Philip Guston's centennial, in New York

Many years ago, Boston University Journal carried a small portfolio of paintings by Philip Guston, who'd earned a reputation as a member of the New York School of Abstract Expressionists back in the 1950s, but hadn't much been heard from since. I was completely bowled over by the new work— I'd never seen anything like it, but I realized at once that it was terrifically important, and not just as art. It was important as Goya's art had become with the Caprichos and The Disasters of War, when a talented court painter had suddenly emerged as a searing critic and visionary observer of the human condition.

Time will tell where Guston belongs in the pantheon of 20th-Century painters, but I believe he will rank very high.

Guston was born in Canada, but moved to the U.S. at an early age. He and Jackson Pollock attended the same high school in Los Angeles, where both were expelled for rebellious behavior. Pollock went back and got his diploma; Guston did not.

At 17 he was already a painter of startling talent, as his now-lost The Conspirators (1930) attests. In the 1930s, Guston painted murals (many also now lost) for the Works Progress Administration. He finally had his first New York show in 1945, at which Pollock showed up drunk to denounce him for his betrayal of modern art. It wasn't the last time Guston endured such a charge.

Guston's work was figurative through most of the 1940s, but he was already turning to an increasingly flattened spatialization that all but squeezed objective representation out of the picture plane. By the end of the decade he had taken the plunge into abstraction. Despite his relatively late embrace of the Abstract Expressionism of the New York School, Guston emerged as its seemingly most austere and committed practitioner.

Charged with betrayal

It was therefore a shock when, after a period of intense self-scrutiny, he appeared in the late 1960s with a new figurative style that, while making clear allusions to his early work, looked at first blush like a cross between child drawing and comic-strip art. The critic Hilton Kramer, formerly an admirer, accused him of being a mandarin trying to act like a stumblebum. Once again, Guston was charged with having betrayed modern art— identified, for Kramer, with the high priesthood of abstraction.

The image had already returned to fine art, of course, with the Pop Art movement of the 1960s. Guston was having none of that. Pop Art had dealt with the contested status of representation by adopting a style that mimicked while it mocked the culture of glossy photography and advertising. This was not a solution to the crisis of the image, but a symptom and, as it were, a magnification of it.

Perhaps the closest thing to what Guston was after was the art brut of Jean Dubuffet, but that too, for all its willful crudity, had a decorative quality alien to him. What he wanted was to restore an iconic quality to the image that suggested an almost Byzantine formalism and simplicity, and with it a new space that could hold it.

Sophisticated cave man

Guston's pen and ink drawings of the late 1960s— a moment when he had all but given up painting, as if renouncing the whole Western art tradition and trying to ground himself in art's most primitive impulses— still convey a quality of raw discovery such as one can imagine of the first cave painters feeling their way toward their art.

Of course, we are not talking about Cro Magnon man but an artist of the most refined technique and intellectual sophistication, working in his studio in Woodstock.

Moving outward from the simplest marks, Guston began to find geometrical shapes, notably the cone. This was not a new game of abstraction, but a reaching for expressive content that was at the same time a resurrection of his earliest art.

Frightening and funny

The Conspirators had been a depiction of sinister Klan figures in their hoods, a comment on the violence that enforced Jim Crow in the America of the 1920s and 1930s, and not in the South alone. The 1960s in which Guston was now living had seen a recrudescence of this racial violence, of which the imperial violence of the war in Vietnam seemed both an outgrowth and a superposition.

The figures of The Conspirators had a Mannerist quality, but the "hoods" (as Guston generically referred to them) who emerged in the paintings of 1969— the ones I first saw in reproduction— evoked the comic strip style of the '30s, but in a way both hilariously and frighteningly over the top. The new Gustons were extremely funny, but the sense of menace they exuded precluded laughter.

