Fall 2022 - The Figure

P R O F I L E
29
69 × 78 1/2”
Guston had created relatively few self-portraits up to this
stage in his career. He soon cast aside his hooded
personages, instead centering himself, his wife, and his
immediate surroundings in paintings that confronted mortality
and memory. “I found when I was doing these pictures that
I had made a circle,” he stated in 1974. “All my older interests
in painting, the children fighting with garbage cans . . . came
flooding back on me.” Legend (1977, above) encapsulates this
flood of memories as Guston conjures up an uneasy dreamscape.
Weapons seen in his first paintings and in Gladiators
reappear. A flying brick and Officer Pupp’s gloved fist refers
to the Krazy Kat comics of Guston’s youth and to America’s
troubled history of police brutality. A can spewing beer and
the cigarettes and liquor bottle that litter the floor attest
to the bad habits that had undone Guston’s health. A horse
cantering off in the background and an open book allude
to Isaac Babel’s 1926 Red Calvary, a wartime memoir and
testament to anti-Semitism that had moved Guston
profoundly. This cascade of associations has no fixed meaning,
rather it should be understood as the deeply humanistic
moral stance that threaded through Guston’s life and
animated his paintings across many stylistic changes.
In 1966 Guston commented, “I should like to paint like a
man who has never seen a painting, but this man, myself,
lives in a world museum,” a statement that he repeated toward
the end of his life. For Guston the “world museum” ultimately
encompassed more than the world of art. Living vividly in the
present, responding to the most urgent concerns of his generation,
Guston gazed unblinkingly at difficult truths, wrestling
with tragedy and doubt with self-knowledge and compassion.