Word: gustons
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...sick and tired of all that purity! I wanted to tell stories!" Thus Philip Guston, whose tremulous gestural paintings established him, from 1951 onward, as one of the leading Abstract Expressionists. His current show at Manhattan's Marlborough Gallery is indeed a change. The old Guston is barely recognizable. The patches and drifts of color, tentatively knitted rather than brushed-like magnified details of a Monet seen through gray glass-have gone...
...Guston has returned to painting figures. He has also turned political. It may seem a little late in the century to mount an entire exhibition on the theme of the Ku Klux Klan, but that is what he has done. Drawn in a mock-fumbly, endearing line, hooded Klansmen, looking like half-inflated dirigibles, sit plotting together in cheap hotel rooms, or ride in a jalopy through city streets, or, cigar in fist, survey piles of bodies. Sometimes they are seen in confabulation with a bald, pink-necked Southern sheriff. Now and then a hand, suggestive...
...here was an artist who had painted along with Pollock, Kline, Gottlieb and DeKooning, who had been among the most articulate defenders of the faith and who was now at last having his big moment. On hand for the occasion were such oldtimers as Mark Rothko and Philip Guston to give Motherwell, now 50, a bear hug for his success...
...this, De Kooning himself is still not convinced that he is even a good painter. "Art," he likes to point out, "is the thing you cannot make." He still finds it nearly impossible to know when one of his own works is finished. Only when a friend, Painter Philip Guston, cried, "That's it! That's it!" did he stop endlessly revising one large nude. He has carried over the same element of creative indecision-which makes viewers often feel that his moment of supreme victory has been painted over, or else is yet to come-into...
Nativeness, and other kinds of representation, are far and away the people's choice in art, but abstraction has an undying fascination in shows like the Philip Guston retrospective. To see it is to sweat out a painful development: every step that Guston took throughout his professional life involved agonizing doubts and self-reappraisals. Perhaps as a result, his canvases have a feverish, almost tentative look; yet this very nervousness is also their virtue. They give his forms, built up of tiny strokes, a quivering inner life. Compared with Guston, Ben Nicholson's mentholated abstractions are the essence...