In 1979 Guston suffered a catastrophic first heart attack. His immediate recovery was stormy and unsure. While in the Kingston, N.Y., hospital he suffered delirium tremens from alcohol withdrawal, and when finally allowed visitors he looked beached in the bed, a gasping whale. He seemed only partly pleased and half convinced he had in fact survived, and anxiously he pressed on me a yellow legal pad on which he’d written certain last requests should this in fact turn out to be his deathbed he lay on.
Attended by a confused and nearly mute Musa, by Musa’s sister Jo (who also lived in Woodstock), by Jo’s daughter Kim, and finally by Musa Mayer—Gustons’ daughter, Ingie, who’d come east from Ohio—Guston had a quartet of women to help and worry over him. And it was clear to everyone that if Guston was to have any hopes of recovery they would have to all but sit on him to make him take it easy.
That never would have been a great bet, and it turned out not to be. Guston was an impossibilist in every way. After the heart attack he blithely ignored every stricture; he never stopped smoking or drinking or eating the way he liked to. Once he was back on his feet and we were together one day in the city, he and I went downstairs to a dismal McAnn’s Bar near Grand Central Station to get some lunch. It was Guston’s cherished theory that the more unpretentious the restaurant the better—but in this case, no. Standing in front of the steam table, he promptly ordered a sandwich cut from what plainly was the deadliest slab of fatty corned beef I’d ever seen. “I don’t think so, Philip,” I said, hoping that what slender authority I had at the time as the husband of a medical student might deter him. Naturally he ignored me completely and had the sandwich.
In that recovery year he painted continuously, not on physically taxing large canvases but doing smaller oils and acrylics, reduced works that had a distillation to them of all his great late-style humanity in a special burst of richness. Much of that year also was concerned with the picking of the work for his 1980 retrospective exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. This involved exhausting, contentious horse-swapping with the museum’s director, Henry Hopkins, a situation filled with old anxieties for Guston, though ones much lessened by the confidence he had in the strength of the recent work. Yet physically, when he finally did go out to California to oversee the exhibition’s installation and opening, he was hanging on by a thread.
In a month he was dead. Around eight one night I answered the phone in Brooklyn and heard Musa’s tiny voice: “He’s gone! Philip’s gone! He’s gone!” Fred Elias, the radiologist who with his wife were neighbors in Woodstock and who’d had the Gustons over for dinner that night, took the phone from her. “Philip was eating his dessert. Suddenly he put his chin down to his chest—and that was all.”
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The funeral was the following weekend. Before heading out to the Artists’ Cemetery in the center of Woodstock, a number of people gathered for a time in the house. Then, with what seemed like one unspoken will, we drifted across to the studio. In the studio’s office corner, on a shelf above a worktable, sat the cardboard box that earlier in the day had contained Guston’s ashes before they were buried by Musa and Ingie. The box was an object of dumb amazement, as odd, pregnant, and absurd a plain object in its own way as anything Guston had spent the last fifteen years painting. In a dead painter’s studio absence itself assumes a definite form, something almost sculptural, and everyone seemed to walk around the central void of being in the studio that belonged to but never again would be entered by Guston.
Even more remarkable than the box, though, at least for me, was the presence among us of the composer Morton Feldman, summoned down from his home in Buffalo a day or so before.
Feldman, Philip Roth, and I—as per Guston’s hospital-bed list of last desires—were to say Kaddish for him in an hour’s time. But no one who was in the studio that afternoon was unaware of the poignancy as well as the more than small grotesquerie of Feldman’s presence. Over the best part of two decades Feldman had been Guston’s closest friend. Up till that very day of the funeral, though, Feldman basically had not spoken to Guston in nearly a decade. There had been a rupture which never managed to become resealed in life. Guston’s late style, the move away from abstraction, had alienated the two men.
