Like most everyone else I knew Guston first only through his paintings. Growing up in New York in the late fifties and early sixties, I wandered through the two great adjoining museums of Fifty-third Street, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney, precisely during the years when the sovereign, gorgeous Abstract Expressionist paintings were pushing their way into those collections. Guston’s abstract work—the halftone refinements, the ragged centralities in a modulated palette, a style so classically discreet that he was able to be dubbed by some as an “abstract impressionist”—particularly appealed to me, a teenager with a taste for subtlety.
By the mid-sixties a more personal connection to these paintings happened to be forged for me. Riding the last wave of twenties-through-sixties Village bohemianism, the pedigree that runs from Edmund Wilson through Dawn Powell to Franz Kline, I took a literary apprenticeship that located itself not in college writing-programs but in downtown bars like Max’s Kansas City and the Cedar Tavern, the Metro, the Lion’s Head, the Ninth Circle, the St. Adrian’s Company; or at jazz clubs: the Five-Spot, the Half-Note, Slugs, the Dom; or at uptown art galleries, or at the Poet’s Theatre on Fourth Street, or in slum apartments. The older writers who befriended me (and my peers such as Michael Stephens, Andrei Codrescu, Tom Weatherly, Paul Auster) were poets, prose writers, and quite frequently both: Gilbert Sorrentino, Fielding Dawson, Joel Oppenheimer, Paul Blackburn. All these writers were fierce downtowners. Each, at least outwardly, seemed to regard their neglect by the greater literary world as a kind of inverse prestige, a bohemian superbia. William Carlos Williams had entertained excellent relations with painters of his day such as Sheeler, Demuth, and Hartley; these heavily Williams-imbued and Black Mountain College–oriented mentors of mine highly valued the virtues of cross-pollination, too. By locale and through personal contact, their titans were the first-generation New York Abstract Expressionist painters: Pollock, Kline, de Kooning, Guston.
It was filtered down to me, therefore, that a writer found himself at least partly underequipped for the creative life if he didn’t acquire at least one visual-artist friend to share it with. Here I happened to get quickly lucky. One afternoon, in a literature class at City College my first year there, I accidentally found myself sitting next to one. Archie Rand was a little younger than I was. Both of us originally were from Brooklyn, as well as from that lower-middle-class Jewish post-war urban cohort that instinctively looked upon intelligence as a competitive event. If anything Archie was more precocious than I was (he’d had his first gallery show when he was seventeen) and more artistically omnivorous (he knew as much about Cecil Taylor as he did about Delacroix). And both of us, through inclination, had absorbed what now seems to me, looking back, to be almost quaint downtown aesthetic principles: experimentation, self-knowledge, intensity, a heroic love of the past.
We went together to see Guston’s controversial Marlborough show in 1970. Guston’s hulking beautiful/miserable abstractions of the early sixties had made way for a threatening carnival: thugs in hoods smoking cigars and holding nailed clubs. They were surprising, exhilarating, fearless, chopped-open pictures that went by us like wind against our lips. When five years later, in 1975, Archie’s brother, Harry Rand, a contributing editor at Arts magazine, asked me whether I’d be interested in writing about a gallery show of Guston’s newest paintings, I was more than ready to give it a try.
Half a decade after Guston’s scandalous show at Marlborough, his “re-debut,” so to speak, it had been interesting to watch the shape his heresies took as they cooled. The hoods slowly had disappeared. The Keystone Kops raucousness was modulating. A certain spacious discretion, resulting in such landscape-like works as Ominous Land and Painter’s Forms, both 1972, now was in evidence. Guston, it seemed, was not quite sure where to go next with his freedom in the paintings of the early seventies.
For its part, the art press of 1975 seemed to have more or less put Guston aside as yesterday’s scandal—his novelty had been good for only a short time. Hardly anyone actually ever bought a post-1969 Guston, and all his shows seemed to be reviewed as a continuation of what he’d done once in 1970, perhaps sufficiently. This may have had to do with Guston’s age at the time, fifty-eight, as well as with his relegation, by a few doctrinaire critics, to second-rank status on the Abstract Expressionist podium.
Some of the lack of attention may even have had something to do with his choice of a gallery. Guston had decamped from Marlborough after 1970 and gone over to a new gallery opened in 1974 by David McKee. Young, thoughtful, and British, McKee was a former Marlborough associate who, with his future wife, Renee Conforte, had gone ahead to lease what perhaps was the most unlikely exhibition space in New York at the time: the mezzanine floor of the Barbizon Hotel for Women on Lexington Avenue and Sixty-second Street. Taking the staircase from the lobby, you either were headed down to the hotel’s swimming pool or up to the McKee Gallery. (Women clutching towels and workout bags far exceeded gallery goers.) About this fledgling gallery there was a nearly comic out-of-the-wayness, and the lack of art-world gloss to Guston at the time (something he’d deliberately stripped away himself) only accentuated the far-flung-outpost-feeling of McKee.
In the 1975 McKee show I reviewed for Arts there was a triptych of large flood paintings that clearly, even in a re-invented Guston, was something remarkable and renewed. For the War Department, in 1943, Guston had produced a series of drawings and gouaches of sailors shown training for emergencies in the water; and the compositional setup of this floating imagery had stayed with him as something essential to his vision. Just as Kafka recognized early on that his own unconscious tended to schematize existence into the awareness that Little has of Big, so Guston, too, had his own psychic world stripped down to the complements of dry and wet, sand and sea.
