It is the simple literal meaning of metaphysics that concerns the painter, mete beyond, physics external nature. The vital painter in our century cannot subsist merely describing the surfaces of visible things. He must move beyond external nature.

When Miro observed that ‘in the work of Leonardo I think of the esprit and in the work of Paolo Uccello, it is the plasticity and structure which interest me,’ he could have been describing the two main directions in modern painting. The difference, though, between the painters of the past and the modern painter is that the modern painter has been able to go beyond external nature, has found other subjects, while both the spiritual and plastic painters of the past were compelled to allude to the apparent facts of nature.

These two directions are often pursued together, but ultimately the artist gravitates to one pole or the other. He chooses his assumptions. Philip Guston’s paintings - his most recent paintings particularly - are strongly on the side of esprit. His paintings indicate that for him, painting is a mode of inquiry and a mode of stating an intuition concerning the meaning of existence.

Such a statement, abstract and perhaps a little grandiloquent, cannot stand alone. An experiment: Supposing we could list, as on a bill of lading, all the components in a painting by Philip Guston. It might read:

Item: Traditional oil paint from tubes (rose, ochre, blue, grey, black).

Item: Stretched canvas, normally no higher or wider than the reach of a tall man.

Item: Strokes (long, loping; short, stacatto).

Item: Textures (opaque, dense: transparent, thin).

General Descriptions: Greyish strokes weaving in and out with occasional flickers of silvered highlights, forming a resilient webbing, or a thickish atmosphere, which supports, surrounds, forms and corrodes two or three major shapes. Shapes are composed of strokes, usually closely articulated, more densely painted. Suspended in the ‘medium’ they move inward or outward. Roughly rectangular or arc-like in design. Largely tonal but sparse indications of non-naturalistic colour, rose, blue, ochre.

This is a lifeless series of words, yet it is a fair verbal transcription of the visible facts of a recent canvas by Guston. A catalogue of his characteristics, his reflexive gestures, says nothing of the moving efficacy of the paintings, or of the vital questions they pose.

Guston’s paintings are more then a collection of visible facts. They are intentionally endowed with meaning, for as the Zen master says, as soon as the questioner poses the question, he already has an intuition of the answer.