The late paintings of Philip Guston have had a profound influence on painters today. As time has passed and Guston’s star has risen, it has been forgotten how scandalous and crude these paintings, with their cartoonish imagery and curiously faltering application of paint, were initially deemed to be. The 1970 show at the Marlborough Gallery in which Guston, abandoning the delicate abstract expressionist style for which he was known, revealed his new style was critically savaged. In the aftermath of this drubbing, Guston retreated to his studio in Woodstock, New York—in part to nurse his wounds but, more important, to go on painting exactly as he saw fit. Ross Feld, a young poet, novelist, and critic, was one of the few reviewers of Guston’s show to write favorably about it. Guston responded with a grateful note and a new friendship was soon born. Feld became an inveterate visitor to the painter’s and an inspiration to his work. Guston in Time, written not long before Feld’s early death from cancer, is a portrait of Guston the man; of his wife, Musa, a major figure not only in his life but in his work; and a reckoning with his supremely individual achievement as an artist. Feld’s slim and resonant book is a work of art in its own right.