Guston in Time: Remembering Philip Guston
Ross Feld praised Guston’s capacity and willingness to imbue even 'the most upsetting or disquieting imagery' with 'a shaggy, even goofy friendliness'...He wasn’t wrong about the friendliness: The hoods look like Hershey’s kisses crossed with Moomins...Yet painting the Klansmen approachably doesn’t defang them...By depicting them so crudely that it can take a moment to identify them, Guston arguably tricked his viewers into lingering—and then urged them not to look away...Feld celebrates Guston’s willingness to paint everyday objects, and to do so in what he implies is—and what I certainly see as—a stereotypically feminine way... Guston, though, embraced his 'histrionic impulse,' imbuing household detritus with dignity and menace, and transforming it into the “ever-present still life that surrounds the embarrassingly, even tragically human.
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In the first of eight short chapters that move between anecdotes of a tender friendship and close readings of individual paintings, interpolated by letters from the artist, Feld puts forward his own proposal as to the ethos of Guston’s work...It is their legacy of a painterly abstraction that is absolutely pure, autonomous, and self-referential that Guston was accused of having betrayed...In what might be a tribute to Guston’s superficially ramshackle but structurally complex late compositions, Feld builds his thesis on the relationship between art and the world out of the clutter of everyday life...We see Guston in his natural environment of home and cheap New York eateries: charming, articulate, mischievous, difficult but not exceptionally so, weak, garrulous, wholly dependent on his wife, generous, self-destructive, all too human.
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Feld’s account of Guston, while briefly covering his early life and career as a card-carrying AbEx, is primarily an affectionate homage to the artist and the works he created after his change of style, the period when Feld (who died in 2001) knew him personally...Punctuated by letters from Guston that allow the artist to speak for himself, the author describes and analyzes the deeply personal works from the last decade of Guston’s life that he believes are his friend’s landmark paintings...Feld’s effortless prose sets the reader in the studio, in the kitchen, in an Italian restaurant, as he captures his friend’s animus...An added bonus is the inclusion of the pair’s correspondence (minus the Guston letters quoted in the main text) in an appendix, which allows the reader to observe the evolution of this energetic intellectual and personal friendship...As good an introduction to classic Guston as one will find, not merely as an artist but as an intellectual.
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