Philip Guston (born Phillip Goldstein, June 27, 1913 – June 7, 1980), was a Canadian American painter, printmaker, muralist and draftsman. Early in his five decade career, muralist David Siquieros described him as one of "the most promising painters in either the US or Mexico," in reference to his antifascist fresco ''The Struggle Against Terror,'' which "includes the hooded figures that became a lifelong symbol of bigotry for the artist." "Guston worked in a number of artistic modes, from Renaissance-inspired figuration to formally accomplished abstraction," and is now regarded one of the "most important, powerful, and influential American painters of the last 100 years." He also 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.
A founding figure in the mid-century New York School movement, which established New York as the new center of the global art world, Guston's work appeared in the famed
Ninth Street Show
The 9th Street Art Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture is the official title artist Franz Kline hand-lettered onto the poster he designed for the Ninth Street Show (May 21-June 10, 1951).
and in the avant-garde art journal ''
It is. A Magazine for Abstract Art
''It is. A Magazine for Abstract Art'' (Spring 1958 – Autumn 1965) was an influential limited edition fine arts magazine that only published six issues in its seven years of existence. Founded by the abstract expressionist sculptor Philip Pavia, ...
''. By the 1960s, Guston had renounced abstract expressionism, and helped pioneer a modified form of representational art known as
neo-expressionism
Neo-expressionism is a style of late modernist or early-postmodern painting and sculpture that emerged in the late 1970s. Neo-expressionists were sometimes called ''Transavantgarde'', '' Junge Wilde'' or ''Neue Wilden'' ('The new wild ones'; 'Ne ...
. "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
Tate Modern is an art gallery located in London. It houses the United Kingdom's national collection of international modern and contemporary art, and forms part of the Tate group together with Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. It ...
; 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 "until 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
''The Brooklyn Rail'' is a publication and platform for the arts, culture, humanities, and politics. The ''Rail'' is based out of Brooklyn, New York. It features in-depth critical essays, fiction, poetry, as well as interviews with artists, criti ...
'', 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's 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 Jewish parents who escaped persecution 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 and which took place across California. In 1923, possibly owing to persecution or the difficulty in securing 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
Manual Arts High School is a secondary public school in Los Angeles, California, United States.
History
Manual Arts High School was founded in 1910 in the middle of bean fields, one-half mile from the nearest bus stop. It was the third high sch ...
where he met
Jackson Pollock
Paul Jackson Pollock (; January 28, 1912August 11, 1956) was an American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. He was widely noticed for his " drip technique" of pouring or splashing liquid household paint onto a hor ...
, who became a life-long 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
Otis College of Art and Design is a private art and design school in Los Angeles, California. Established in 1918, it was the city's first independent professional school of art. The main campus is located in the former IBM Aerospace headquarte ...
in Los Angeles, which left him dissatisfied, Guston remained a largely self-taught artist, influenced, among others by Italian painter
Giorgio de Chirico
Giuseppe Maria Alberto Giorgio de Chirico ( , ; 10 July 1888 – 20 November 1978) was an Italian
artist and writer born in Greece. In the years before World War I, he founded the '' scuola metafisica'' art movement, which profoundly influ ...
, 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
An early activist, in 1932, the 18-year-old Guston produced an indoor
mural
A mural is any piece of graphic artwork that is painted or applied directly to a wall, ceiling or other permanent substrate. Mural techniques include fresco, mosaic, graffiti and marouflage.
Word mural in art
The word ''mural'' is a Spani ...
with artist
Reuben Kadish
Reuben Kadish (January 29, 1913 – September 20, 1992) was an American artist, specializing as a sculptor, draughtsman, muralist, painter, and printmaker. In his later career he also taught art history and sculpture in New York City.
Biograph ...
in an effort by the communist-affiliated
John Reed Club
The John Reed Clubs (1929–1935), often referred to as John Reed Club (JRC), were an American federation of local organizations targeted towards Marxist writers, artists, and intellectuals, named after the American journalist and activist John ...
of Los Angeles to fundraise money in support of the defendants in the Scottsboro Boys Trial, nine Black teenagers 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
In the United States, Red Squads were police intelligence units that specialized in infiltrating, conducting counter-measures and gathering intelligence on political and social groups during the 20th century. Dating as far back as the Haymarket ...
. The subsequent court ruling found no fault on the part of L.A. police, even though irreversible damage was sustained to many works of art.
