A Highly Original Appetite
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

If Abstract Expressionism represented the uprising of the New World against the Old, it was hardly a monolithic movement. Rather, it was an aggregation of many deeply personal rebellions. As the critic Harold Rosenberg described it, his artist acquaintances were “re-born” as they cast off the vestiges of earlier styles: “The man may be over 40, the painter around 7.”
One second-generation New York School painter was to have a unique, second “re-birth.” This was Philip Guston (1913–80), who in his 50s abandoned a successful mode of lyrical, brushy abstractions to turn to cartoony images of piled boots and Klansmen. For some this amounted to a betrayal of modernism, but in the decades since many have come to prefer the gritty orneriness of his late work.
His 30 works in ink, charcoal, and pencil currently at McKee are indeed a treat. Averaging a little less than 2 feet across, these never-before exhibited drawings — they were only recently released by his estate — are smaller than the artist’s typical late paintings, and, executed in black media or graphite, they necessarily lack his pungent color. They amply demonstrate, however, his freewheeling energy and compelling sense of design. Covering the years from the heyday of “Ab-Ex” until his death in 1980, the chronological installation shows the artist building upon, and in some ways surpassing, the explorations of his 1950s abstractions.
Visitors to McKee may be first struck by the prescience of Guston’s late style. The kinky outlines and hectic images anticipate by many years the comicstrip aesthetic of such artists as Keith Haring and Carroll Dunham. Unlike the work of these younger artists, though, Guston’s drawings have a formal breadth and fortitude that feel distinctly pre-Pop. Despite his ambling line and pseudo-naïve perspectives, an exquisite pacing of forms often imparts to them an iconic bulk.
“Smoke” (1969), a portrait of a hand with fat cigar wedged between log-like fingers, could have been merely prurient. But its tough rhythm of elements, amassing and opposing one another with lumpy precision, give it a surprising gravity. Next to it, a few ink marks in “Untitled (Shoe)” (1968) suffice to create the mounding essence of a boot, its verticality urged by the laces’ stubborn, rising zigzag. A suite of 21 somewhat smaller ink drawings (1970) on another wall extracts maximal effect from spare, sign-like outlines. Among these, several of armchairs are notable for their clumsy monumentality.
Most drawings in the exhibition combine motifs in more complex patterns. One untitled charcoal drawing from 1969 plots a dramatic space between distant buildings and a huge clock lying flat on the foreground plane; a polka-dot swarm of clouds minutely echoes the clock’s oval. In another untitled drawing (c. 1969), Klansmen and buildings repeatedly overlap into the distance, compressing the space as they advance up the sheet. Slotted eyeholes in the hoods, vacant but impenetrable, mirror the buildings’ windows.
What does it all mean? The artist seems not to have been sure. He once explained, “There’s some mysterious process at work here, which I don’t even want to understand.” In any event, his images have a consistent air of private, wayward bemusement. Some flirt with the morbid — like the images of Klansmen, for instance, or one sketch of legs sprouting stiffly from the earth, their calves and shins spiked by nails. Others are perfectly innocent records of the everyday. “What I Like to Eat” (c. 1975) pictures a loaf of bread and a bottle of bourbon, while two drawings (both c. 1976) depict the artist’s palette piled with brushes and paint. Whatever their subject, all reflect deliberate, hierarchical designs that connect them more closely to late Braque than Warhol, and in this sense they represent a curious blending of a postmodernist posture and a traditional discipline.
As if documenting his “re-birth,” an intriguing series of early abstractions shows the artist’s incremental move toward representation. An untitled ink drawing from 1950, all restless loops and sporadically knotted marks, captures the essence of Ab-Ex’s all-over space. Another from 1953 allows the paper to breathe in even intervals between dense packings of strokes. In three 1960 drawings, diagonals leverage a space of overlapping forms — and here we sense the beginnings of a new attitude of composing, one that unfolds in variations of interval and scale. Coincidentally or not, these drawings also contain the first occasional hints of recognizable objects, such as shoes and watches. No longer the enveloping, hypnotic flux of Ab-Ex, this is a space that articulates and develops — perfectly suited to a narrative of forms, though Mr. Guston’s rhythms coalesce as arrested (and arresting) images, rather than as stories or messages.
Several pencil drawings from his very last year show a surprising tenderness. All of these model volumes more gently and thoroughly; one imagines the artist attempting to commune with his subjects. “Untitled (Sandwich)” (1980) — a portrait of, apparently, a BLT — depicts sprigs of bacon projecting from a small mountain of matter topped by bumpy bread. A single, conspicuous bite gouges the mound. The image is at once generous, vigorous, and faintly ridiculous: all evidence of a knowing and original appetite.
Until December 22 (745 Fifth Ave., between 57th and 58th streets, 212-688-5951).