Word: gustons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...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...
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...