In 1934, Philip Goldstein (as Guston was then known), and artist Reuben Kadish joined poet and friend
Jules Langsner
Jules Langsner (19111967) was an American art critic and psychiatrist. Born in New York City in 1911 and died in 1967 in California. Although born in New York, Langsner did not grow up in New York. He and his family moved to Ontario, California
...
on a trip to Mexico, where they were commissioned to paint a mural on a wall in the former summer palace of the Emperor Maximilian in the state capital of
Morelia
Morelia (; from 1545 to 1828 known as Valladolid) is a city and municipal seat of the municipality of Morelia in the north-central part of the state of Michoacán in central Mexico. The city is in the Guayangareo Valley and is the capital and lar ...
. They produced the impressive ''The Struggle Against Terror'', whose antifascist themes were clearly influenced by the work of
David Siqueiros
David Alfaro Siqueiros (born José de Jesús Alfaro Siqueiros; December 29, 1896 – January 6, 1974) was a Mexican social realist painter, best known for his large public murals using the latest in equipment, materials and technique. Along with ...
. A two-page review in ''
Time
Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, ...
'' 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 husband
Diego Rivera
Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez, known as Diego Rivera (; December 8, 1886 – November 24, 1957), was a prominent Mexican painter. His large frescoes helped establish the ...
.
In 1934–35, Guston and Kadish also completed a mural that remains to this day at
City of Hope Medical Center
City of Hope is a private, not-for-profit clinical research center, hospital and graduate school located in Duarte, California, United States. The center's main campus resides on of land adjacent to the boundaries of Duarte and Irwindale, with ...
, a tuberculosis hospital at the time, located in Duarte, California.
WPA murals
In September 1935, at 22 years of age, he moved to New York where he worked as an artist in the
WPA
WPA may refer to:
Computing
*Wi-Fi Protected Access, a wireless encryption standard
*Windows Product Activation, in Microsoft software licensing
* Wireless Public Alerting (Alert Ready), emergency alerts over LTE in Canada
* Windows Performance An ...
program during the Great Depression. In 1937, he married 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
The Renaissance ( , ) , from , with the same meanings. is a period in European history
The history of Europe is traditionally divided into four time periods: prehistoric Europe (prior to about 800 BC), classical antiquity (800 BC to AD ...
painters such as
Piero della Francesca
Piero della Francesca (, also , ; – 12 October 1492), originally named Piero di Benedetto, was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance. To contemporaries he was also known as a mathematician and geometer. Nowadays Piero della Francesca i ...
,
Paolo Uccello
Paolo Uccello ( , ; 1397 – 10 December 1475), born Paolo di Dono, was an Italian (Florentine) painter and mathematician who was notable for his pioneering work on visual perspective in art. In his book ''Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, S ...
Giotto
Giotto di Bondone (; – January 8, 1337), known mononymously as Giotto ( , ) and Latinised as Giottus, was an Italian painter and architect from Florence during the Late Middle Ages. He worked during the Gothic/ Proto-Renaissance period. G ...
Commerce, Georgia
Commerce is a city in Jackson County, Georgia, northeast of Atlanta. As of the 2020 census, the city had a population of 7,387.
History Native American history
Before European settlers arrived, the area around present-day Commerce was inhabit ...
, 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
Abstract expressionism is a post–World War II art movement in American painting, developed in New York City in the 1940s. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York at the center of the ...
, 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 by Piet Mondrian or the late '' Nymphea'' canvases by
Monet
Oscar-Claude Monet (, , ; 14 November 1840 – 5 December 1926) was a French painter and founder of impressionist painting who is seen as a key precursor to modernism, especially in his attempts to paint nature as he perceived it. During ...
.
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 palette and reintroduce abstraction to his work, late in life, as evidenced in some of his untitled work from 1980 that has more blues and yellows.
Neoexpressionism
In 1967, Guston moved to Woodstock, New York. He was increasingly frustrated with abstraction and began painting representationally again, but in a personal, cartoonish manner. "It disappointed many when he returned to figuration with aplomb, painting mysterious images in which cartoonish-looking cups, heads, easels, and other visions were depicted against vacant beige backgrounds. People whispered behind his back: "He's out of his mind, and this isn't art," curator Michael Auping said. "He could have ruined his reputation, and some people said he did." The first exhibition of these new figurative paintings was held in 1970 at the
Marlborough Gallery
Marlborough Fine Art was founded in London in 1946 by Frank Lloyd and Harry Fischer. In 1963, a gallery was opened as Marlborough-Gerson in Manhattan, New York, at the Fuller Building on Madison Avenue and 57th Street, which later relocated in ...
in New York. It received scathing reviews from most of the art establishment. Memorably, ''New York Times'' art critic
Hilton Kramer
Hilton Kramer (March 25, 1928 – March 27, 2012) was an American art critic and essayist.
