Word: guston
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There is an edge of smugness in the view of Monet that attributes his claim on our eyes to his modernity, we are prone to use the past as gratification, and think it good because it made us possible. But Monet did not labor for the sake of Philip Guston or Sam Francis. His actual greatness resides in the way in which he marked, and then transcended, his own cultural perimeter. He provoked Impressionism rather as Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon provoked Cubism; and the crucial encounter here was with an older painter, Eugene-Louis Boudin, whom...
Written Paint. With hindsight, it is difficult to look at the broad, loosely brushed planes of primary color in Marin's watercolor of 1921, Red and Green and Blue-Autumn, without thinking of Philip Guston or Hans Hofmann; and Marin's Cape Split. Maine, with its fuzzy-edged, vibrating and organic shapes held together by tense flicks of line, equally suggests Gorky or the early De Kooning. Near the end of his life, Marin was almost literally writing the paint onto his canvases -his own title for a 1950 oil was The Written Sea-with an immediacy...
...Guston's obvious debts are to American graphic art, to "some of the comic strips I used to really love-Mutt and Jeff, and Krazy Kat." But the idiom is overloaded to the edge of portentousness. It is as if Guston flipped back to the late '30s, when he was a WPA muralist -those remote days when it was still believed that political comment could give art relevance...
Social comment was never far from Guston's figurative work: his 1946 Night Children may be caught in a dream, but they live in a slum. The new paintings attack more broadly. His Klansmen are not to be taken as images of a specific present threat (who now takes the Klan as a real political force?) but as generalized symbols of inhumanity. The cunning childishness of Guston's style accords with a game his paintings play -the reduction of the elements of evil to their simplest form, like building blocks...
...York Times's Hilton Kramer dismisses Guston's paintings as a mere exercise in radical chic. Rather, they are Guston's authentic response to a personal sense of crisis. The trouble is that painting has become a clumsy way of reporting a society as turbulent and racked as this. Its clashes cannot be accounted for in single, painted images-as Goya could report the Madrid insurrection in Third of May, or Delacroix symbolize the 1830 revolution with Liberty Leading the People over the barricades of a Paris street. The task has been assumed, and done better...