To the Editors:
When Deborah Solomon writes in her review of Musa Mayer’s Night Studio (September 1988) that “Guston didn’t really hate abstract art” she is wrong. Philip Guston made it clear in exhibition catalogues, books, interviews, talks, letters, and conversations that he came to hate abstract art. His eloquent indictment, and the implicit indictment in the work of his last decade, cannot be swept aside as sour grapes. Not, that is, if Solomon means to write an intelligent review of Musa Mayer’s book.
Solomon has it that Guston could only paint “minor” abstract pictures and therefore hated what he could not do well. “Minor” is merely her opinion. Attar, Beggar’s Joys, Dial, et al. will make their own case. But to leap from her shaky (she offers no evidence) assertion to inform us what it was Guston really thought is pure nonsense.
But Solomon either doesn’t mean to or is incapable of intelligently reviewing this book. One of her limitations is a tin ear. When she characterizes Mayer as self-righteous for writing, “being a good father certainly was the least of his concerns while being a good daughter was . . . the greatest of mine,” she clearly hasn’t heard the quotes around good. Mayer isn’t saying that while Guston couldn’t be good she tried to be. She is saying that Guston was not disposed to be a conventionally good father but that she was caught in striving to be a conventionally good daughter.