Biography
Early life
Kramer was born in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and was educated at Syracuse University, receiving a bachelor's degree in English; ...
ridiculed Guston's new style in an article entitled "A Mandarin Pretending to Be a Stumblebum", referring to "mandarin" in the sense of an influential figure and "stumblebum" meaning a clumsy person. He called the act of changing styles an "illusion" and an "artifice". The initial reaction of Robert Hughes, critic for ''Time'' magazine, who later changed his views, was put into a scathing review entitled "
Ku Klux
The Ku Klux Klan (), commonly shortened to the KKK or the Klan, is an American white supremacist, right-wing terrorist, and hate group whose primary targets are African Americans, Jews, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Cath ...
Komix".
According to Musa Mayer's biography of her father in ''Night Studio,'' the painter
Willem de Kooning
Willem de Kooning (; ; April 24, 1904 – March 19, 1997) was a Dutch-American abstract expressionist artist. He was born in Rotterdam and moved to the United States in 1926, becoming an American citizen in 1962. In 1943, he married painter El ...
was one of the few who instantly understood the importance of these paintings, telling Guston at the time that they were "about freedom." ''Cherries III'' from 1976, held in the collection of the
Honolulu Museum of Art
The Honolulu Museum of Art (formerly the Honolulu Academy of Arts) is an art museum in Honolulu, Hawaii. The museum is the largest of its kind in the state, and was founded in 1922 by Anna Rice Cooke. The museum has one of the largest single co ...
, is an example of his late style representational paintings. Although cherries are a mundane subject, their spiky stems can be a metaphor for the crudeness and brutality of modern life.Honolulu Museum of Art, wall label, ''Cherries III'' by Philip Guston, 1976, oil on canvas, accession 7008.1
As a result of the poor reception of his new figurative style, Guston isolated himself even more in Woodstock, far from the
art world
The art world comprises everyone involved in producing, commissioning, presenting, preserving, promoting, chronicling, criticizing, buying and selling fine art. It is recognized that there are many art worlds, defined either by location or alte ...
that had so utterly misunderstood his art.
In 1960, at the peak of his activity as an abstractionist, Guston said, "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." From 1968 onward, after moving away from abstraction, he created a lexicon of images such as Klansmen, light bulbs, shoes, cigarettes and clocks. In late 2009, the McKee gallery, Guston's long-time dealer, mounted a show revealing that lexicon in 49 small oil paintings on panel painted between 1969 and 1972 that had never been publicly displayed.
A ''
catalogue raisonné
A ''catalogue raisonné'' (or critical catalogue) is a comprehensive, annotated listing of all the known artworks by an artist either in a particular medium or all media. The works are described in such a way that they may be reliably identified ...
'' of the artist's work was compiled by the Guston Foundation in 2013, coinciding with recent scholarly interest that explored the periods he spent in Italy.
Detroit Institute of Arts
The Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), located in Midtown Detroit, Michigan, has one of the largest and most significant art collections in the United States. With over 100 galleries, it covers with a major renovation and expansion project comple ...
High Museum of Art
The High Museum of Art (colloquially the High) is the largest museum for visual art in the Southeastern United States. Located in Atlanta, Georgia (on Peachtree Street in Midtown, the city's arts district), the High is 312,000 square feet (28, ...
*
Honolulu Museum of Art
The Honolulu Museum of Art (formerly the Honolulu Academy of Arts) is an art museum in Honolulu, Hawaii. The museum is the largest of its kind in the state, and was founded in 1922 by Anna Rice Cooke. The museum has one of the largest single co ...
,
*
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (widely referred to as The Modern) is an art museum of post-World War II art in Fort Worth, Texas with a collection of international modern and contemporary art. Founded in 1892, The Modern is located in the c ...
Tate Modern
Tate Modern is an art gallery located in London. It houses the United Kingdom's national collection of international modern and contemporary art, and forms part of the Tate group together with Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. It ...
*
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, or VMFA, is an art museum in Richmond, Virginia, United States, which opened in 1936. The museum is owned and operated by the Commonwealth of Virginia. Private donations, endowments, and funds are used for the s ...
