For artists, when Philip Guston took up his brush again in the late sixties after reaching a dead end with abstraction, it was like Dylan going electric. A lot of people thought he'd lost his mind, with these garishly keyed-up pictures of bloated Klansmen smoking zeppelin-sized cigars and trucking around the outskirts of towns in overstuffed jalopies — but they quietly respected his derring-do in forging a new style. Today Guston's late-career work (he died in 1980 at age 66) is classic, a virtuoso way of "doing illustration without being illustrational," the influential painter Carroll Dunham says. With Philip Guston: Works on Paper, an exhibition at New York's Morgan Library, we'll see how he got there. "He finds his way through to the last chapter of his painting through drawing," Dunham says. These 100 drawings aren't just prep work for the paintings. They're the main event, and they range from hauntingly beautiful geometric figures to still-hilarious pictures of Richard Nixon sporting a giant cast on his leg. A 1975 drawing of a bottle of bourbon, a baguette, some spaghetti, and cherries is Guston at his most eloquent and personal. The title? What I Like to Eat.

Read more: Art and Design >>