With bottle-glasses, a low forehead, a sensualist’s lips, thick straight hair that streamed toward the crown of his head like hawsers thrown back over the side of a departing ship, Feldman was an imposingly homely, unforgettable-looking man. Yet about him was a charm and a fluency abetted by his thick New York accent and sophisticated aplomb that were tremendously winning. Like his friend Guston he was a jet of hot and various talk, even on that sad afternoon. Quickly and nervously, with real passion, he spoke about caffeine, Kirghaz rugs, his writing an opera with Samuel Beckett, a steak dinner he’d shared with his girlfriend in the local motel the night before. You could see why Guston had loved him.
After Feldman’s, a few other crucially close friendships did follow for Guston. The poet Clark Coolidge’s playful but dense poems encompassed among other things an encyclopedic knowledge of jazz and film, tossed away as loosely and uncuratorially as a spray of gravel. Isaac Babel entitled a book You Must Know Everything, and in Coolidge Guston found someone who, like himself, truly did. Philip Roth was another close friend, a neighbor in Woodstock who at the time was himself recoiling from the furor over Portnoy’s Complaint. Facing the fallout over the 1970 Marlborough show, Guston had in Roth’s bravery, brilliance, and delight in impurity a good match for his own. A glittering Russian-like tragicomedy was one of the conditions of these late paintings he was making—which Roth got to receive and read back to Guston at their Gogolian stage of calm yet fantastic scandal (and Coolidge and I at their slightly later Chekhovian stage, where a domesticity of the inexplicable obtained).
Yet though Coolidge, Roth, and I each provided Guston with companionship in a lonely yet intensely productive time of his life, no bond ever was as organic, even almost aboriginal, as the Guston–Feldman one. Feldman was the personified linchpin of Guston’s forays into abstraction in the fifties. The art world of the time generally viewed Guston as a comer, a prize-winner, a skillful semi-academic style-browser, poised perhaps to yet be important but certainly conducting himself as though he already was. He was not altogether trusted on a few fronts. But friendship with Feldman seemed to bring Guston into an eccentric but sturdy subfold. The composer John Cage was the intriguing magnet that drew first Feldman and Guston after him, Cage’s individualist sense of the autonomy and chance elements that could make a Zen-imbued abstract music or painting turn on a dime. There was an immediacy, an alla prima quality, to the Cage-philosophy that appealed to both men for a time. Both clearly were fascinated by time (Feldman’s late works sometimes go on for hours); and in the fifties, with war over, instantaneousness happened to be the focus: the lack of interval, the recovery of life, and instinct unburdened by history or even a duration conscious of itself.
Feldman was much more to Guston than just an aesthetic ally, though. About both men was not only a voracious intellectual appetite but a valuable ability to stretch. Guston would talk of how Feldman made him really hear Chopin for the first time, demonstrating that Chopin had to be both played and heard as though it was in fact Beethoven—and Beethoven likewise like Chopin. Both men savored food, jokes, smoking. And metaphors. Something about Guston and his work attracts metaphors to it (I have produced my share of them), but none ever were like Feldman’s, which were wryly perfect. When he wrote about Guston, Feldman turned poet with a prophetic tinge: “Always aware in his own work of the rhetorical nature of complication, Guston reduces, reduces, building his own Tower of Babel and then destroying it.” Or: “As we make a metaphor about creation, it has made a metaphor about us . . . Guston is of the Renaissance. Instead of being allowed to study with Giorgione, he observed it all from the Ghetto—in the marshes outside Venice where the old iron works were. I know he was there. Due to circumstance, he brought that art into the diaspora with him. That is why Guston’s painting is the most peculiar history lesson we ever have had.”
Yet Feldman finally couldn’t sanction the work Guston started producing in the late sixties. In 1978, eight years after the loosening of their bond, Feldman still was enough on Guston’s mind to be the subject of one of the most remarkable Guston paintings: Friend—to M. F. (1978).
