Yes, but -: A critical study of Philip Guston [Hardcover]

Dore Ashton wrote this book in 1974 while Guston was still alive and apparently he reviewed it and it had his authorization. I am the brother of Reuben Kadish, who met Phillip Goldstein in 1930 in Los Angeles and with whom he collaborated on at least three murals ending in 1936. In 1936 Goldstein became Guston.

During 1996, the City of Hope, a cancer research center in Duarte, California, rediscovered a mural made by Kadish and Goldstein in 1935 and 1936. They found that it was in good condition, having been in a protected area for the past 60 years. They got a Donar, Ernest Lieblich, and with the cooperation of the Getty Museum had the mural cleaned and restored. Bob Reid, of the City of Hope, found the Kadish family two weeks before its rededication on June 11, 1998. Since Goldstein went on to fame and fortune as Phil Guston, Reuben, in his lifetime, gained little recognition as an artist. I decided to research their collaboration and to establish the relationship in their work.

Being two and half years younger than Reuben, I met most of Reuben's friends of that period including Goldstein. Ashton's book is the first I read about Guston. She starts from his birth and goes on to review his life from an artistic viewpoint. Goldstein and Kadish painted in a classical Thomas Hart Benton Italian style. When Guston started to work by himself after 1936, his work became more stylized, and in 1950 his style changed and he became a leader in the abstract expressionist school. About 1966 he abruptly changed his style into a cartoon type of painting that he did to the end of his life in 1980.

In his earliest paintings he had Klu Klux Klan figures as part of his theme. In the last ten years of his life the Klu Klux Klan figures reappeared and other images of a forehead and eyes showing over a wall became a dominant theme in addition. These sudden shifts in style confounded the critics. Ashton tries to explain those changes by quoting from different people to clarify Guston's reasons. She does not succeed.

Goldstein was the youngest of his families many children. The family was not a religious one. There is nothing to indicate how much contact or knowledge Goldstein had with Jewish religious life. Nowhere in the book does Ashton say that he is Jewish or that his name was Goldstein. As I remember it, he did not come from a political family. I do not know if he had any knowledge or spoke Yiddish. He is the only one in the family to become an artist. Goldstein was a dandy, being an esthete in everything he did, food, clothes and in his art.

Reuben came from a political family, his father was a socialist in Russia, and was active and sympathetic to the communist led organizations after he came to the United States. There is a strong artistic streak in the family. My father's brother was a killed painting craftsman and was an actor and director on the Yiddish stage. At one moment, I and my two brothers each had a child being trained to be art historians, in separate Universities in Flagstaff, San Francisco and Connecticut without knowing or having any connection with each other.

Nowhere in her book does she explain this change or even make the point that it happened. The result is a portrayal of Guston who constantly searched to find himself, with no explanation of the cause. Guston's sensitivity allowed him to create great art although his changes were totally unexplained. It is apparent to me that the contradictions of his life created the artist that he was.