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Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston

Musa Mayer

Recommended by 1 person on the record.

The bar next to each date shows how long ago it was said: 6d is days, 4yr is years.

Andrew Graham-Dixon loved it
This is a brilliant piece of social history. It's a daughter's expression of love for her father, even though it was a complicated love. I think it's a very memorable portrait of a particular painter. She relates his work to his life, to his fathering, and regrets the toll taken on him by the rather damaging macho culture of the male artists of the New York School, who seemed to have felt obliged to drink at least a bottle of whiskey and smoke five packets of Camel no-filter cigarettes every day. It's amazing that he lived as long as he did, given that he died in his mid-sixties.

on fivebooks.com · 31 Jan 2019

This book on rcmnd →

That little bar

It says how long ago something was said, so you can tell last month from 2014 without doing the arithmetic. Full and green is recent; it drains and cools as the date gets older, and empties completely at about 6 years.

A striped bar means the date itself is an estimate — the source did not carry an exact one. An entry with no date at all gets no bar.