It is a portrait of Feldman’s half-turned away face, a picture composed out of pain plus a startling concentration of simple adult resignation. As still and frozen as a Piero in its way, the remarkable, almost helmet-like Feldman hair is captured in the front while the back of the head begins looking very mineral indeed, that solidified-blood-look that Guston used so effectively. Sclerotic. Feldman was putting a good face on his acceptance of new art, the picture seems to suggest, but the back of his mind was firmly made up. It had frozen against Guston paintings just such as this one.
This would not be the only such portrait of Feldman that Guston would make at around the same time, either. Paintings of coats began to appear. Feldman’s father was a garment manufacturer, and Guston delightedly used to tell of long walks with Feldman, the two of them talking about Valery but being eminently interruptible when they happened to go by the old S. Klein’s-on-Union-Square, where Feldman would duck inside to handle a sleeve, to comment on a garment’s workmanship. These coat paintings were paintings of Feldman as well—Feldman as schneider, the Jewish artist, tailor of the goods. And, like Friend, they were done during the men’s long estrangement.
On that funeral day Guston’s last pictures, small acrylics and inks on paper, were tacked up to the free-standing painting wall that bisected the studio. Feldman, who I’m sure had seen very little new Guston work, kept glancing over at these tacked-up sheets but was understandably constrained, being in a group of friends and family that full well knew the cause of the chill between the two men years back. Finally, however, he had to go over and look at them (and be seen looking at them), which he did quickly, repeatedly, lightning raids each time. On his first return from them he exclaimed to no one in particular, yet somehow to everyone:
“Now I understand what he was getting at!”
At least for me, hearing him say this was to suffer a kind of existential splinter the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas analogizes insomnia to: hearing and seeing what you don’t want to hear and see, the intimate hollowness, the seemingly endless vertigo of time coming at you in waves. I couldn’t wait for the moment to be done, to pass. No one of course dared to ask Feldman what he thought it was that Guston was getting at—but then he told us anyway:
“I see the rhythm of the images. I see how he arranged them, which ones repeat, the pattern. Now I see it!”
After Feldman had left the studio to go to his car and on to the cemetery, and my wife and I were getting ready to do the same, Musa walked up to me and said shyly and offhandedly: “Oh, Morty, that Morty. I put those pictures up myself today. Ingie helped me. They’re just where we decided to put them.”1
A year later Feldman wrote an introduction to a catalogue of those same last works after they were assembled for exhibition by the Phillips Collection in Washington. It was clear that he’d held on to his perception of these particular works on that funeral day like a psychological life raft, for he began his published remarks on this very odd note:
I question the appropriateness of writing about something other than this exhibition. But to write about it, some effort should be given to research. And I have a resistance in talking to anyone who could tell me why Guston assembled these last works the way he did. My attitude is not unlike my father refusing to ask for directions the time we were lost in Hoboken.
He was speaking the most candid truth here: he did not want to know; he wanted to know nothing they themselves taught him but rather only something that he already had taught himself. Then, concern for appropriateness apart, he went on to spend the greater part of the brief introduction writing about Schoenberg, Stravinsky, about himself as composer, about Samuel Beckett, Mark Rothko, and Anatolian rugs. These all were modernist figures and ideas and corollaries much closer to him at that date than any of the images in Guston’s last pictures—about which Feldman at one point hesitantly refers to as a “mythology,” sounding a little like a nervous anthropologist finding himself among cannibals.
