GERMANTOWN, New York — In his article “Piero della Francesca: The Impossibility of Painting” (Art News, March 1965), Philip Guston wrote: He is so remote from other masters; without their “completeness” of personality. A different fervor, grave and delicate, moves in the daylight of his pictures. Without our familiar passions, he is like a visitor to the earth, reflecting on distances, gravity and positions of essential forms. In his painting “Pantheon” (1973), Guston writes down five names. Four are written in red letters between the easel and a bare light that takes up most of the painting: Masaccio, Piero, Giotto, and Tiepelo. On the far left, squeezed between the easel and painting’s left edge, Guston has written de Chirico on a diagonal. In the exhibition Enigma Variations: Philip Guston and Giorgio de Chirico, at the Santa Monica Museum of Art (September 9–November 25, 2006), the co-curators, Michael Taylor and Lisa Melandri, paired specific works by the two artists. The pairing revealed how closely Guston looked at de Chirico’s paintings. And yet, even when Guston is responding directly to a work by de Chirico, no one would accuse him of being derivative. His response was inspired and imaginative.
Thomas Nozkowsi’s pantheon surely included Pisanello’s “The Vision of Saint Eustache” (1438–42), which hangs in the National Gallery in London, where he first saw it and realized that you could put anything in a painting. In my interview with him in The Brooklyn Rail (November 2010), Nozkowski said: What a great painting! Some works of art just open up and seem to stretch out in all directions. They go on forever. For Nozkwski, this meant that he could put anything he experienced into a painting. This is how he put it in our interview: Yes, but taking that idea [of personal experience] in the broadest possible way. Events, things, ideas — anything. Objects and places in the visual continuum, sure, but also from other arts and abstract systems. A few days ago, I was sitting in Suzan Frecon’s studio in Germantown, New York. We ran into each other outside the train station in Rhinecliff, New York. We had both been on the same train but did not know it. She was going to her studio while I was going to Bard College to meet three students in the graduate program at Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies before giving a poetry reading later that evening. The accident of our meeting enabled me to invite myself over to Suzan’s studio. I had been visiting her New York studio since shortly after I moved to New York in 1975 and met her through a friend. But this was the first time I would see what she was up to in Germantown.