Guston’s life, it seems to me, cannot be truly sketched without also inking-in his wife Musa’s; especially in the seventies, Guston’s essential loneliness was the more paradoxical for being such an intensely shared one. Like many artists’ spouses, Musa Guston all but donated her life to her husband’s. Much more unusually, she also seemed to line his life with hers—and because of her Guston always was more nearly a promethean artist-and-a-half.
Musa Guston was a small, frail woman. She was preternaturally silent around most people, a whispering commentator whenever she did in fact choose to speak. Philip Roth, using her as partial template for Hope Lonoff, the writer’s long-suffering wife in The Ghost Writer, termed her a “geisha”: the retiring mien, the handmaidenly impression she gave off. She could be eerily self-effacing. She had been a painter herself, but early on had ceded the art to Philip, instead raising a daughter (also named Musa but called Ingie by her parents), writing poems and plays that were whimsical and delicate and unillusioned.
She watched over Guston like a hawk, but his ambition, depressions, and emotional shuttles made this a thankless, much-stymied job. One afternoon, in their Woodstock living room, when Guston was feeling mellowly expansive, he reached over to grasp Musa’s hand, then said to my wife and me:
“Poor Musa. I ask her for her opinion of a picture. She tells me she likes it, but then I think (and maybe I even say . . . although I know I should absolutely not say . . . but keep on saying): Well, what do you know about anything? You’re just trying to make me feel good.
“The next time I ask her about a picture, she says she doesn’t like it, I say: What do you know? You’re just trying to make me feel bad.”
Unmistakably a delicate beauty in her youth, Musa was pale and mousy in age, coloring her hair a quiet, dull blonde and pulling it back severely. She was ascetic. I never saw her in a skirt, only buff-colored pants and neutral man-tailored shirts. Her voice was reedy, patchy. Words from it were applied sparingly. She would say “Oh, yes”—an absolute recommendation, a life’s hard-won discrimination inside the simple two words. And when she took a more acidic view of the many people who passed through Guston’s life, she’d often say, “Oh, he was a terrible person.” You realized when you heard both these expressions, these almost childlike Ohs that were at the same time the highest temperatures of conviction, that they came from someone not spiritually of the modern world at all but perhaps instead of the nineteenth century. Strained through Musa’s reluctant voice (and her silence) came the sound of moral perfect-pitch and utter focus.
For she was a good deal more than just self-effacing and economical—she was an ellipsis unto herself. The more she camouflaged and edited herself, the larger she grew. Guston’s late paintings sought not only to give shape to Musa-the-enigma as a sphinx or icon but also maybe as those late pictures of bugs climbing over rocks—the dot-dot-dot of complete determination. Determination and utter concentration was the mutual engine of the Gustons’ union. Both their powers of renewal were astounding. Whenever Guston painted Musa—and he did so over and over—her image would be graced by a dab of green, that color in a middle or late period Guston almost always a marital gesture. He would title his most famous painting of her Source, a neo-Egypytian emblem fleshed-out from the stenography of a fifties abstraction, the circumflex of For M.
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In 1977 Musa suffered a stroke.
. . . This is to be a doleful letter—a dirge.—Since your visit I’ve seen no one save check-out girls at the A&P. Musa, it seems to me is progressing slowly but it will be a long pull—memory and the naming of things lags. Doing household chores made me lazy—I ate—slept. Laziness turned into lassitude and melancholy, finally solid despair. Old friends, of course, but I never seem to learn. I console myself—notions about the ancient angel of forgetfulness. Preparing for the new, and as I’ve just barely started making images again—thinking I had so much capital to draw on, but no—now comes the dismantling—the desert again—my appetite for what I haven’t yet seen. . . .
Even before this calamity, in paintings referring to himself and Musa, there were chilling touches of paralysis and premonition—never more so than in Web (1975), a painting about death’s terrible net. It is as if Guston has taken the picture plane and rested his deflated world upon it. The painter has somehow been toppled, dropped like a statue of a dictator overthrown, dusky with grief. Beneath him, from his big painter’s eye, leaks a bloody wound of impotence and preoccupation.
The other head—Musa’s—is purposely eyeless and frontal, leaking a puddle not of remorseful red but of the freshest, shyest green, her color. As in many of Guston’s works, Musa’s head is so close and annealed to his, that he has only to make a self-reflection—and she is right there, too. One toppled, one upright, the two heads are the heel and sole of a single shoe.
The plane above them both is given over to fate itself. The bugs up there have a closeness that speaks to a unitary power that Philip and Musa seem to have lost. The bugs’ silk webbing, red and white, covers Musa completely (her fidelity to Guston never was breached) but merely a bit of Guston (who too often was faithful only to himself). Under the web there is a disquieting pollution of black, pink, and red. The damage being done seems to have left only blasted heath.
