From the Morgan’s perspective “Works on Paper,” the trajectory of the Guston’s oeuvre flows with continuity. Motifs recur with seeming inevitability. In an untitled charcoal drawing from 1970, for example, two Klansmen, one brandishing a stogy, stare each other down. The Ku Klux Klan first appeared in Guston’s art 40 years earlier in Drawing for Conspirators (1930) (not included at the Morgan), which depicts a Klansman fingering a rope as a group of comrades in the distance huddle beneath two lynchings. A social realist influenced by the Surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico, Guston portrayed the scene with care.

Arranged chronologically, the show begins with the mid-1940’s, at the end of that first figurative period. In one untitled ink wash piece from 1946, it’s as though we’re witnessing the moment when figuration melts into abstraction, the human form shunted aside for drawing unfettered by representation. By the early ’50s, pictorial space had fully emerged as Guston’s main concern: Scratchy horizontal and vertical lines quiver over the expanse of paper in the hope of locating a “place” for the eye to travel. A Cézanne-esque doubt informs the architectonic Drawing Related to Zone (Drawing No. 19) (1954), and all but succumbs to its own vagaries within the dense agitation of Untitled (1953).

The drawings undergo a shift of emphasis around 1958. Forms solidify with clunky vigor. Air and atmosphere give way to clumps of shape and mass. Head—Double View (Drawing No. 20) (1958) and a duo of pieces from 1961 are wracked with frustration. You feel Guston working toward something just out of reach. The search is slow. Only Dark Form II and Accord II (1963), slurred accumulations of gray, black and red, look rushed. Guston can’t wait to get where his art is leading him.

Impatience led Guston to a stern reevaluation of drawing itself. His late-’60s pieces are, to put it mildly, attenuated. Marks become few; the paper is hardly touched. A vertical mark, no longer than an inch or so, hovers at the top of the page. A stuttering line moves forward with grave insistence. Form (1967) barely comes to fruition; Ground (1967) is a vertical line abutting a horizontal line.

THEN IT COMES, at first with trepidation and then like a flood: Books, shoes, coffee cups and, in Garden Steps Roma (1971), a tree and building make a lumpish claim on our attention. The Klan reappears shuttling through town in a limo. Philip Roth and “Poor Richard”—Guston’s moniker for Richard Nixon—make appearances, as does Guston’s alter ego, a bulbous Cyclopean head with furrowed brow, chunky stubble and bloodshot eyes. A cigarette is usually in the vicinity, as is an increasing air of mortality.

Guston’s drive to make art increased as his health faded. Time weighed heavily, prompted binges of painting and drawing. Disembodied limbs, spider webs, isolated masses of heads, legs, stretcher bars and, in an odd fillip, a bacon-and-egg sandwich struggle to maintain equilibrium within abandoned landscapes. Guston’s line is as staccato and scratchy as the old-time comic strips he loved, Krazy Kat or Mutt and Jeff.

In the elegiac and prophetic Untitled (Hillside) (1980), drawn in the year of Guston’s death, there’s a tombstone inscribed with the initials “P. G.” It’s a melodramatic touch—but notwithstanding this palpable dread, we intuit it as Guston’s avowal of art as, in his own words, “the most intimate affirmation of creative life.” The late drawings never stop moving forward, never stop believing in the redemptive magic of art. They are a terrifying and beautiful denouement.

“Philip Guston: Works on Paper” at the Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Ave., until Aug. 31. Mario Naves can be reached at mnaves@observer.com.

This remarkable consensus will be reflected in the press. As of this writing, only a handful of reviews have been published, including Peter Schjeldahl's thoughtful, honest and admiring essay in The New Yorker and Daniel Kunitz's cautious, ultimately respectful assessment in The New York Sun . The chief art critic of The New York Times , Michael Kimmelman, has also waxed enthusiastic, and I'm not about to resist the trend: Guston's oeuvre is among the most important in late 20th-century art.

