Afterword
I cannot help but ask myself, as if I were writing a hundred years from now, writing tomorrow as though it were today: What would be a central or consistent internal metaphor in his life's work? Or rather, what is it finally about? Such a question belongs only to critical history. Paintings are not about anything; they are mysteriously themselves, selfconsistent throughout history, warding off successive interpretations, and surviving rhetoric. Yet it is of some interest to speculate about "about." And my own speculations keep circling around the significant (that is to say, indispensable) conflict between estheticism and the world, or the events of the world. Guston has had so many relationships to his time that the future historian will have a field day. Still, the central relationship seems the crucial one of taking up the challenge implicit in his time, clearly spelled out in the history of twentieth-century painting, which longs to be explicit and at the same time abstract; longs to be concrete and at the same time ambiguous, ephemeral, caught in the toils of cosmological process (as the nineteenth century was caught in the toils of the historic process). The twentieth century posed its question, which was very nearly this: Is there any beauty, in and of itself, or is there "meaning" in painting that denies esthetic value? And Gus-
ton answered: Yes, but . . . Yes: an affirmation of the meaning not so much of painting pictures, but of creating images. But: on the other hand, yes to the obstacles and intrusions of the world too.
In August 1974, during a painting lull, which always left him in a state of near-despair, Musa showed Guston a quotation that he promptly lettered on a large sheet and put up over a table (the repository of so many of his most intimate thoughts and images):
I hold my inventive capacity on the stern condition that it must master my whole life, often have complete possession of me, make its own demands on me, and sometimes for months together put everything else away from me. . . .Whoever is devoted to an art must be content to deliver himself wholly up to it and to find his recompense in it.
Guston did so.
I. Gladiators , 1940. Oil on canvas, 24½ × 28 in.
II. Zone , 1953-54. Oil on canvas, 46 × 48 in.
III. Dial , 1956. Oil on canvas, 72 × 76¼ in.
IV. Painter's City , 1956-57. Oil on canvas, 65 × 77 in.
V. A Day's Work , 1970. Oil on canvas, 78 × 110 in.
VI. Cellar , 1970. Oil on canvas, 78 × 110 in.
VII. Painter's Table , 1973. Oil on canvas, 77¼ × 90¼ in.
VIII. Allegory , 1975. Oil on canvas, 67½ × 72¾ in.
IX. Wharf , 1976. Oil on canvas, 80 × 116 in.
X. Source ,1976. Oil on canvas, 75 × 115 in.
XI. Cherries , 1976. Oil on canvas, 68½ × 116½ in.
XII. Ladder , 1978. Oil on canvas, 70 × 108 in.
XIII. Group in Sea , 1979. Oil on canvas, 68 × 88½ in.
XIV. East Coker , T.S.E., 1979. Oil on canvas, 40 × 48 in.
XV. Ravine , 1979. Oil on canvas, 68 × 80 in.