Badness circa 1970

In 1970, the painter Philip Guston mounted an exhibition of new work at the Marlborough gallery in a crudely stylistic form, which featured reoccurring depictions of characters in hoods reminiscent of the Klu Klux Klan. Given Guston’s much heralded past accomplishments, these works were a travesty in the eyes of many critics and fellow artists alike. At first look, the works appeared to be nothing more than rushed, dashed off, whimsical social and political commentary. Ever since, this show has remained central in any critical discussion of Guston. Robert Slifkin enlarges the conversation surrounding the artist’s controversial turn by arguing the case for a broader context of understanding its causes while establishing strong connections between Guston and the wider cultural turn occurring during the same period—drawing upon no less a popular figure than musician Bob Dylan (and others) to bolster his case.

Guston began painting as a teenager in Los Angeles in the 1930s (palling around with his peer Jackson Pollock) soon finding success during the heyday of large-scale murals. He went on to work for the Works Progress Administration and earned celebrated academic posts in Iowa and elsewhere. By the 1950s, the prevailing tide in the art world had shifted, and Guston’s sense of where his work was headed shifted respectively. Feeling adrift, he began a departure from figuration and moved towards abstraction, joining his New York City peers (Kline, De Kooning, Pollock, et al.) a bit belatedly yet, nonetheless, quite swiftly entering into the top ranks among painters of the New York School. By the late 1960s, he was well established in terms of career, yet the art world was again shifting, leaving abstraction behind. With the 1970 Marlborough show, Guston emerged with what became the defining pinnacle motifs of his late work.

Detail from cover

In interviews and classes Guston talked about what he was up to with “the hoods” appearing in his later work:

In the paintings of 1968–70, I also made the hoods into painters. There were pictures where the hoods became artists. My favorite group, the ones I keep, that I find I take out and look at, enjoy the most, are where they are painters…I also had them discussing art, becoming art critics; I had one looking at an abstract painting.

And on another occasion, “I did a whole series in which I made a spoof of the whole art world. I had the hoods looking at [color] field paintings, hoods being at art openings, hoods having discussions about color. I had a good time.” Guston, in effect, was casting his own show, enjoying himself. Yet as Slifkin makes clear, it didn’t come easy. Larger historical forces were impacting not only the world around him but encroaching into his imagination as well, prodding long lingering figures to finally surface in the paintings.

Slifkin’s book takes a thorough approach outlining both the specifics of works in the Marlborough show along with what lay in back of them in terms of Guston’s life and art. He delineates how “By 1970 Guston was a man out of time, living a spectral existence in Woodstock, feeling far from not only the geographical center of the art world but also from those golden days of action painting’s apogee, when he was at the historical center of the art world.” His argument culminates in a direct comparison of Guston with Bob Dylan:

Dylan’s 1970 LP Self Portrait represents the most revealing musical analogue to Guston’s own creative output of the same year. Like Guston’s Marlborough paintings, the album was received with popular befuddlement and a deluge of critical scorn, most famously Greil Marcus’s review in Rolling Stone; it began with the curt question, “what is this shit?,” which the author went on for four pages trying to answer.

The crutch of Slifkin’s comparison hinges upon a catchy trope with which he titles his...