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Dore Ashton has updated the bibliography and added a new concluding chapter to her classic study of the paintings and drawings of Philip Guston, the only study of his work completely authorized by the artist. Philip Guston (1913-1980) was one of the most independent of the painters whose work was loosely linked by the term "abstract expressionism" during the 1950s, and he baffled admirers of his lushly beautiful abstract expressionist paintings by moving abruptly in mid-career to gritty figurative paintings in an almost cartoon-like style. One of the few critics who saw this at the time as a progressive development in his work was Dore Ashton, who here analyzes Guston's paintings and drawing...
An authoritative and comprehensive survey of the life and work of the visionary and influential painter Philip Guston. Driven and consumed by art, Philip Guston painted and drew compulsively. This book takes the reader from his early social realist murals and easel paintings of the 1930s and 1940s, to the Abstract Expressionist works of the 1950s and early 1960s, and finally to the powerful new language of figurative painting, which he developed in the late 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on more than thirty years of his own research, the critic and curator, Robert Storr, maps Guston's entire career in one definitive volume, providing a subtantial, accessible, and revealing analysis of his work. Wi...
An illustrated examination of Philip Guston's comic and complex painting The Studio. Throughout his career, Philip Guston's work metamorphosed from figural to abstract and back to figural. In the 1950s, Guston (1913–1980) produced a body of shimmering abstract paintings that made him—along with Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Franz Kline—an influential abstract expressionist of the “gestural” tendency. In the late 1960s, with works like The Studio came his most radical shift. Drawing from the imagery of his early murals and from elements in his later drawings, ignoring the prevailing “coolness” of Minimalism and antiform abstraction, Guston invented for these late works...
Guston disagreed, famously saying: 'I got sick and tired of all that purity--I wanted to tell stories!' And what stories he told, with his Klansmen, ominous but somehow familiar, perhaps even ourselves under those hoods, as suggested in 'Untitled' (1971), which features a fleshy head enclosed by two hooded figures. This was not the path of refinement a leading abstract expressionist painter should be taking, yet Guston pushed forward: challenging tradition and expectations, guided solely by his own intuition and determination. Guston and his wife left for Italy immediately after the 1970 Marlborough opening, taking up residency at the American Academy in Rome over the next seven months. He spent the first two months brooding, despairing at the reviews and the rigidity of the art world, and revisiting the great art of the past that had first moved him to paint as a young man. .
This is the premier collection of dialogues, talks, and writings by Philip Guston (1913–1980), one of the most intellectually adventurous and poetically gifted of modern painters. Over the course of his life, Guston’s wide reading in literature and philosophy deepened his commitment to his art—from his early Abstract Expressionist paintings to his later gritty, intense figurative works. This collection, with many pieces appearing in print for the first time, lets us hear Guston’s voice—as the artist delivers a lecture on Renaissance painting, instructs students in a classroom setting, and discusses such artists and writers as Piero della Francesca, de Chirico, Picasso, Kafka, Beckett, and Gogol.
In the years following his controversial 1970 exhibition at the Marlborough Galleries, Philip Guston was generally viewed as yesterday's scandal, a maverick who had abandoned abstract expressionism and, with it, the adulation of the art world. Few paid serious attention to the disturbing, profound work he was producing in his Woodstock studio. So when Ross Feld, a young novelist and critic, wrote a penetrating review of Guston's latest show, the artist sent him a letter of appreciation: "I felt . . . as if we knew each other and had many discussions about painting and literature. In a word—I felt recognition." Thus began a remarkable friendship. Feld, a frequent visitor to Guston's studio where the two men would talk late into the night, became Guston's intellectual sparring partner and sounding board—"I'll shout it right out," Guston wrote to Feld, "you inspire me to paint again!"—as well as the artist's most eloquent critic and champion. Guston in Time is Feld's final tribute, and it is at once a testament to a friendship, a provocative and richly nuanced study of one of the twentieth century's most important artists, and a portrait of a remarkable character.
The story of Philip Guston's life is, in many ways, a chronicle of the ideas and events that transformed American painting in this century. Having been a muralist in the 1930s, by the 1940s Guston had turned away from public art to explore a more private vision. These haunting tableaux gave way in the 1950s to shimmering abstractions that represent one of the most poetic contributions to Abstract Expressionism. In the last and most important decade of his life, Guston's work changed yet again, as he invented bizarre, cartoonlike characters to enact monstrously comic fantasies. This abrupt shift from abstraction to figuration enraged the art establishment, but it also helped embolden a younge...
Published to accompany the first solo exhibition of Philip Guston at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford from 23 November 2019 to 8 March 2020 Features many works by the American artist not seen in the UK before Philip Guston (1913-1980) was an internationally acclaimed American artist whose response to the political and social tumult of the post-war decades resulted in a prolific artistic output. Over the course of his career, his style transformed from figuration to abstraction to figuration. Born Phillip Goldstein, the artist began drawing incessantly at the age of 12. Aware of antisemitism, he changed his name in 1935, the year he moved to New York. After producing award-winning murals in a '...
Focusing on the thirty-three paintings that Philip Guston exhibited at the Marlborough Gallery in 1970, this in-depth account reconsiders the history of postwar American art and the conception of figuration in modern art history. Through a myriad of cultural touchstones, including evidence from literary and musical vogues of the period, Robert Slifkin examines the role of history as both artistic medium and creative catalyst to GustonÕs practice as a painter. Slifkin employs a wealth of visual examples, archival materials, and original scholarship to situate GustonÕs paintings within broader artistic debates of the time, using the cultural movement of Òthe sixtiesÓ as its orienting foreground. This historical framework provides an interface between the notions of time in art and time in the material world. Lively and edifying, SlifkinÕs comprehensive text productively complicates the prescribed traditions of postwar art history and, in turn, shifts our perception of Guston and his place in the domain of modern art.