Word: guston
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...their surface. But they do breathe: light and air -- of a rather claustral kind, but atmosphere just the same -- bathe the bodies and unify them as objects in the world while threatening always to dissolve them as emblems of personality. The surfaces look as if they came via Philip Guston from Monet, picking up some of Giacomo Balla's futurist dissections of light particles along the way -- a sober flicker in which images flash and are gone like the sides of fish in dark, weedy water...
...this case, the foreground counts most. It is a simplification, but not a gross one, to say that Morley and the late Philip Guston were the twin unlatchers of "new figuration," at least in America. Morley was an expressionist artist when most of the current crop of neoexpressionists were still, aesthetically speaking, in diapers. His mix of mass-media cliche with intimate confession, his abrupt shifts of gear in imagery and format, and his therapeutic desire to shovel his whole life-traumas, lusts, memories, hopes-onto the canvas, struck many younger painters as a fresh model of artistic character...
Need one add that there is no naiveté in Guston's figurative work that is not deliberate, and no clumsiness that is not feigned? Between the early and the late '70s the scope of his vision and the resonance of his images deepened steadily; those phalanxes of knobby knees and boots like Uccello horseshoes, those bloodshot cyclopean eyes and gut piles of pink carcasses acquired, despite their comic-strip mannerisms of drawing, a degree of pessimism that verged on the tragic. Guston's Head and Bottle, 1975, with its profile of a face (a self-portrait...
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...
Klutzy and learned, embarrassing and quizzical, eloquently obsessed with inarticulacy-such was Guston's art. "Human consciousness moves," he remarked in the mid-'60s, "but it is not a leap: it is one inch. One inch is a small jump, but that jump is everything. You go way out, and then you have to come back-to see if you can move that inch." As the paintings prove, he could...