Edge of Town

Philip Guston, 1969 · Gallery 420 · Floor 4

He walked away. Philip Guston was one of the big abstract painters in New York. Soft pinks. Shimmering. Lovely stuff. By the end of the sixties, he couldn't keep doing it. The war. The conventions. His own line: "What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into frustrated fury about everything, and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?" So look what he painted instead. Two guys in Klan hoods, out for a drive. And this thing's big. Nine feet across. Nearly six and a half feet tall. Start with the car. A black jalopy, no roof, a grey ring hung off one end. The hoods. White, pointed, stitches showing. The hands. Pink, fat, knuckles along the door. Both of them have cigars. Now look at the left edge. That strip of pink, brushed soft. There's a bit of the old Guston. And behind the hoods, the gear. A plank with nails bent through it. A bundle of sticks. Tossed in like beach chairs. It's painted like a comic strip. Nobody's in a hurry. These guys could be running an errand. Guston knew those hoods. Jewish kid, born Goldstein, grew up in Los Angeles. He'd painted them as a teenager. He called them his little bastards. He shows thirty-three paintings in New York. This one's in it. The Times headline: "A Mandarin Pretending to Be a Stumblebum." Meaning: a guy who knows how to paint pretending he doesn't. Hardly anything sold. His best friend stopped speaking to him. Guston went to Rome for a while. Then came home and carried on. Then he says this. "They are self-portraits. I perceive myself as being behind the hood." Him. The Jewish kid. As if he wanted to know what it would be like to be evil.

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