Philip Guston was a Canadian-born American painter who represented the second wave of Abstract Expressionists. Starting as a social realist painter, the artist elaborated the style of cartoon realism which later transformed through abstraction into figurative pictures made after 1970 with their gloomy figures of soft and pastel colors.
He was also known as an educator.
Background
Ethnicity:
Philip Guston’s parents were of a Ukrainian origin.
Philip Guston, born Phillip Goldstein, came to the world on June 27, 1913, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He was the youngest of seven children in a family of Louis Goldstein, a saloon keeper, and Rachel Ehrenlieb Goldstein.
When Philip was a three-year-old child, the family relocated to the United States. In 1919, the Goldsteins settled down in Los Angeles. While in the city, the family faced financial and social difficulties related to the rising of the Ku Klux Klan this time.
In 1923, perhaps suppressed by the concerns, Guston’s father committed suicide by hanging. It was a psychological trauma for Philip who found the body. The fantastical world of comics became his shelter, and soon he revealed his interest in drawing. Guston was encouraged in the passion by his mother.
Education
Philip Guston began his artistic training at the cartooning courses where he was sent by his mother.
A fourteen-year-old boy, he entered the Los Angeles Manual Arts High School where he met another future famous painter Jackson Pollock. Both friends were taught by Frederick John de St. Vrain Schwankovsky and learned European modern art, Eastern philosophy, theosophy and mystic literature.
While studying, Guston and Pollock created and published a paper criticizing the inclination of the School to the sport instead of art. The friends were excluded. Later, Pollock came back and received his diploma.
In 1930, Philip Guston became a student of the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles which he left after three months dissatisfied by the academic approach of the institution.
Except for this little formal education in art, Guston was mostly an autodidact.
In 1970, Philip Guston obtained an honorary doctorate from Boston University.
Philip Guston had his debut solo exhibition in 1931. During four years from then, the artist collected odd jobs to support himself and travelled around Mexico accompanied by Reuben Kadish and Jules Langsner in order to explore anti-war murals. While in the country, the artists created the huge antifascist mural called ‘The Struggle Against Terror’. On his return to Los Angeles Guston continued to work on mural projects.
In 1935, encouraged by Jackson Pollock, the artist completely moved to New York City where the next year he joined the mural division of Federal Art Project of the Work Projects Administration. The murals Guston produced working for WPA included the decoration of WPA Building wall at the New York World's Fair of 1939 and the Queensbridge Housing Project on Long Island. Guston found inspiration for his works in the Mexican murals, in the art of Italian Renaissance painters combining it with the simple forms of Cubism.
Philip Guston left the project at the beginning of the new decade and came back to easel painting. He used form and color to express various emotions and feelings so the canvases of this period became more abstract.
In 1941, the painter joined the teacher’s staff of the School of Art and Art History at the University of Iowa. On his third year, the University hosted his personal exhibition which was followed the year of his resignation in 1945 by the Carnegie International Exhibition and his first solo show in New York City at Midtown Galleries. From 1945 to 1947, he worked as an artist in residence at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts of Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri. By this time, Guston created his first non-objective paintings.
In 1948, he started his European trip using the Guggenheim Fellowship and Prix de Rome scholarship. During one year of travelling, the artist visited Italy, Spain, and France. He stopped painting for a while but drew a lot.
Philip Guston recommenced painting on his return to the United States. He eliminated all the elements of Cubism from his artworks which were classified as the examples of Abstract Impressionism by the early 1950s due to gestural compositions made in a partly restricted color palette (mostly black and white, grays, blues and reds). The artist himself preferred the expression of New York School.
He taught drawing both at the Pratt Institute and New York University from 1951 till 1957 and 1959 relatively. The most important exhibitions of the period included ‘Twelve Americans’ show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1956, the Venice and São Paolo Biennale, the retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1960 and the show at the Jewish Museum six years later, both latter in New York City.