Goya had been like that, and the dunce-capped simpletons, obscurantist priests and flying witches that had bubbled up from the Spanish master's imagination seemed reborn in contemporary dress: an old nightmare newly styled. The hoods weren't flying, but as they sped along desolate urban landscapes in jalopies crammed with spiked two-by-fours, they gave off the same sense of hell-bent motion and lethal intent.

Bulbous self-portrait

Guston broadened his repertory as he entered the 1970s, at the same time tapping into deeper veins of anxiety and dread. Detached limbs and articles of clothing began to appear— stacked, nail-studded shoe soles, empty overcoats, clambering legs, thrusting arms and digits, half-drowned faces submerged in, or rising from, a kind of tide.

The only figure not shown in truncated form was a bulbous-faced protagonist depicted in profile, featureless but for a wide, staring eye and, most often, a protruding cigarette, that represented a cross between an Everyman figure and the painter himself. The only human image not of the male body was the helmet-haired face of Guston's wife, Musa, whose head was also shown only from the top.

In the mid-'70s, black, spidery bugs began to appear as well. Backgrounds became increasingly abstract, with red brick walls taking the place of cityscapes, mysteriously dangling light bulbs and pointing fingers, and ladders that reached toward nowhere. Many of the objects depicted referred to Guston's studio and attested to his self-destructive habits: smoking, overeating and drinking.

Post-Holocaust world

Other canvases evoked a bleak, featureless landscape cluttered with the disjecta membra of his object-world— a world increasingly metamorphic in character, where each object offered multiple and competing significations, as for example the piles of cherries, abstracted from any repast, that looked from only a slightly different perspective like grenades timed to explode. The images were sinister, grotesque, but still— as with late Goya— very funny, as things that terrify us often are.

Guston died in 1980 just as his work was receiving a major retrospective; heart attacks had made it impossible for him to paint in his last year, but he turned again to drawing, his imagination and will to create no less fecund than before. The baffling, disturbing, and yet immensely vivid world he created in his final decade— a fallen, post-Holocaust world, created as if by a demiurge— continues to resist assimilation into any of the received categories of art, again just as Goya's final visions do.

At the same time, it is possible now to see the links not only with his earlier figurative period but also with his more conventionally celebrated Abstract Expressionist one, and one of the joys of the late work is the sheer painterly exuberance of his palette.

Snubbed by MOMA

Guston never really forsook the image or at least the possibility of it, even in his most formally abstract compositions; by the same token, the enigma of his late work is grounded in abstract patterning and spatial relations.

The centennial of Guston's birth is certainly an appropriate occasion for an exhibition that would cover his half-century career and display, finally, its fundamental unity. The Museum of Modern Art, which owns 16 Gustons, is well placed to do so but, unlike the Met, it's never offered a substantive Guston show, and it seems more concerned these days with the trendy ephemera of the passing art parade.

Instead, Guston's long-time dealer, David McKee, is offering a smaller but highly select show of the late period works, set off by a single large abstract canvas, The Year (1964), that suggests the connective thread between Guston's middle and late-period work. There are 20 works in all, including some of critical drawings of the late 1960s and a couple of those from the last year of his life.

Horses at the door

The bulk of them are paintings that show the range and development of Guston's iconography in the '70s. Without ceasing to be political, they are increasingly existential and autobiographical.

It's hard to choose among them, but the large canvas To J. S. (1977) seems to have had a special relevance for Guston. The initials refer to the French Surrealist poet Jules Supervielle's The Horses of Time, which reads in part, "The horses of time are halted at my door / I am always a little afraid to watch them drink / Since it is with my blood they quench their thirst." The painting depicts legs and hooves rearing up over what appears to be both a solid barrier and a flat sea— the very image of disturbing forces welling up from the painter's unconscious, both feeding and feeding upon his life.

Guston really did give all he had to his art, as did his boyhood friend Pollock, and this carefully chosen and handsomely mounted show— not to be missed, I think, by anyone who cares about the important art of our time— struck this viewer again with the same force as did that magazine portfolio years ago. Guston matters, perhaps today more than ever.