, the possibility that Guston himself cringed at the memory – or remembered the cartoons – remains speculative. “At the turn of the century,” Storr warns, “Klan hatred was directed as much against immigrants as against blacks. So there were many reasons to hate the Klan. »

But the drawings introduce a new potential reading. In confronting the banality of evil with his Klansmen of the 1960s and 1970s, Guston was perhaps delving into his own past in search of the raw American political unconscious. (His return to political cartooning under President Nixon, featuring childish reductions of China and Africa, would suggest he was still “doing the job.”)

“To ask for meaning is to misunderstand his process,” his daughter, Musa Mayer, said in a recent interview at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But as Guston settles deeper into the canon, with a huge new gift and an exhibition in the Met’s future Tang Wing, it is to be hoped that the full and unrelenting scope of his legacy – from newspaper cartooning to gallery – will embolden rather than frighten its curators. Let us study it, following Harry Belafonte’s informal edict in 1963, addressing the crowd at the March on Washington: “It is artists who reveal society to itself.”