“I got sick and tired of all that Purity! I wanted to tell Stories!” the artist Philip Guston told Art News just before the opening of his controversial exhibition at Manhattan’s Marlborough Gallery. The year was 1970 and the 33 paintings he showed left Abstract Expressionism behind, much to the fury of critics, who prefer that artists should change not very much. Guston moved into his late style, a sort of figurative expressionism that turned people into giant noses, eyes, and coneheads, and cities into piles of bricks and shoes. He flayed everything, leaving the world viscerally exposed, often bloodshot, the pink of a mucous membrane. “Resilience,” the first Los Angeles solo show of Guston’s work in over five decades, focuses on the shocking vision of his last 10 years. —L.J.