"But most of all you are reminded of comic books, comic strips, the funnies – Krazy Kat, Mutt and Jeff. Guston admitted that he knew them well – when he was 13 his mother enrolled him in a correspondence course from the Cleveland School of Cartooning – but he didn’t much care for the comparison. Robert Crumb, in his comic book Weirdo No. 7, which makes play with some of Guston’s motifs (the big eye, the soles of nailed boots) and has a narrative, ‘Uncle Bob’s Midlife Crisis’, in which he muses about taking up ‘a fine art career, oil painting maybe’, might have been suggesting that Guston was a plagiarist. The dates don’t fit. But the high art/low art antagonism can’t be ignored. When Guston took off the abstract mask, he lost the fear of revealing ‘how bad one can be’ and the images he made were done in a style only the true, deep tastelessness of someone like Crumb had, until then, had a use for. Guston can make his shoes, hairy knees and hairy arms, mugs, hands and dogs monumental, but the pictures are still rude, and rude is always in some way or another funny." from here
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- bill 11-03-2014 2:26 pm