Excerpt from A
Critical Study of Philip Guston by Dore Ashton”
“But none of these heads was as alarming, as
shudderingly uttered as the head of the dying T. S. Eliot in the painting East
Coker: T.S.E. In its gray-pink pallor, this head with its map of suffering,
its Buddha ears, its final immobility, conjures the poem—the dung and death
Eliot speaks of in The Four Quartets. Guston perfectly parallels the
mood of dry despair Eliot created in both "Burnt Norton" and
"East Coker." He offers the genesis of his own thought in the
painting. He tells us a secret about his entire oeuvre and the first line of "East
Coker" holds the key: "In my beginning is my end…" Eliot's head
on its stony ellipse of a pillow is a keenly alive but dying head. The eyes are
widened, looking upward, and the mind is at work but terribly aware of the
failing light. It is yet another reminder from Guston of the impossibility and
yet the possibility of his art as a painter.
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