Of course, no artist ever receives a universal thumbs-up. In this case, there's some dissent, even among painters-mostly qualms about the late work (the mordant ruminations on solitude, guilt and dependence featuring a recurring cast of cyclopean heads, cigar-smoking members of the K.K.K., galumphing shoes and hairy, disembodied legs). Still, Guston's "hot" reputation is worth pondering: What is it about this particular artist that excites widespread passion? It's not simply that the work is good; if that were the case, we'd all be queuing up for a retrospective of Arnold Friedman, say.

Guston's art answers a need. The tale of how a painter renowned for lush and genteel abstractions transformed himself into a figurative artist of crude, caustic power has achieved mythic proportions. Guston's 1970 exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery-which introduced the public to his late work-is, for a lot of people, a turning point in art history. By pursuing such a thunderously outrageous brand of figurative art, Guston proved that there was life after Abstract Expressionism, that intractable monolith of American art. He established himself as a paragon of integrity by following the dictates of his own peculiar vision and bucking the status quo. Everyone loves an underdog, especially when the underdog is vindicated by history. (It's true, however, that not every underdog rebel-with-a-cause has the luxury of blue-chip representation.)

Shocking though Guston's figurative shift may have been, the turnabouts in the work, as seen at the Met, come across as logical and necessary. (Retrospectives are all about 20/20 hindsight.) Passing through the maze of the exhibition's small, boxy galleries, one tracks the continuities in Guston's art, from the initial Surrealist-infused Social Realism to the quavering, fleshy abstractions to-finally-the lumpish imagery that Guston would pursue until his death. The pacing and placement of the work is careful: However much Porch No. 2 (1947) clings to the early realist work, it's closer, in painterly emphasis, to the AbEx pictures with which it is rightfully included.

Precision is the rule; the viewer doesn't miss a beat. One wonders, however, if the Met's sober, scholarly approach doesn't, in the long run, work against Guston's art. The exhibition is nothing if not polite, and though Guston resists prettification, the museum's pedantry does damp down his messy vitality. It's as if the Met were worried about people believing that these pink and ugly pictures are, in fact, art.

The museum's anxieties would explain the placement of Pantheon (1973), which serves as a prologue to the exhibition. A hasty nothing of a painting, it contains the names of painters that Guston considered heroes: Masaccio, Giotto, de Chirico, Tiepolo and Piero. Wow! This guy really knew his stuff , is what we're supposed to think. See, I told you so , is the museum's smug reply. It's an exercise in curatorial hand-holding.

As a Guston enthusiast, I was impressed with the thoroughness of the retrospective, yet I left the museum feeling strangely dispassionate. Maybe I'm too familiar with the work. Or maybe I was numb from overhearing a Met curator recite to a television reporter the names of "important artists" that Guston influenced: Elizabeth Murray, Susan Rothenberg, David Salle, Carroll Dunham … the list grew more depressing with each new addition.

Guston's achievement is monumental; his influence-at once strong and regrettable-is less than that. Guston's art may turn out to be a grandiloquent dead end. That's why his followers invariably disappoint: They've been left with no place to go. Sad to think that Guston is a hero because he gave people the go-ahead to paint cartoons.

Perhaps the Met is right; perhaps we do need our hand held in order to understand Guston's art-and, in particular, his profound bond with tradition. Michael Auping, the curator of the exhibition, inadvertently proves the point. In a revealing reminiscence, he writes about meeting Guston and introducing himself as a "contemporary" curator of "mostly the newest things." To which Guston replied: "So they don't really let you learn that much."

Mr. Auping brushes off Guston's comment. He should have paid closer attention. The artist's wry crack was prophetic: Take one look at our art scene, trivialized by its obsession with the eternal now, and you'll realize that people don't really learn that much. The melancholy I experienced when I left the Met had less to do with Guston than with the realization that the values he held dear are nearly everywhere ignored.

Philip Guston is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, until Jan. 4.

