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.

William Corbett is a poet who lives in Boston's South End and is Director of Student Writing Activities in MIT's Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies. He writes frequently on art, directs the small press Pressed Wafer and is on the advisory board of Manhattan's CUE Art Foundation.