Word: abstract
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...Says Father Jon Sobrino, who teaches at the Universidad Centroamericana José Siméon Cañnas in San Salvador: "We Jesuits have not chosen an ideology. The basic problem is reality itself. When you see corpses or children starving, what makes you react is reality, not some abstract idea...
Nearly everyone who was concerned with American abstract expressionism-critics, curators, the artists themselves-agreed on one thing: the movement, like its godparent, surrealism, was all about freedom. In Jackson Pollock's drips lay written the unfettered play of the mind, the swift "existential" decisions of the hand. Because it incarnated liberty, some thought, abstract expressionism transcended style. This cherished notion was very much a part of its time, a fixture of the '50s, like James Dean, the beats or the vogue for Camusian outsiders. In later years, it was more honored in the breach than...
...work of his friend Willem de Kooning. But the paintings Guston began to make in the late '60s, and first showed in 1970, looked so unlike his established work that they seemed a willful and even crass about-face. Instead of the Gustons the art world knew-abstract paintings with vaporous, knitted surfaces of pearl gray and subtle pinks, like fragments of Monet lily ponds with hints of Turner's clouds and sea fogs-they were, of all unlikely things, political images: fat Ku Kluxers riding around in cars, nooses, stubbled faces in claustrophobic, smoke-filled rooms...
...precision in the interest of a cunningly rude, expressionist-based diction. Quite clearly, Guston is godfather to this manner, and for this reason his work excites more interest among painters under 35 than that of any of his contemporaries. He would never have gained this following had he stayed abstract, and it is sadly ironic that he died last year, at age 66, shortly after the current retrospective opened in San Francisco, but too soon to enjoy the enthusiasm it is stirring in New York...
Toward the end of his life, Guston was painting the world as a charnel house of gross dreams and irreconcilable conflicts: no satisfaction anywhere, except in the creamy, impasted paint, which remained as lavish as in his abstract paintings. The essential Guston is all there in a work like Entrance, 1979. It is about intrusion and helplessness, the mind's impotence to fend off its demons. A door opens, and in rolls a mass of Guston's standard images-the trampling, dismembered limbs, nasty enough even without the bugs that advance with them across the floor. Then...