Philip Guston's Late Work A Memoir
William Corbett's memoir of Philip Guston focuses on their friendship over the last eight years of Guston's life and on the paintings and drawings Guston made during those years. Guston's figurative work, crude and bold images beautifully painted, turned the art world on its ear when they were first shown in 1970. Corbett explores themes of change, growth, doubt, freedom and risk as Guston's work and life exemplified them. This is not a book of art criticism; art jargon is avoided. It is a book that looks hard at Guston's late paintings and celebrates their humor, violence, mystery, and sustaining force.
Reviews
Giovanni Garcia-Fenech @giovannigf
I bought this hoping to find out a little more about Philip Guston's life during his last (and greatest) period, but despite the title this isn't a memoir. It does have an occasional personal observation, but mostly the book is composed of Corbett's interpretation of Guston's work, along with many digressions about politics (I sympathize with his sentiments, but editorializing about the war in Iraq doesn't make sense when Guston died decades before we went there). Worst of all, it's terribly written, which is surprising, considering that the author is supposed to be a poet.