CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/14/2017

Inquiry and revelation: Philip Guston & the Poets

“A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have,” Wallace Stevens wrote in 1957. Philip Guston would have agreed, according to Kosme de Barañano, author of Hauser & Wirth’s stellar new Gallerie dell'Accademia di Venezia exhibition catalog, Philip Guston & the Poets. “For Stevens, a poem is an exploration of the world, another form of thinking and knowledge. Similarly for Guston, the image is an inquiry into the capacity for revelation within visual—painterly—language, which in a sense overtakes the painter himself. The artist, whether poet or painter, does not seek to name or describe reality as a geographer or physicist does, but to discover it with or in the work. A poem, like a song from the soul, wants to do the same.”