Your review of Philip Guston’s show at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York suggests that he was a hero of sorts for abandoning abstraction and embracing figurative art late in his career (“The Man Who Changed His Mind,” May 10, 2008). But it is good to remember that abstraction got much of its attraction in the world of art because both Hitler and Stalin effectively outlawed it in the Thirties. Such formidable adversaries of “degenerate” or “socially irresponsible” art were long gone by the time Guston returned to figuration in the late Fifties and early Sixties. The heroism of abstraction ceased to matter by that time, thus making the return to figuration a private affair rather than a heroic act. Guston is an artist worth celebrating, it goes without saying, but hardly in terms as glowing as those you have chosen in your lavish review.