Guston miniatures, in New York

After a decade of often-agonized experiment, 1969 was the breakout year in which the celebrated Abstract Expressionist Philip Guston achieved his late style. It was also the year Richard Nixon became president, and the two events were not unrelated.

As bad as 1968 had been, with the twin assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy and the Chicago riots at the Democratic National Convention, the election of Nixon, to a man of the left like Guston, was unconscionable and appalling. Guston would have returned to figural painting in any case— the logic of his art had pointed in that direction for more than a decade— but the style and subject matter of his new work was in many respects a direct response to the new drift of the country.

Guston didn't turn his attention to Nixon directly until 1975, when he produced a major series of paintings centered on the then-deposed 37th president. But he offered symbolic stand-ins in the form of hooded Klan figures that were at once a throwback to Guston's early anti-lynching masterpiece, The Conspirators (1930), a biting commentary on Nixon's "Southern strategy" and the open appeal to racism on which it was based, as well as a prescient foreshadowing of the White House horrors that would only be revealed by Watergate. Thugs, Guston was saying, had been elected to run the country.

Meditations on mortality

There was a great deal else to Guston's new (or renewed) figural style, whose symbolic richness continues to supply grist for many an interpretive mill, including my own. It seems to me undeniable, though, that the reactionary turn in American politics colored the deeper meditations on solitude, mortality, and the human condition in general that characterized Guston's work until his death in 1980.

This is most apparent in the oils grouped in the present show under the heading of "hoods," which show Klan figures driving, smoking and conversing (the world, under Nixon, would be their oyster). But, no matter the object depicted, Guston's was now an art brut in which violence, anxiety and anomie formed the climate of expression.

What gave Guston's new figuration its visual spark, however, was its Goya-like humor. The style he adopted was straight out of the comic book styles of his own boyhood, especially Krazy Kat. The hoods were thus jocular and menacing at the same time, in an eerie compound that suggested a world unsure of its compass— a perfect description, as it turned out, of the 1970s, the decade not only of Watergate but also of the romanticized villainy of the Godfather movies.

Off-the-wall vitality

The simplified outlines and pungent colors of Guston's revived object world (his palette refreshed after a long immersion in blacks and grays) reinforced the sense of zany, off-the-wall vitality. It was a world simultaneously rooted (ominous tenements, a ubiquitous red brick wall) and floating (detached clocks and light bulbs, limbs and digits): a world displaced, and thus profoundly destabilized.

This world has become of course more familiar now, as Guston's late work has achieved canonical status as well as the compliment of imitation by an entire generation of painters. Looked at afresh, however, the works of this period have lost none of their power to brace and shock, and sometimes to exhilarate as well.

That is the particular virtue of the present show at New York's McKee Gallery, which presents 47 small oil works rarely seen, and never before grouped together as a whole. Guston regarded these paintings, all executed between 1969 and 1973, as a continuing series, and they are grouped together here under four rubrics: hoods, cityscapes, studio interiors and single objects.

Guston in a nutshell

The oils, most of them untitled and unsigned and many undated, range in size from nine inches by 12 to 12 inches by 15. Their subject matter is not unique, but replicated in larger canvases and graphic works. Because of their intimate scale, however, they represent not only a primer of Guston's late vocabulary, but also an intensely distilled and focused expression of it. This is Guston, as it were, in a nutshell, pared to the sparest and most direct of statements, but no less riddling and mysterious for that.

The effects are remarkable. In an untitled painting from 1969, a single nail is driven into a block of wood: nothing more, but the image is quiveringly alive, and the sense both of violence and vulnerability (the nail is bent and the head mashed in) is intense. You can almost feel the reverberation of the blow, as if from an unseen giant, and yet, so iconic is the image that nail and wood seem to have worn their pose for eons, to have fused into a single entity.

Similarly, in Shade (1973), a green window shade with a dangling black cord descends about three-quarters down the picture plane from the top: nothing more, but what a green! Vivid as is no other modern painter I can recall— De Stael alone comes close— it is, even in an inanimate and thoroughly pedestrian object, a wonderful intensification of life.

Some of the studio paintings show several objects at once, lined up in a row or huddled together. Here one is reminded of the great tenderness Morandi bestowed on objects (and on Guston's indebtedness to Italian art in general, going back to Piero and the great medieval fresco painters). It is no exaggeration to place Guston in their company. This exquisite show offers a piquant and revealing perspective on one of American art's most significant legacies.