By the end of sixties, Philip Guston had left abstraction and come back to representational art elaborating his personal cartoonish style for which he is famous nowadays. The canvases made in new manner were exhibited for the first time in 1970 at the Marlborough Gallery in New York City. Both the public and critics met the show negatively, except for the positive review from Willem de Kooning. The paintings depicting figures in hoods as the reference to the members of the Klu Klux Klan expressed Guston's rejection of war, injustice, and the hypocrisy.
Disappointed by the bad reception, the artist canceled the partnership with the Marlborough Gallery and isolated in Woodstock, New York. After some time, Guston started to collaborate with David McKee Gallery in New York City which had represented his art till the end of his life.
The later subjects of the painter’s canvases included interiors, landscapes, and such objects as light bulbs, cigarettes, paint brushes and shoes.
The last exhibition of Guston's artworks while he was alive took place one month before his death at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1980. Later, the show travelled to Chicago, Denver, New York, and Washington, D.C.
Philip Guston was an accomplished representative of the New York School whose figurative paintings made in cartoon-like manner contributed to the development of various art trends of the 21st century and continue to influence new generations of artists.
During his successful career, the artist received such prestigious awards as Carnegie International Exhibition First Prize, Flora Mayer Witkowsky Award and Benjamin Altman Prize. Besides, he was a recipient of such scholarships as Prix de Rome from the American Academy in Rome, Guggenheim Fellowship (twice) and grants from Ford Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
As an educator, Guston transmitted his knowledge to many famous artists, including Stephen Greene, Fridtjof Schroder, Ken Kerslake and Rosemary Zwick.
Nowadays, Guston’s art is promoted by the Guston Foundation and represented by Hauser & Wirth gallery. In addition, the paintings of the artist are included in many well-known public collections around the world, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, both in New York City, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection in Albany, New York, and the Tate Modern in London.
In 2013, a painting by Philip Guston titled ‘To Fellini’ was purchased at an auction for $25,8 million.
Through his art, Philip Guston tried to unite two directions of art – the notions of pleasure and beauty and the notions of care and pain.
Quotations:
"Painting and sculpture are very archaic forms. It's the only thing left in our industrial society where an individual alone can make something with not just his own hands, but brains, imagination, heart maybe."
"There is something ridiculous and miserly in the myth we inherit from abstract art. That painting is autonomous, pure and for itself, therefore we habitually analyze its ingredients and define its limits. But painting is 'impure'. It is the adjustment of 'impurities' which forces its continuity. We are image-makers and image-ridden."
"The painting is not on a surface, but on a plane which is imagined. It moves in a mind. It is not there physically at all. It is an illusion, a piece of magic, so that what you see is not what you see."
"To paint is a possessing rather than a picturing."
"The desire for direct expression finally became so strong that even the interval to reach back to the palette beside me became too long; so one day I put up a large canvas and placed the palette in front of me. Then I forced myself to paint the entire work without stepping back to look at it. I remember that I painted this in an hour."
"In my experience a painting is not made with colors and paint at all. I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint?"
Membership
National Institute of Arts and Letters
,
United States
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
,
United States
posthumously
National Academy of Design
Interests
Buddhism, Zen philosophy, Existentialism
Artists
Giorgio de Chirico, Pablo Picasso
Connections
Philip Guston met his future wife, a painter and poet Musa McKim, while his brief studies at the Otis Art Institute in 1930.
Philip and Musa married seven years later. In 1943, the family produced one daughter named Musa Jane.
Philip Guston: Late Paintings
The book includes installation views, color plates, an illustrated interview, essays and additional plates in both color and black and white
2015
Philip Guston. Painter 1957-1967
The book contains nearly 90 paintings and drawings from Philip Guston’s Abstract Expressionist period, an expanded chronology on the artist with archival material, historic installation views, plus conversations with Guston and texts by him
2016
Philip Guston & the Poets
The book explores the artist’s oeuvre in relation to critical literary interpretation
