Between 1968 and 1970 the American painter Philip Guston famously turned away from large-scale abstract expressionist painting, a mode in which he had been working with considerable success since the mid-1940s, to produce a series of defiantly figurative paintings that appeared to contemporary critics wholly out of step with their contemporary moment. Yet, as Robert Slifkin argues, Guston's new paintings were in fact entirely of their time, politically, socially and aesthetically. Critics were bewildered and appalled at Guston's “return to figuration,” which for them signalled a slide backwards to Guston's social-realist painting of the 1930s. Particularly striking was the way in which Guston explicitly returned to earlier motifs drawn from those earlier paintings, such as the image of hooded Klansmen, remade in the present as cartoonish humanoid forms depicted pointing, painting, smoking or sleeping. To what did the series of paintings refer or appeal? Why, at the tail end of a decade seemingly committed to developing alternative models of abstraction, such as minimalism, did one of abstract painting's most celebrated artists perform such a public about-face? Was it demonstrative of a crisis of some kind in art, in humanity, in art's inability to address the social and political via abstract means?

In his first three chapters Slifkin maps out the book's theoretical claims, as he seeks to prise the term “figuration” away from its usual art-historical definition as designating a morphological relation to the “thing” depicted. Slifkin pays careful attention to the specificities of the works, offering a series of close readings of individual paintings. At the same time, he draws upon an expansive range of contextual sources to insist that far from being out of touch, or “time,” Guston's return to the 1930s was in fact part of a wider 1960s return to earlier moments of political upheaval, and that Guston was simultaneously tackling head-on the very same set of formal questions and problems relating to form and figuration, realism and “abstraction,” with which his younger contemporaries were also engaged. It is at moments such as these that the book's broader relevance and importance shine through, as the bigger stakes of Guston's project begin to reveal themselves in a way the earlier sections’ lengthy theoretical exegesis and at times convoluted prose occasionally overshadow. The most engaging sections of the book involve Slifkin enfolding Guston and his late figurative paintings such as Flatlands (1970) within the broader social, cultural and aesthetic landscape of the late 1960s. Slifkin attends to those moments in the paintings in which Guston mingled his own motifs culled from his earlier realist paintings with others absorbed and appropriated from diverse cultural forms, offering a fascinating series of comparisons with figures ranging from Courbet and Picasso to Krazy Kat cartoons and Sly and the Family Stone.

For Slifkin, Guston's figurative turn was an acknowledgment of “the exhaustion of the humanistic tradition and its valued forms of expression (such as figuration),” while at the same time he desired, nonetheless, “to continue his work in that tradition” (170). In the tension between these two positions, Guston – Slifkin argues – captured on canvas a wider cultural and political malaise, a kind of disenchantment explored in the face of the artist's commitment to carry on. In the final chapter of the book, Slifkin compares Guston's figurative turn with Bob Dylan's equally divisive “electric” turn at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, when each was criticized soundly for turning away from their earlier political and formal commitments. Captured in each of these “mythic” moments, Slifkin argues, was the dialectical recognition – among the artists but importantly, too, among their audiences – that their respective historical moments were unravelling.

This book offers an impassioned and original attempt to continue to question the “sixties,” and not simply to quarantine it as a period now already done and dusted. In Slifkin's capable hands, the 1960s conjured here are every bit as alive, conflicted and uncertain as were Guston's painted attempts at figuring it.