In these three large 1975 canvases, the depth of the seas (an ocean of cadmium red medium, unoxygenated blood) gave the odd impression of coursing upward, a diagonalism that would be refined in many pictures after these. The darkest of the three, The Swell, featured a lolling head that was Guston’s own, six or seven distinct strokes of the brush done with eagerness and ease. In Blue Light, a Commendatore figure was stared-down by a larger, Olmec-like head, the cranium of which looked like one of the shipwrecked shoes sticking up here and there. Down in the lower right corner of the same picture were planted sections of canvas-stretcher resembling a pier with a ladder, should any of the awash figures be ready to try to climb out onto dry land.
So these were works not only about submersion but also about dogged re-appearance, a swirling down but also a bobbing up. The wharf becomes a recurring image in late Guston, one of a repertoire of anchoring landmarks set down in an ocean or desert: floorboards, ladders, monuments, pyramids, even shoes. These hulks suggest a supervening level to Guston’s comic pessimism: that in fact all may not be quite lost. They make an un-despairing bet that things, rude stuff, actually do exist independent of our belief in or intellectual rationale for them; that they are there to be happened upon. “He who seeks to find himself is lost,” Jean Starobinski writes, “he who consents to be lost finds himself”—a cognate truth to Picasso’s often heralded statement: “I do not seek; I find.”
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The short page-long essay I wrote about that McKee show of 1975 spoke only a little and in conclusion of that amazing triptych, occupying itself more with an overview of what Guston had done in 1970, about why perhaps it had been so alienating and where it might be going next. Half a year after the article appeared in print, I received a surprising note in the mail:
Oct 26, 1976
Dear Ross Feld
Only my lassitude has kept me from writing you—I’ve been wanting, for months now, to tell you how much I liked the piece you wrote on my work in The Arts, last April or so. I don’t remember writing a note such as this, but I wanted you to know how I felt when, to my great astonishment, (and pleasure) I read your singular article. Everything you wrote in it was so personally felt by you and expressed in such a close and fascinating way, rarely if ever found in the art magazines. I felt as if I were reading thoughts about my work with great excitement—and more—as if we knew each other and had had many discussions about painting and literature. In a word—I felt great recognition. Please accept my deepest appreciation and thanks.
Most sincerely
Philip Guston
I answered the note. A few days later, Guston phoned me at home and we arranged to meet at the McKee Gallery the following week. David McKee accompanied us downstairs to a luncheonette on Lexington Avenue. We ordered coffee and buttered rolls, but before any real settling-in could be done, first impressions and first measures taken, Guston immediately, and without any preface, launched into the following story:
Back in the thirties, he said, while he was working for the WPA, he’d gone one evening to hear a fiercely serious German scholar give a lecture on Cezanne. Guston, after the lecture, waited for a downtown train on the platform of the nearest subway station, and while standing there spied the Cezanne lecturer on the same platform, also waiting for the train. The lecturer had in addition just treated himself to a candy bar from one of the vending machines on the platform.
Guston said that he could see the candy bar’s wrapper: the scholar had bought himself something called a Love Nest. Guston began walking toward the man to pay his respects and thank him for the talk, but when the august German realized he was being approached, he quickly began stuffing what was left of the Love Nest into his mouth.
Guston explained to McKee and myself:
“Now Love Nests were very gooey. A little, little piece stayed on the guy’s mustache the whole time he was talking to me, making the points of his lecture all over again, marveling over Cezanne’s genius. All that time, with every word he spoke, the little piece of Love Nest above his mouth danced up and down, up and down.”
Guston could have told me any story out of his repertoire of hundreds, especially funny ones. Yet on the day of our initial face-to-face getting-together he recounted this one. Sly warning had been given, I realized. Guston was introducing me to his own Love Nest, the one he lived in and painted with—where impiety, impurity, and the plainly embarrassing were raised up high and celebrated, not swept away or covered up.
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Guston always had been particularly close to writers—William Inge, Frank O‘Hara, Stanley Kunitz, Robert Phelps, Bill Berkson, Philip Roth, Clark Coolidge, myself—some of whom had written about his work, some not. The need painters have for writers, from the time of Vasari onward, seems ultimately to have less to do with ego-gratification than with a simple change of lighting by which the artist’s works can be known. By words visual imagery is given a second vividness. And writers recast it into a descriptiveness that’s infinitely portable.
I was twenty-nine in 1975. But recovering from Hodgkin’s disease, fatalistic beyond my years, I also lived lightly and more than a little warily on the surface of the world, carrying that double passport the ill bear in the world of the well. Guston, nearly thirty years older, had been rejuvenated, but also marginalized by his new freedom. What formed between us was, in a certain light, the least likely comradeship. My wariness and vague standoffishness, his liberation but also near-crushing isolation. In my careful-stepping, self-protective state of being during those years, Guston’s personal heedlessness and excesses—he was like a large, whirling Zero Mostel, a supernova of personality—easily swamped me.
Somehow, though, at the same time, this also seemed to hold us fast, like a Chinese finger-cylinder that tightened as we instinctively pulled in opposite directions. Now I know that we made a not-so-odd-couple after all. Guston’s startling late freedom had been a rebirth—one of which I’d experienced, if more passively, with cancer myself. There’s a Biblical midrash that ascribes Isaac’s growing blindness as an old man to that earlier moment when he’d almost become a boy-sacrifice: “When our father Abraham bound his son upon the altar, the ministering angels wept and tears dropped from their eyes, leaving their mark upon them. And when he grew old, his eyes grew dim.”
A price is paid for knowing about death too well too young. In my own case, narrowed of vision, psychologically cataracted, one of the things I got to see most clearly in those post-illness years just happened to be Guston’s extraordinary pictures. I’d never seen anyone else’s pictures quite this intensely before; I have never since.