Week 11: TONIC / BLESS

Philip Guston, Friend (to M.F.), 1978

Philip Guston Philip and composer Morton Feldman were close friends, going back to the 1950s. But when Feldman failed to respond to Guston's late work, the friendship went awry. It was an estrangement they later both regretted. Guston painted Friend in 1978...

I was surprised to read this. The painting has always been one of my favorites. But maybe that's just the point--the friendship was redeemed in the painting...

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(Source for the regret story--Robert Storr's book on Guston. For a very different take on his work, go back to the Dore Ashton book mentioned in class-- Yes, But... Her clarity regarding the sources of Guston's work--what he was reading, looking at, thinking about while  making the paintings--often in his own words--is tonic in itself!  The book was later re-issued under another title.)
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In a very different connection, here's the Robinson Jeffers poem mentioned last night as well:

Robinson Jeffers
Carmel Point 

The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses—
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads—
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.—As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.