Philip Guston

• Born: June 27, 1913
• Birthplace: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
• Died: June 7, 1980
• Place of death: Woodstock, New York

Canadian-born artist

Guston was a significant figure in the New York School of abstract expressionism that emerged in the 1950’s.

Area of achievement: Art

Early Life

Philip Guston, the youngest of seven children, was born Phillip Goldstein in Montreal, Canada, on June 27, 1913, to Leib (Louis) and Rachel Goldstein, Jewish immigrants from Odessa. In 1919, the family moved to Los Angeles, where Louis, a blacksmith by trade, was reduced to carting refuse in a horse-drawn wagon. Depressed by his inability to support his large family, he hanged himself. Guston discovered his father’s body, an event that traumatized him and found echo in his first mature painting, Conspirators (1930), which depicts Ku Klux Klan lynchers with knouts and ropes.

Guston found refuge in drawing, which he practiced in a large closet lit by a dangling light bulb; the image of the bulb would return as a key iconographic element of his late art. His precocity was indicated when he won an art contest sponsored by the Los Angeles Times in 1927. He attended Manual Arts High School, from which he and his classmate, Jackson Pollock, were expelled for criticizing the school’s curriculum. Pollock was readmitted, but Guston did not return. He won a scholarship to the Otis Art League, but, dissatisfied with its academic approach, he dropped out after three months. It was there, however, that he met his future wife, Musa McKim, whom he married in 1937. In 1931, he had his first exhibition, where Conspirators was sold; the painting was subsequently lost.

Life’s Work

With many other artists, Guston—who began to call himself Guston from 1935 onward—found work during the Great Depression with the New Deal’s mural arts programs, the Works Progress Administration, and the Federal Arts Project. He met and worked beside artists who would become the most significant figures of abstract expressionism, including Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko. Guston’s mural work, which won a first prize at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, displayed his thorough study of Renaissance art and the influence of Pablo Picasso, Giorgio De Chirico, Fernand Léger, and José Clemente Orozco, whose work he observed directly as it was being produced.

In 1940, Guston moved to Woodstock, New York. He returned to easel painting with a pivotal work, Martial Memory (1941). During and after World War II, he held teaching positions at the University of Iowa and Washington University. As his reputation grew, he received prestigious awards and grants, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Prix de Rome, which enabled him to travel to Europe for the first time. Several paintings from the late 1940’s, including Porch No. 2 (1947) and The Tormentors (1947-1948), signaled a move toward abstraction. As he was to do twenty years later, Guston temporarily abandoned painting to work out his stylistic change in pen and ink. When he returned to the easel, it was with a fully developed abstract idiom, first displayed in a 1952 exhibit at New York’s Peridot Gallery. In a series of major works, including Zone (1953-1954), Beggar’s Joys (1954-1955), Dial (1956), and To Fellini (1958), he emerged as a leader of the New York School.

Guston never abandoned the image, however, and the thick impasto shapes that bulked in his work as the 1950’s progressed showed his journey back toward figuration. He was not, however, prepared to embrace pop art when it emerged in the early 1960’s, and in 1962 he joined with fellow expressionists in leaving the Sidney Janis Gallery in protest over a pop art exhibition. That same year, he enjoyed a major retrospective at the newly opened Guggenheim Museum in New York. However, the high tide of abstract expressionism passed, and by 1970 many of the leaders of the New York School had died. Guston’s palette, so vivid and arresting in the 1950’s, became progressively darker, and the still-undefined shapes that haunted his canvases became more insistent and obsessive.

In the late 1960’s, Guston again abandoned painting in favor of pen and ink. In a remarkable series of drawings executed in 1968 and 1969, he worked his way back to direct representation, one object at a time. The iconography he worked out—the Ku Klux Klan figures he referred to as “hoods”; clocks and pointing fingers; ladders and flattened shoe soles; nail-studded sticks and shield-like garbage covers; brick walls and tenements—suggested both the urban anomie of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s and the more private drama of the aging and ailing artist. This new work was first exhibited at the Marlborough Gallery in 1970, where it received largely negative and even outraged reviews. For Guston, however, the new style was liberating, and his final decade would be, despite failing health, the most productive of his career. By the end he no longer had the strength for easel work, but he continued his voluminous output in acrylic and ink on paper. On June 7, 1980, he died of a heart attack in Woodstock, just after the opening of a major new retrospective organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Significance

Guston’s fifty-year career spanned New Deal pictorialism, abstract expressionism, and the neo-figuration of the 1970’s, of which he was a pioneer. His abstract expressionist works remain central both to his own and to the New York School’s achievement, but his more immediate influence lies with his late work, whose objectification is not static, as in pop art, but ceaselessly questioning and dynamic. A major retrospective in 2003 and 2004 confirmed his status as one of the major figures of twentieth century American art. Guston had friendships with many important writers, including E. E. Cummings and Philip Roth, and the impact of his sensibility can be seen in literature as well as in the arts.

Bibliography

Ashton, Dore. A Critical Study of Philip Guston. New York: Viking Press, 1976. Rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Ashton’s classic study of Guston’s paintings and drawings was the only such work authorized by the artist. With updated bibliography and new final chapter.

Feld, Ross. Guston in Time: Remembering Philip Guston. New York: Counterpoint, 2003. Novelist Feld’s memoir of his long friendship with Guston, combining biography with interpretations of Guston’s work and excerpts from his letters.

Mayer, Musa. Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston by His Daughter. New York: Penguin Books, 1990. Includes extensive interviews with Guston’s family, friends, students, and colleagues, and the artist’s letters, notes, and other writings. Richly illustrated with several full-color images of paintings.

Storr, Robert. Philip Guston. New York: Abbeville Press, 1986. Comprehensive introduction to Guston’s life and work, written by a leading art critic.