A Man Who Changed His Mind

The retrospective of paintings and drawings by the American artist Philip Guston (1913-1980), currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, must be a publicist's dream. Will there be a single unfavorable review? I doubt it. Guston is a rarity in the fractious world of contemporary art, a touchstone for people who have-aesthetically speaking-little else in common. The lion isn't lying down with the lamb necessarily, but as an art-scene equivalent, it's not far off. Painters, neo-Dadaists, the conceptually inclined and the Pop-afflicted-all of them can get with Guston.

This remarkable consensus will be reflected in the press. As of this writing, only a handful of reviews have been published, including Peter Schjeldahl's thoughtful, honest and admiring essay in The New Yorker and Daniel Kunitz's cautious, ultimately respectful assessment in The New York Sun . The chief art critic of The New York Times , Michael Kimmelman, has also waxed enthusiastic, and I'm not about to resist the trend: Guston's oeuvre is among the most important in late 20th-century art.

Of course, no artist ever receives a universal thumbs-up. In this case, there's some dissent, even among painters-mostly qualms about the late work (the mordant ruminations on solitude, guilt and dependence featuring a recurring cast of cyclopean heads, cigar-smoking members of the K.K.K., galumphing shoes and hairy, disembodied legs). Still, Guston's "hot" reputation is worth pondering: What is it about this particular artist that excites widespread passion? It's not simply that the work is good; if that were the case, we'd all be queuing up for a retrospective of Arnold Friedman, say.

Guston's art answers a need. The tale of how a painter renowned for lush and genteel abstractions transformed himself into a figurative artist of crude, caustic power has achieved mythic proportions. Guston's 1970 exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery-which introduced the public to his late work-is, for a lot of people, a turning point in art history. By pursuing such a thunderously outrageous brand of figurative art, Guston proved that there was life after Abstract Expressionism, that intractable monolith of American art. He established himself as a paragon of integrity by following the dictates of his own peculiar vision and bucking the status quo. Everyone loves an underdog, especially when the underdog is vindicated by history. (It's true, however, that not every underdog rebel-with-a-cause has the luxury of blue-chip representation.)

Shocking though Guston's figurative shift may have been, the turnabouts in the work, as seen at the Met, come across as logical and necessary. (Retrospectives are all about 20/20 hindsight.) Passing through the maze of the exhibition's small, boxy galleries, one tracks the continuities in Guston's art, from the initial Surrealist-infused Social Realism to the quavering, fleshy abstractions to-finally-the lumpish imagery that Guston would pursue until his death. The pacing and placement of the work is careful: However much Porch No. 2 (1947) clings to the early realist work, it's closer, in painterly emphasis, to the AbEx pictures with which it is rightfully included.

Precision is the rule; the viewer doesn't miss a beat. One wonders, however, if the Met's sober, scholarly approach doesn't, in the long run, work against Guston's art. The exhibition is nothing if not polite, and though Guston resists prettification, the museum's pedantry does damp down his messy vitality. It's as if the Met were worried about people believing that these pink and ugly pictures are, in fact, art.

The museum's anxieties would explain the placement of Pantheon (1973), which serves as a prologue to the exhibition. A hasty nothing of a painting, it contains the names of painters that Guston considered heroes: Masaccio, Giotto, de Chirico, Tiepolo and Piero. Wow! This guy really knew his stuff , is what we're supposed to think. See, I told you so , is the museum's smug reply. It's an exercise in curatorial hand-holding.

As a Guston enthusiast, I was impressed with the thoroughness of the retrospective, yet I left the museum feeling strangely dispassionate. Maybe I'm too familiar with the work. Or maybe I was numb from overhearing a Met curator recite to a television reporter the names of "important artists" that Guston influenced: Elizabeth Murray, Susan Rothenberg, David Salle, Carroll Dunham … the list grew more depressing with each new addition.

Guston's achievement is monumental; his influence-at once strong and regrettable-is less than that. Guston's art may turn out to be a grandiloquent dead end. That's why his followers invariably disappoint: They've been left with no place to go. Sad to think that Guston is a hero because he gave people the go-ahead to paint cartoons.

