Art - Richard Cork on an artist who never overcame his childhood insecurities

At the age of ten, Philip Guston discovered his Russian father's body dangling from a suicidal rope. At the very least, the trauma must have aggravated the insecurity of a boy who had spent his earliest years in Montreal's Jewish ghetto. By the time he found his dead father in 1923, Guston had moved with his family to Los Angeles. A place of Ku Klux Klan racism and gang violence, the city instilled in him a fundamental sense of menace.

No wonder the earliest painting in the Royal Academy's powerful retrospective of Guston's work is imbued with intense foreboding. Mother and Child is a highly precocious work for a 17-year-old, using neoclassical forms derived from Giorgio de Chirico, Picasso and the Italian Renaissance. Monumental yet sensuous, the seated mother leans forward to bathe her offspring in a primitive bath. But she looks oppressed, and the anxious child burrows so far into her flesh that his features are entirely obliterated.

During the 1930s, Guston's strong political convictions led him towards socially committed mural painting. After helping David Alfaro Siqueiros on a gigantic mural in Mexico, he painted the circular Bombardment with a protesting rage akin to Picasso's Guernica. But here, too, in a dizzying picture where civilians plunge through deeply recessed space as the bombs explode, Guston gives prominence to a naked child clinging in terror to his mother.

The whole notion of childhood as a fierce arena, a rehearsal for the greater conflicts of adult life, became his governing preoccupation. Even in the war years, when Guston tried to earn a living with sensitive illustrations of air-service training for Fortune magazine, this theme persisted. In Martial Memory, several youths threaten each other with makeshift swords and shields in a blighted urban setting. And yet, their actions are strangely frozen. They look spellbound, like so many of the figures in paintings by Piero della Francesca, whom Guston greatly admired. As late as 1945, he invested a large painting called If This Be Not I with the same Piero-derived air of suspense and expectant stillness. The ominous title implies that Guston was approaching a full-blown crisis of identity.

The paintings he went on to produce certainly testify to a momentous and perturbed change of direction. In 1947, Guston made a preliminary ink drawing for The Tormentors. Plenty of figurative references can be detected here, above all in the anguished face and arm flung out in helpless, despairing protest. In the final painting, however, Guston eradicated these familiar forms and, in their place, executed a series of raw, red structures pitched against midnight gloom. With hindsight, we can detect hints of the hobnail boots that would play such an eloquent part in his late work. But Guston was determined to free himself from overtly representational art. As a schoolboy in California he had met the teenage Jackson Pollock, and the two artists stayed in touch. Guston got to know Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Mark Rothko in New York, and by the late 1940s he felt ready to follow them into a more abstract universe.

White Painting I leaves much of the canvas bare, and the splintered forms with their jarring rhythms threaten to dissolve in the light. Guston seems to have rejected his earlier commitment to a figurative language, deeply involved with the art of the past. But are these paintings as abstract as critics once supposed them to be? Although these evasive, tantalising canvases seem dramatically different to Guston's previous work, the Royal Academy show helps us to detect in them some of his earlier concerns.

But by the 1960s, the pressure of political events in the US helped Guston make a decisive move, eliminating abstract suggestiveness in favour of plain statement. He resumed painting small images of simple objects: a plump white hand holding a brush; a dirty, discarded shoe; the blood-smeared hood worn by a man who could easily belong to the Ku Klux Klan. Taken together, these potent little panels amount to a visual lexicon for a new kind of art, and 1969 was the turning point for Guston's renewal.

In his late fifties, he finally escaped from the fear that his work had dwindled into a cul-de-sac. Painting on a grander scale, he gave three hooded heads centre stage in a wide canvas called Blackboard. The title must refer to the chalky presence of these murderers, gazing through eye-slits against a murky background. But the "blackboard" framing them is more like a window or a car's rear-view mirror at night. They must be on their way to an execution.

On the whole, though, Guston's hooded figures inhabit rooms suggestive of a home or studio. Smoking fat cigars, they lean lazily on their hands or, surprisingly, paint a self-portrait on a canvas attached to an easel. Guston seems to cast himself in the role of a Klansman, lying in bed surrounded by bottles of booze. The solitary naked bulb may refer to the light source in the large closet where, as a boy in LA, he had hidden away from his family and drawn cartoons. Certainly these late paintings borrow elements from the shorthand of cartoon strips, lacing with wry comedy the tragic undertow of a vision haunted by clocks, dismembered body parts and, in Scared Stiff, a giant pink hand pointing an accusatory finger at a hooded head.

Guston's elusive sense of identity had been defined at last. But the paradox is that, as he embarked on his last, finest and most expansive decade of painting, his work suffered a battering from many bewildered critics. He withdrew into the silent, ruminative seclusion of his Woodstock studio. Here he is the bulbous head jutting out of a seedy, ash-spattered and food-strewn bed in a canvas called Painting, Smoking, Eating. His bloodshot eye swells to a monstrous size in a later picture, but his gaze remains stubbornly alert - even when the head finds itself abandoned in a parched landscape where predatory beetles advance on him.

Couple in Bed may reflect Guston's intimacy with his wife, Musa, but he still clutches paintbrushes for comfort and his spindly puce legs terminate, oddly, in outsized boots. The imminence of death is omnipresent and becomes a gruesome reality in Pit, where the familiar head lies discarded among a cluster of upturned feet in a mass grave.

As these harrowing images brought his long and embattled career to such an impressive conclusion, Guston tried to celebrate by painting a colossal, god-like hand. It stretches down from the clouds to draw a confident black line on the ground. But the line also resembles a lengthening shadow, and grimness reasserts itself in the last picture on view. Executed only a year before Guston died of a heart attack in 1980, it shows a bent and useless old wheel half-buried in gouged red earth. Although the spokes manage to remain upright for now, night is about to descend. And a white, glacial moon rises implacably in the fast-darkening sky.

"The Art of Philip Guston: 1913-80" is at the Royal Academy of Arts, London W1 (020 7439 7438) until 12 April

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