MARJORIE WELISH
559
Philip Guston's abstract expressionist paintings, often de–
scribed as ethereal, sensitive, and contemplative, had coarsened by
the mid 1960s; even so, in 1970 his art seemed suddenly to.betray its
former values. Offensive to most loyal followers of Guston's work
was the supposed regression to figurative painting that deliber–
ately jettisoned sensitivity for simplistic, heavy-handed caricature.
By rejecting key indicators of fine art-the "art coeficients,"
Duchamp would say-Guston became guilty of esthetic wrongs
that compounded the ethical wrong he committed in picturing
the Ku Klux Klan. Unlike his own surrealist precedents for these
figures painted in the thirties, such reductive depictions do not
console us through an ennobling styIe. Rather we are left desolate,
to consider Punch and Judy, the Katzenjammer kids, or Mr. Natu–
ral and their rhetoric of self-aggrandizement, stupidity, and vio–
lence. Bigotry taken lightly contributes in large measure to the
sensationalism of this work.
Distraught by a society that honored the stupidity and vio–
lence attending the Democratic Convention and riot control in
the late sixties, Guston returned to a pictorial mode that was
both intelligible and vented his feelings . But the prime source of
his outrage is the individual complicit with such a society. The
self-aggrandizing ego amid its bad habits and rote behavior is
the true subject of this late phase of his painting. Objects and
gestures furnish the ego with an identity at once too literal and too
insubstantial for belief. In the nineteenth century, Victor Hugo
waxed enthusiastic over
Sardanapalus,
but thought Delacroix
needed a fire to complete the story. Guston similarly cloaks his
negative alter-ego in overstatement. He loads the painting with
the furnishings of alienation-overdone signs whose mechanistic
rhetoric signals that alienation itself is a cliche, but a cliche that is
real to the subjective individual who realizes his fears and vices are
stupid but coddles them even so. In Baudelaire's words:
Stupidity, error, vice and evil
possess our minds and waste our bodies.
As beggars nourish lice
we nurse our likeable remorse.
As Guston's manner develops, the psychological weight of
his depictions deepens. Guston relies more and more on facture,
composition, and other formal resources, and less and less on the