These little paintings surely are among the greatest works Guston ever achieved in his lifetime. He had always fiddled with the horizontalities of his paintings, whether they were “of” french fries or skinny legs; and often before there had been an incline, an occasion for clambering up or down such as in pictures like Ravine (1979) or Moon (1979). Here, though, in these late little pictures, ascent was unmistakable. Up slopes as flat and unambiguous as ramps, within cerulean vistas banished of shadows, Guston’s whatzits were on the move, journeying within and outside themselves. Suitcases have become teapots (a teapot contains changes-of-state invisibly within itself); big spheres are heavily patched, bandaged, re-armored; a wagon wheel with spokes assumes final custodianship of all those many clocks of Guston’s career. Time rolls, Guston had discovered. His temperament always was Sisyphean, the hopeless task of rolling a ball uphill, but nothing is pushing these forms ahead other than their own freedoms. They won’t backslide, you sense. There is new purchase. The 1980 acrylic called Untitled, with the blue-gray, battered ball/head, and its absolutely huge but emptied eye, the pupil high up in regard of the unnamable, seems in retrospect like a blissful going-up to meet fate itself. In this small picture more than perhaps in any other of Guston’s opus, the melancholy allegorist had transcended himself.
Yet none of this would Feldman end up noting. He was hardly alone in not understanding Guston’s final work, but his disapproval of (and blindness to) what his old friend was up to seems if anything more inevitable—and in some way culturally proper, culturally clear—than anyone else’s. In his sympathy and identification with abstract painting, and with his own methods of translating some of the New York School’s visual investigations across channels to his own music, Feldman perhaps was in better viewing angle than anyone else to see what Guston was doing differently. Feldman’s own musical compositions, one scholar writes, “lack rhythm and dynamic articulation. Durations of tones are slow but free, dynamics constant and quite soft . . . Almost all activity seems to be spread out evenly across the entire range of the instrument. The result is a very flat, uninflected surface, devoid of any sense of dramatic contrast.” The music is so subtle, in fact, that some critics have taken to calling Feldman’s sections “gestures.” Feldman himself once wrote, “The degrees of stasis, found in a Rothko or a Guston, were perhaps the most significant elements that I brought into my music from painting.” Moreover Feldman, during the fifties and sixties, notated a number of his own works on graph paper. The duration of the sounds was designated by how much space the squares or rectangles took up.
Time, in other words, was something Feldman strove in his own music to downplay and turn instead into space. This for a composer perhaps is historically eccentric, but it’s certainly of a piece with Feldman’s own time and milieu. Fifties New York art, whatever it told itself about being in direct opposition to the earlier School of Paris, was in many ways the very triumph of French epistemology that runs from Descartes through Derrida (interestingly a figure who, like Feldman, found convincing spatial and totalizing cognition in the patterns of Anatolian rugs). Just like this strain of French philosophy, the New York School resolutely gazed inwardly at itself. Rather than seeing outside or representable things, it saw signs, gestures, and proofs of its own sincere inwardness.
Space will always serve this tendency better than time does. In space a Subject can seem to turn into an Object, an object furthermore that seems to want to be a random something as well as a sovereign nothing-but-itself.2 Wasn’t this exactly what Descartes argued an object was, after all: self-identity? In its own casual, unstressed, unideological way, Abstract Expressionism quested to make a subjectivity that was solid enough to replace the pictured object. Is what makes a Rothko or a Pollock universal the formalism, or is it more likely—as the British philosopher and theologian Catherine Pickstock notes—a strange and strained sense of the universal: “. . . Because the individual is all there is, and so paradoxically the individual is the universal to the extent that there is nothing ‘beyond’ the individual.”
For Guston, however, there was plenty beyond (“. . . then you move into the next,” he writes in a letter, “like a strange and new clock, warping Time into becoming a frightening new other place, a land in which there is no rock and no ‘nothing’”)—and in calling forth his strange, funky imagery in order to “re-present” them, he insisted on seeing those things (and himself) change. Change most fluidly exists not in space (where its moments are all diced small but ever whole) but in time. Thus it is that Guston’s refusal of the abstractionists’ “nothing beyond” seems to raise the intellectual stakes here higher than just one painter’s change of direction. With each decade since his death it becomes clearer that there was a significant cultural crossroads involved in his heresy, that from Guston modern art received a late challenge someone like Morton Feldman simply perceived earlier and more painfully than anyone else.