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

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 shock in the current Guston retrospective at the Metropolitan. (The show began last spring at the Fort Worth Modern Art Museum.) Reliving it, I understand both why it took me more than a decade to come around to late Guston and why I now regard that work as the most important American painting of its time. The reason in each case is a traumatic upheaval of the nineteen-sixties. Late Guston belongs among other explosive, harshly significant cultural departures of the era. Bob Dylan, plugging in an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, also abruptly trashed a precious taste with which he had been identified. It seems appropriate that Guston lived in Woodstock, New York, where he had moved in 1947. His breakthrough work in 1967 even seemed to echo "underground" comic-book stylists of the day, notably R. Crumb, though evidently he was unaware of them at first. (The resemblance points to shared influences. Both Guston and Crumb took inspiration from such classic comic strips as George Herriman's "Krazy Kat.") I loved rock-and-roll Dylan, but I clung to a faith in high-toned abstraction as the pinnacle of contemporary art. Guston's 1970 show--in retrospect, modern painting's Appomattox--left me feeling betrayed.

Guston was born Philip Goldstein to Russian Jewish immigrants in Montreal in 1913; he was the youngest of seven children. The family moved to Los Angeles seven years later. Philip drew obsessively, often holed up in a closet with a bare light bulb. (That bulb is a leitmotif in his late work.) When he was ten or eleven years old, he found the dead body of his father, Louis, a blacksmith who had been reduced to working as a junkman. Louis had hanged himself. Jackson Pollock was Guston's classmate and best friend in high school. Budding leftists, the two were expelled together for leafletting against the school's emphasis on sports. Pollock left for New York in 1930, while Guston remained in California, profiting from friendships with cultivated older artists and intellectuals. He acquired his lifelong passion for Old Masters--Piero della Francesca was a god to him--and embraced the Depression-era fashion of Social Realism. His fascination with the Ku Klux Klan began early. In a drawing that he made at the age of seventeen, a Klansman in a group that has lynched a black man fingers a rope with apparent anguish. Guston said of the K.K.K. figures in his late work, "What would it be like to be evil? To plan, to plot." There's a harrowing touch of "Heart of Darkness"--upriver, where the beast thrives--to this aspect of Guston's imagination.

After working on murals in Mexico, under the aegis of David Alfaro Siqueiros, Guston moved to New York in 1935, stayed with Pollock, and joined the mural division of the Works Progress Administration. He married Musa McKim, an artist and poet and his inseparable companion for the rest of his life. He hung back from the trend toward abstraction in the work of ...