Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. May 1 to September 11, 2022. The touring retrospective Namjoon stood in front of in 2022, the show his @rkive post is dated from. I went to the same rooms in September. The late figurative work is what filled them: the hooded figures, the big shoes, the dirty pinks, the cigarette hands. Standing in it confirmed in person what the seed already says: this is the boundary, not a tributary. My eye keeps sliding back toward Mark Rothko’s side of the pivot. Looking again, the one canvas that actually held me is the one from 1959, before the break: Painter, the abstraction, not the figures.
Grows from
The one show in the garden I sought out because Namjoon pointed, that didn’t bloom. Grows from Philip Guston (a bloom: none seed) and shows at Museum of Fine Arts Boston. The encounter is the value: the contrast got sharper by being in the room.
Works encountered
The one that landed is Painter (1959), the abstraction. The rest are the late figures, here as the boundary they drew.
Painter, 1959. The one that landed: a dark form reading as both easel and figure on a shimmering field, the late-abstract Guston nearest my axis.
Yellow Light, 1975. A pile of brick, ladder, and boulder-forms on a dark-red horizon over a gray sea, a bare bulb hanging above.
The Studio, 1969. The hooded painter at his easel, the self-portrait as Klansman.
Painting, Smoking, Eating, 1973. The one-eyed head lying in bed, a plate of fries on its chest, a stack of shoes looming behind.
Tower, 1970. The cherry-red hand pointing “look over there,” the pillar of shoes and legs, the hooded form in the sublayer.
Wharf, 1976. Red brick block-forms along a black-water horizon, colored lights reflected, blue sky, a nailed plank standing at the edge.
Talking, 1979. The outstretched arm, the lit cigarette, the red smoke cascading like entrails.