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Philip Guston's Late Work: A Memoir. - book reviews
ArtForum, Nov, 1994 by Lee Smith
Lee Smith
William Corbett was 30 when he met Philip Guston, 29 years his senior, and the two were friends for the last eight years of the painter's life. Both that proximity, if not intimacy, and Corbett's being a poet give his observations on the artist's late work a creditable immediacy. Poetry is said to be more like painting than prose is, but it's poets who say that, and typically their art criticism is prose that covets plastic form. Thus Corbett is especially attentive to Guston's "things." He sees the cigarettes and the food, like steak fries, that appear in the later paintings as totems of the painter's appetite always exercising itself.
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But "this isn't the subject," as Willem de Kooning said to Guston concerning the political thrust of his 1970 Marlborough Gallery show. Rather, de Kooning asserted, the subject was "freedom, . . . the only possession the artist has." The subject of this memoir is a younger artist, Corbett, trying to claim that possession: "I found Guston's wholehearted absorption in what he was doing a relief and more, an inspiration. I always awoke the next morning after a late-night talk with the desire to get to work." One morning, though, Corbett woke in Guston's Woodstock home with an anxiety attack and tried to cadge a painting from him, as "some reward . . . some sign of acknowledgment." Corbett was so embarrassed by the episode that he suppressed it in his earlier drafts: "I mean, how much of a friend could I have been if I secretly wanted to be his son?" And that's the crux of Guston's lesson, what he learned and variously taught: freedom means, for better or worse, no fathers.
Lee Smith is a writer living in Brooklyn.
COPYRIGHT 1994 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
