Philip Guston Popular Books

Philip Guston Biography & Facts

Philip Guston (born Phillip Goldstein, June 27, 1913 – June 7, 1980) was a Canadian American painter, printmaker, muralist and draftsman. "Guston worked in a number of artistic modes, from Renaissance-inspired figuration to formally accomplished abstraction," and is now regarded as one of the "most important, powerful, and influential American painters of the last 100 years." He frequently depicted racism, antisemitism, fascism and American identity, as well as, especially in his later most cartoonish and mocking work, the banality of evil. In 2013, Guston's painting To Fellini set an auction record at Christie's when it sold for $25.8 million. Guston was a founding figure in the mid-century New York School, which established New York as the new center of the global art world, and his work appeared in the famed Ninth Street Show and in the avant-garde art journal It is. A Magazine for Abstract Art. By the 1960s, Guston had renounced abstract expressionism and was helping pioneer a modified form of representational art known as neo-expressionism. "Calling American abstract art 'a lie' and 'a sham,' he pivoted to making paintings in a dark, figurative style, including satirical drawings of Richard Nixon" during the Vietnam War as well as several paintings of hooded Klansmen, which Guston explained this way: "They are self-portraits … I perceive myself as being behind the hood … The idea of evil fascinated me … I almost tried to imagine that I was living with the Klan." The paintings of Klan figures were set to be part of an international retrospective sponsored by the National Gallery of Art, the Tate Modern, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2020, but in late September, the museums jointly postponed the exhibition until 2024, "a time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Guston's work can be more clearly interpreted." The announcement spurred an open letter, published online by The Brooklyn Rail and signed by more than 2,000 artists. It criticizes the postponement and the museums' lack of courage to display or attempt to interpret Guston's work, as well as the museums' own "history of prejudice". It calls Guston's KKK themes a timely catalyst for a "reckoning" with cultural and institutional white supremacy, and argues that that is why the exhibition must proceed without delay. On October 28, 2020, the museums announced earlier exhibition dates starting in 2022. Biography Early years The child of Ukrainian Jewish parents who escaped the persecution of pogroms by immigrating to Canada from Odessa, Guston was born in Montreal in 1913 and moved to Los Angeles in 1919. The family were aware of the regular Ku Klux Klan activities against Jews and Blacks which were taking place across California. In 1923, possibly owing to persecution or the difficulty of securing an income, his father hanged himself in the shed, and the young boy found the body. Guston's interest in drawing led his mother to enroll him in a correspondence course from the Cleveland School of Cartooning. In 1927, at the age of 14, Guston began painting and enrolled in the Los Angeles Manual Arts High School, where he met Jackson Pollock, who became a lifelong friend. The two studied under Frederick John de St. Vrain Schwankovsky and were introduced to European modern art, Eastern philosophy, theosophy and mystic literature. The pair later published a paper opposing the high school's emphasis on sports over art, which led to expulsions, although Pollock eventually returned and graduated. Apart from his high school education and a one-year scholarship at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, which left him dissatisfied, Guston remained a largely self-taught artist, influenced by, among others, the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico, whom Guston repeatedly acknowledged throughout his career. He died in 1980 at the age of 66, of a heart attack, in Woodstock, New York. Work Political murals As an early activist, in 1932, the 18-year-old Guston produced an indoor mural with the artist Reuben Kadish in an effort by the communist-affiliated John Reed Club of Los Angeles to raise money in support of the defendants in the Scottsboro Boys Trial, in which nine Black teenagers were falsely accused of a rape in Alabama and sentenced to death." The mural was then defaced by local police forces, organized into violent anti-communist Red Squads. The subsequent court ruling found no fault on the part of the L.A. police, even though irreversible damage was sustained to many works of art. In 1934, Philip Goldstein (as Guston was then known) and Kadish joined their friend the poet Jules Langsner on a trip to Mexico, where they were commissioned to paint a 1,000-square-foot (93 m2) mural on a wall in the former summer palace of the Emperor Maximilian in the state capital of Morelia. They produced the impressive The Struggle Against Terror, whose antifascist themes were clearly influenced by the work of David Siqueiros. The mural "includes the hooded figures that became a lifelong symbol of bigotry for the artist." A two-page review in Time magazine quoted Siqueiros's description of them: "the most promising painters in either the US or Mexico." In Mexico he also met and spent time with Frida Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera. In 1934–35, Guston and Kadish also completed a mural that remains to this day at City of Hope Medical Center, a tuberculosis hospital at the time, located in Duarte, California. WPA murals In September 1935, aged 22, Guston moved to New York, where he worked as an artist in the WPA program during the Great Depression. In 1937, he married the artist and poet Musa McKim, whom he first met at Otis, and they collaborated on several WPA murals. During this period his work included strong references to Renaissance painters such as Piero della Francesca, Paolo Uccello, Masaccio, and Giotto. He was also influenced by American Regionalists and Mexican mural painters. In 1938 he painted a post office mural in the US post office in Commerce, Georgia, entitled Early Mail Service and the Construction of Railroads, and in 1944, he completed a mural for the Social Security building in Washington, D.C. Abstract expressionism In the 1950s, Guston achieved success and renown as a first-generation abstract expressionist, although he preferred the term New York School. During this period his paintings often consisted of blocks and masses of gestural strokes and marks of color floating within the picture plane, as seen in his painting Zone, 1953–1954. These works, with marks often grouped toward the center of the composition, recall the "plus and minus" compositions of Piet Mondrian or the late Nymphea canvases by Monet. Guston used a relatively limited palette, favoring black and white, grays, blues and reds. It was a palette that would remain evident in his later work, despite Guston's attempts to expand his p.... Discover the Philip Guston popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Philip Guston books.