THE JUNKMAN'S SON.(Philip Guston, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY)(Biography)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 03-NOV-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Around 1967, Philip Guston abandoned the tremblingly sensitive, lofty Abstract Expressionism for which he was revered. In its place came an outburst of gross cartoon imagery: gregarious Ku Klux Klansmen with fat cigars; one-eyed heads, like lima beans, in need of a shave; interiors ajumble with liquor bottles, cigarettes, food, and painting gear. Guston, who died of a heart attack in 1980, at the age of sixty-six, had seemed the most compunctious member of American art's greatest generation. Intimations of figures sometimes haunted his abstractions, only to be visibly suppressed--he was a knight of emotional restraint. When his new work was shown in bulk at the Marlborough Gallery, in 1970, it was as though an elegant veil had parted and out had stepped a yakking geek. I was one of many people who hated the show, and I found myself half-agreeing with the headline of a famous pan by Hilton Kramer, in the Times: "a mandarin pretending to be a stumblebum." "Mandarin" seemed wrong; a better analogy, for me, would have been mountain-dwelling scholar-poet. But the rest fit the masochistic bearing of a style that felt all the more grotesque for being executed with the artist's insinuating brushwork and ticklish color.

That moment retains its...

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