Although it is thoroughly a picture about grief, no sentimental aspect is permitted at all. The spiders seem to see to that as well. They pile-drive Philip back into Musa. He may not be able to see her straight-on anymore, yet his base is tapered and reduced down to her specific proportions. He is awash with guilt. The train-track eye, elaborate enough to look almost armored, has never before in Guston looked so inutile, so pointlessly open. It is fixed and may in fact never close again, like some curse or the ever open eyes of death. Below Musa a bit of pink smoke leans out. She cannot rise, but before descending unreachably, she first sends out ahead of her some of her essence.
In the same way that certain Van Goghs seem less made with paint than with distilled emotion; or as Eugenio Montale’s great sequence of poems about his dead wife, Xenia, seems barely to be made out of (or for the sake of) art, not a single one of Web’s inches congratulates itself. The awful bugs, the matte finish, the reduced pale colors all prevent it. Instead it exists in a suspended state of incipient erasure.
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In dozens of paintings done in and around this fragile season, Guston found himself fused to Musa in his art as well as his life as never before. Wharf (1976) is but one of the more remarkable evidences of that fusion.
Appropriately enough, it’s a kind of ruin. A glass contains ice. Guston’s own head, in profile, is innerly supported by the outline of the glass. His fingers grip a brush that is in eastward sweep upon a stretched, easeled canvas. Facing us is Musa’s head, her martyred eyes upturned. And finally, neighboring her, is a farrago of dismembered joints and extremities topped or bottomed by the soles of shoes. The entire pierlike mass—glass, painter, canvas, woman, limbs—juts into a sea hard and slatelike enough to throw back glimmers of its reflected light to Musa’s forehead. A gray and red sfumato of weather hangs around the wharf greasily, ominously, but farther up this is pardoned by a sky of gentle blue.
It is a proscenium-arch painting, a congregational painting, a we’re-all-in-this-together comic painting. Yoked all together in it are the three modes—theatrical, asymmetrically plural, and philosophical—that late Guston wrapped almost all his greatest works within. In a descending scale of guilt (the painter’s addiction to vision and to booze, the mediation of a woman’s sorrow, the dumb architecture of the legs) Guston makes his own head and his own glass and his own easel be the sharpest things here, with everything else softening as it goes west. As elements interrupt other elements, incongruously getting in each other’s way, we’re allowed to see that in the last ten years of his life Guston, Musa, and these mysterious “whatzit” images were the family unit.
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Maybe the happiest picture Guston ever painted appeared around then as well. The joyful Cherries (1976), a large canvas about multiplicity (and its darker corollary, gluttony) is maybe the most sterling example of what I see as Guston’s style of congregational composition. This is a satisfiedly “dumb” picture. Guston had nothing but scorn for Greenbergian color-field painting—“‘Over-the-couch’ things,” he liked to call it, “a decorator’s dream” (which was a doubt he ultimately entertained, less happily, about the work of his old friend Rothko as well)—but Cherries would be a picture that Guston would hang near his own sofa in his small living room, where it dwarfed everything else with its cheer. The domestic comedy of the largest cherry squashing the smallest one, which has gone a little pale under the pressure, is a revival of Guston the cartoonist but also is a self-mocking comment on Guston’s domestic life.
It is also the work of an extremely sophisticated artist going a very contrary way. After Cezanne and Morandi the decorum of painting simple objects usually has been to invest them with so much indwellingness and immanence that they approach transcendence; to coax out the apple-ness or bottle-ness of each object and set it free into space to reverberate past the simple forms of the objects themselves. But this painting, Cherries, one of the rare Guston still lifes of this size, is full of tricky anti-transcendental grace-notes. The picture’s circles originally were meant to be ashcan-cover shields—the martial memory that was showing up so strongly in a picture such as The Street (1977)—but with a sense of summertime clemency the subject turned effortlessly into a Guston enthusiasm: early summer cherries.
The cherries are situated on black water, the melancholy essence that Guston always paddles in, with lengthening hatch marks given off by the middle cherry as reflection. But each one is painted exuberantly, with glints of shine. The black cherry at the rear is an outcast (it certainly looks like a bomb) but it too still adheres good-naturedly to the society. For with one exception the cherries touch each other and are communal, with the proximity as well as the isolation of neighbors. The same one mouth, after all, will devour them all.
Abundance isn’t at all the point of this spill of fruit. Unbalanced asymmetry is. Cherries can be seen as simply one of Guston’s cherished ball-chains laid out on the horizontal and relaxed into disarray. Like so many plural objects in late Guston—legs, bugs, shoes—the cherries here are a delirious congregation of imperfections.