57th Street

Made it to the Philip Guston show up on 57th street on the last day. I really like his work and the cartoon like images of his later work. There was one big beautiful abstraction included, but the majority of the work make use of big comic images and his famous pink. 57th street is a strange landscape, some galleries still hanging on in this historical area, but its mainly now fashion, tourists and huge buildings so the scale of the street is pretty much gone. I also wandered into Hirschl & Adler talk about stepping back into the past, they had a small show of an outsider artist who I never heard of James Edward Deeds, who was installed in a mental hospital for many years, and whose drawings which were in an album was found in the trash by a teenager in 1970. Some beautiful drawings. This gallery is strange sort of like a tiny museum full of this and that, a Joseph Stella here, a George Bellows there. I also saw Joe Zucker's elegant narrow grey works at Mary Boone," Zucker scores the surface into a quarter inch grid, then picks off the top layer, exposing the porous core. Each tiny square is painted with watercolor in a broad tonal range from black to white, with only an

occasional leaning toward color." William Klein's paintings, (stick with the photography Bill) and Jane Freilicher Painter Among Poets show at Tibor de Nagy which didn't really interest me much. I like realist work but her stuff is a little too soft for me. I did like all the books, letters and photos of the poets that were displayed in glass cases around the gallery.