Perhaps the Met is right; perhaps we do need our hand held in order to understand Guston's art-and, in particular, his profound bond with tradition. Michael Auping, the curator of the exhibition, inadvertently proves the point. In a revealing reminiscence, he writes about meeting Guston and introducing himself as a "contemporary" curator of "mostly the newest things." To which Guston replied: "So they don't really let you learn that much."

Mr. Auping brushes off Guston's comment. He should have paid closer attention. The artist's wry crack was prophetic: Take one look at our art scene, trivialized by its obsession with the eternal now, and you'll realize that people don't really learn that much. The melancholy I experienced when I left the Met had less to do with Guston than with the realization that the values he held dear are nearly everywhere ignored.

Philip Guston is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, until Jan. 4.

Last winter, I kvetched when Frank Stout lampooned Richard Nixon by including him in one of his signature conventioneer paintings. This fall, I'm kvelling over Philip Guston's Poor Richard, a series of pen-and-ink drawings from 1971 that chronicle the late President's life, times, machinations and foibles.

So why the difference? It's not politics: Guston (1913-1980) and Mr. Stout-and maybe you and me-share a similar disdain for Nixon as private man and public figure. The difference lies in how Nixon is immersed in each painter's art. For Mr. Stout, Nixon wasn't immersed at all; he served as a sarcastic appliqué, an acrimonious add-on that stuck out like a sore thumb. In Guston's case, Nixon's immersion is thorough and complete, making him as natural an extension of the artist's universe as the horseshoes, spiders and one-eyed golems that regularly slouch through it.

Guston's treatment of Nixon is biting and bitter, yet he also believed him a complex character worthy of extended consideration. Consequently, Poor Richard, which is currently on view at the David McKee Gallery, forms its own compelling, coherent and, at times, surprisingly understanding narrative. Don't get me wrong: Guston's caricature of Nixon as a cock and balls-lumpy, swollen and stubbly-tells us a lot about what the painter thought of the politician. Yet it doesn't tell us everything. These drawings may have been motivated by loathing and sustained by it as well, but they also locate improbable moments of poetry and pathos within its trajectory.

Unfortunately, this trajectory is capped by San Clemente, an oil painting from 1975 that's one-dimensional and ugly the way the drawings are articulate and tough. Couldn't the folks at McKee have left Poor Richard well enough alone? Poor Richard by Philip Guston is at David McKee Gallery, 745 Fifth Avenue, until Sept. 29.

Fashion and Biology Are Her Fate

Learning that the painter Christina Ramberg (1946-1995) suffered from Pick's disease, a neurological disorder similar to Alzheimer's, is likely to color one's perception of her work. Suddenly those fetishistic depictions of the female form, currently the subject of an exhibition at the Adam Baumgold Gallery, take on the guise of premonitions. As pictured by Ramberg, the body is foreign and cold, a burdensome container that pulses with an often-treacherous independence. Mortality permeates the paintings (Ramberg's stylizations, while rooted in Pop culture, evoke the clean contours and heraldic figuration of Egyptian hieroglyphs), as does an aestheticized-that is to say, sickly-strain of sexuality.

Truncated and faceless, the Ramberg woman is bound by fashion and haunted by biology. The images are somewhat reminiscent of those of Richard Lindner, another painter fascinated by the mechanics of eroticism. Ramberg lacks Lindner's probity and worldliness: With an artistic compass that points dauntingly inward, she's less of a moralist and more of a loner. Her art won't be everyone's cup of tea.

If it sounds like the tea of choice for gender theorists and the like, well, that's how it's being sold. But one doesn't have to buy Ramberg's art as ideology, or view it through the scrim of biography, to appreciate her meticulous dissections of anonymity, fate and desire. Christina Ramberg: Paintings and Drawings is at Adam Baumgold Gallery, 74 East 79th Street, until Oct. 13.