One Explanation

More & more U.S. painters are turning to abstract art. Many are trained, honest men who have already made reputations with pictures of recognizable things. Yet to most Americans, their abstract work is messy and meaningless--an energetic mishmash of blobs and squiggles. Why do they do it?

Last week an ex-conservative named Philip Guston gave an answer of sorts. Painter Guston's reputation is solidly based on complex still lifes and figure paintings. His tame, placid portrait of a plump-armed girl won top honors at the 1945 Carnegie exhibition of U.S. painting. Three years ago, Guston turned his back on easy success, joined the abstractionist ranks. His latest exhibition in a Manhattan gallery features huge canvases thinly blotched with pale colors, and greyish ribbons of paint trailing, snail-like, over slush-hued backgrounds. His sketch for the exhibition catalogue, an apparently random doodle of short, jerky dashes, is a fair sample of the new Guston. His reason for the change: "I was unhappy."

Guston grew unhappy because he felt he was "just making pictures. I was overly conscious of what I was doing. Art isn't meant to be clear. Look at any inspired painting--it's like a gong sounding; it puts you in a state of reverberation . . . Toulouse-Lautrec's art isn't just pictures of dancing girls and cabarets; it projects some sort of internal world. And you couldn't exactly call Ucello an abstractionist. But he has the ambiguity I like."

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