On October 25, 1970, Hilton Kramer, the Senior Editor of The New York Times, headlined his review of Philip Guston's exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery, "Philip Guston, A Mandarin Pretending to be a Stumblebum." Kramer was referring to the new series of paintings Guston had completed in his studio in Woodstock, New York that were dramatically different from the lyrical abstract impressionist pictures that he was known for. Once again the public will have an opportunity to see these controversial paintings and more in the retrospective exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum.

The in your face oversized canvases painted in deep reds, ice cream pinks and impenetrable blacks present bulbous, enormous heads containing one huge eye, where an oversized hairy hand holds a fat cigar, where a mountain of worn old shoes are piled high across the canvas and white hooded Ku Klux Klan figures crowd into a jalopy roaming the streets looking for trouble.

These were the images that shocked the art public in 1970, a public that was used to Guston's gentle, tremulous abstract pictures of the Fifties, painted in thick, luscious reds, whites and cobalt brushstrokes clustered in the center, surrounded by light blues and greys fanning out to the edges--more impressionist than expressionist.

It was, in fact the earlier paintings that brought Guston an international reputation as one of the group of New York Abstract Expressionist painters consisting of De Kooning, Pollock, Kline and Motherwell. What was one to make of a famous artist turning his back on the work that brought him fame and money, and in a sense rejecting the work of his fellow abstract painters? Had he gone mad?

Guston hadn't lost his sanity, not at all. The fact is, that he went deeper into himself, far deeper than his gentle abstract pictures could satisfy. He was able, as few artists are, to express the depths of his humanity, his feelings about America in the turbulent Sixties: the assassinations of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King, rascism that still persisted, the Vietnam war, as well as shadow memories of the holocaust that still lingered in his psyche.

Remember, too, that Guston as a young man in his twenties painted canvases and murals that expressed a deep social, political consciousness. The mandala, "Bombardment," 1937, presents a starving, naked child held by his terrififed fleeing mother, and a man wearing a gasmask while planes above drop bombs on an innocent city.

As Jacques Lipschitz, the sculptor said when he stopped creating cubist works and began to make monumental, mythical sculptures, "Cubism," Lipschitz stated, "was the ABC of art, but I wanted to say more." Guston, too wanted to say more. "I got sick and tired of all that purity," he said. "I wanted to tell stories."

The stories that he painted following the abstract pictures, as powerful, serious and multi-leveled as they are, were presented not in the representational style of hi-art, but drawn in a raunchy cartoon manner often approaching the grotesque. Even his close friends, with the exception of Willem de Kooning turned their backs on Guston's new work in his show at Marlborough, not to mention the critics and the public.

But Guston had had a life-long fascination with the "funnies," as they were called in the Thirties and Forties. Most Americans, in fact, read the Sunday comics which were regulrly shown in movie theatres as well, sandwiched between two films. On the radio every Sunday morning, Mayor LaGuardia dramatized the comics to children who delighted in hearing about the latest antics of Mutt and Jeff and Krazy Kat.

The brilliant, hilarous graphic art of cartoonists, Bud Fisher, George Herriman and R. Crumb were embedded in the mind of Philip Guston, who drew comics of his own and caricatures of his friends throughout his life. Certainly, Crumb's drawings of oversized faces with their bulbous cheeks and huge single eye were the prototype for Guston's one-eyed head, drowning in a thick red sea in the painting, "Cabal," 1977.

At the same time, regardless of the themes and styles that mark his work, Guston was a man passionate about paint; the sheer thickness, oiliness, juiceness of pigment. Similar to Courbet who stated, "The way I use my brush, the way I apply the paint is an expression of who I am." Guston, too, was excited about putting paint to canvas. He moved his colors around the picture surface in thick, buttery brushstrokes that demonstrated his love of painting.

In the galleries at the Metropolitan Museum, Guston's shimmering, exhilarating paintings from the mid fifties, such as "For M," "Zone," and "Painting," reach the zenith of his abstract painting style. They were followed by dark, brooding pictures as Guston worked his way towards figural art and story telling that was multi-layered: political, auto-biographical, full of his kind of bizarre humour.

When he began to paint the "hoods," as he called the klansmen, it was like striking oil. Paintings poured out of him that were not only spoofing the feared Ku Klux Klansmen, but were at the same time alter egos of himself. The canvas, "The Studio," 1969, portrays a large white hooded head, black vertical slits for eyes, paintbrush held in a fat red hand, painting a self portrait. Above is the ubiquitous naked light bulb and clock. The light bulb, in fact, is a reminder of Guston's youth when the only private place he had to draw in was a closet with a single bulb above.

Not only was Guston, the artist, the cartoonist, the philosopher, he was also an archeologist, digging through the "crapola;" -- his term for the junk: the discarded symbols of Twentieth Century mediocrity. He was the all seeing eye; eye of the self-critic, eye of the wise man, eye of the doomed -- painted in the most beautiful pinks and reds you'll ever see.

Philip Guston, who died in 1980, created all of that and more; canvases that are intoxicated with the sensual pleasure of paint and color; canvases that show his concern about mankind, its ironies and cruelty.

Copyright © 2005 Hedy O'Beil