himself and his emotion into abstract expressionism, so he is giving you himself in the figurative paintings. They are not nave. Although largely self-taught, Guston had all the learning of the auto-didact, with a broad knowledge of art, especially the Italian masters as well as the surrealists. The best-known painting on display, The Line, takes Michelangelo's image of God's fingertip act of creation and gives it to you face-on as the hand of the artist inscribing a line with a piece of charcoal held between two monumental fingers. The symbolism is obvious but the power, along with the humanity, comes from the veins pressing down along the hand against a light-blue pastel background that seems to highlight their rawness. An early vision of The City (1969) takes the image of Babel and Babylon from Flemish Renaissance and painting but gives it a soullessness, as the pink buildings with their black dashes for windows replicate themselves on and on into the horizon. In a remarkable early picture, Black Sea (1977), a solid shape imposes itself on the dark waters, emphatically there but ambiguously imaged. The heel of a shoe? An arched building? Or something not solid at all but organic? It is this deliberate counter-point between ambition and self-effacement, between solid mass and soft colour, between knowingness and innocence that makes Guston's work so intriguing. You can elaborate an awful lot of interpretations from his imagery, talk of his "language" and "alphabet" as curators do. But then the artist himself looks