Word: gustons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...artist in particular, though, did change-and was not thanked for it. He was Philip Guston, whose retrospective of 106 works spanning 50 years from 1930 to 1980 is now on view at the Whitney Museum in New York City...
...What Guston did was turn into a figurative painter in his late middle age. This need not have looked bad in itself: the human figure, in various states of smearing and dissection, had long been visible in the 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...
...have turned out that way. In the intervening decade, there has been a riotous growth of deliberately clumsy, punkish figurative painting in America: paintings that ignore decorum or 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...
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...