Word: guston
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...Looney Tunes mule. And The Breakdown (circa 1940-41), showing a sharecropper's feet protruding from beneath his stalled jalopy while a huge sun sinks and his wife scrapes together a meal by the side of the road, has some of the deep, wry, emblematic pathos of Philip Guston's late work...
...million against the estimates of $5 million to $7 million. It might have been a $15 million painting a year ago, but at least its price offset the fact that none of the other De Koonings in the sale -- all later or inferior works -- found buyers. Philip Guston's Summer, 1954, joined the De Kooning as one of the few paintings to exceed its high estimate -- $1.1 million, against estimates of $500,000 to $700,000. But again, nothing by Warhol sold, and Minimal art did badly across the board...
...idea that "low" sources somehow debase the integrity of "high" art is moonshine, of course. It always has been: Goya's Caprichos, for instance, draw heavily on folk proverbs, crude popular drama and 18th century (mainly English) caricature. Miro was inspired by comic strips and folk scatology. And Philip Guston in the 1970s was able to attain his measure of greatness as a tragic painter only through a free, uncondescending use of motifs from George Herriman's great strip Krazy Kat and the underground comics of Robert Crumb. Nor can MOMA be accused of pandering to mass taste by exhibiting...
...Innocent X into his own series of screaming Popes. Picasso did a knotty and unsuccessful series of "variations" on his work, attempting to reconstruct it in terms of something other than empirical vision. Velazquez's influence appears in unexpected places: if, for instance, one wants to know where Philip Guston felt some of the authority for his last paintings lay, where those eloquently clumsy speckled gray-and-pink shapes looked back to, one need only consult passages in Velazquez like the extraordinary plumage of the headdress worn by Queen Mariana for his formal portrait of her in the Prado...
...more modeled and blunter in the early '80s. All the same, one was not ready for the swing that appeared in Tucker's work in 1984. He turned to bronze, to figures -- everything his early sculptures had eschewed. This was as unexpected as the moment in 1970 when Philip Guston, known for 20 years as a painter of fugitive gray-rose webs, showed his first paintings of Ku Klux Klansmen and sent an avalanche of taste rolling toward "clumsy" figuration. What was the erstwhile constructor up to? This show tells...