Son of the Brush

hen the great Canadian-born painter Philip Guston’s daughter Musa Mayer wrote a compelling biography (1988) about the problems of having a never-around workaholic father, many were shocked by his apparent parental neglect. And it was not just his daughter; like so many artist couples her mother, also called Musa (McKim), was a talented painter and poet whose career was side-lined by Guston’s ambition. He, in turn, had his own demons to fight. Many of these did not fully emerge until the last decade of his life, when he ditched Abstract Expressionism for what appeared like wild cartoon imagery, often on a huge scale. These works used a reduced palette of mostly muted pinks, with visual trigger points in high-keyed greens