In 2022, Guston's daughter, Musa Mayer, gifted 96 paintings and 124 drawings from her personal collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art; this acquisition of more than 200 pieces is the largest collection of Guston's work held by a single institution.
Academic affiliations
Guston was a lecturer and teacher at a number of universities, and served as an artist-in-residence at the School of Art and Art History at the University of Iowa from 1941 to 1945. He then served an artist-in-residence at the
St. Louis School of Fine Arts
The St. Louis School of Fine Arts was founded as the Saint Louis School and Museum of Fine Arts in 1879 as part of Washington University in St. Louis, and has continuously offered visual arts and sculpture education since then. Its purpose-buil ...
at
Washington University in St. Louis
Washington University in St. Louis (WashU or WUSTL) is a private research university with its main campus in St. Louis County, and Clayton, Missouri. Founded in 1853, the university is named after George Washington. Washington University is r ...
, Missouri until 1947. He continued with his teaching at New York University and at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and, from 1973 to 1978, he conducted a monthly graduate seminar at Boston University.
Among Guston's students were two graduates of the University of Iowa, painters Stephen Greene (1917–1999) and Fridtjof Schroder (1917–1990), as well as Ken Kerslake (1930–2007), who attended the Pratt Institute. Rosemary Zwick was a student at Iowa. Among those who attended his graduate seminars at Boston University were painter Gary Komarin (1951–) and new media artist
Christina McPhee
Christina McPhee (born 1954, Los Angeles, California) is an American painter, new media and video artist. She lives on California's central coast and San Francisco, CA.
Art
Christina McPhee works in drawing as a core practice, developing layer ...
(1954–).
He was also posthumously elected to the
National Academy of Design
The National Academy of Design is an honorary association of American artists, founded in New York City in 1825 by Samuel Morse, Asher Durand, Thomas Cole, Martin E. Thompson, Charles Cushing Wright, Ithiel Town, and others "to promote the f ...
as an Associate Academician.
2020 controversy
In the fall of 2020, ''Philip Guston Now'', a long-planned traveling retrospective of Guston's work, which included 24 of the Klan paintings, was postponed until 2024 by the traveling show's four sponsoring institutions: the National Gallery of Art; the
Tate Modern
Tate Modern is an art gallery located in London. It houses the United Kingdom's national collection of international modern and contemporary art, and forms part of the Tate group together with Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. It ...
; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In a joint press release issued by the museums, they wrote "The racial justice movement that started in the U.S. and radiated to countries around the world, in addition to challenges of a global health crisis, have led us to pause," explaining that the international tour already rescheduled because of the coronavirus was best delayed "until a time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice … can be more clearly interpreted." Public response led to a "deluge of criticism from inside the art world," as well as major articles in ''New York'' magazine, ''
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
'',
CNN
CNN (Cable News Network) is a multinational cable news channel headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. Founded in 1980 by American media proprietor Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld as a 24-hour cable news channel, and presently owned by ...
, ''
Artforum
''Artforum'' is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art. The magazine is distinguished from other magazines by its unique 10½ x 10½ inch square format, with each cover often devoted to the work of an artist. Notabl ...
'', ''Tablet'', and ''
The Wall Street Journal
''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...
'', among other publications.
The most scathing response was collective, and organized in an open letter, published online by ''
The Brooklyn Rail
''The Brooklyn Rail'' is a publication and platform for the arts, culture, humanities, and politics. The ''Rail'' is based out of Brooklyn, New York. It features in-depth critical essays, fiction, poetry, as well as interviews with artists, criti ...
''. The letter featured a "list of signatories
hat
A hat is a head covering which is worn for various reasons, including protection against weather conditions, ceremonial reasons such as university graduation, religious reasons, safety, or as a fashion accessory. Hats which incorporate mecha ...
reads like a roll call of the most accomplished American artists alive: old and young, white and Black, local and expat, painters and otherwise," including
Matthew Barney
Matthew Barney (born March 25, 1967) is an American contemporary artist and film director who works in the fields of sculpture, film, photography and drawing. His works explore connections among geography, biology, geology and mythology as well ...
,
Nicole Eisenman
Nicole Eisenman (born 1965) is French-born American artist known for her oil paintings and sculptures. She has been awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship (1996), the Carnegie Prize (2013), and has thrice been included in the Whitney Biennial (1995, 20 ...
Ellen Gallagher
Ellen Gallagher (born December 16, 1965) is an American artist. Her work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions and is held in the permanent collections of many major museums. Her media include painting, works on paper, film and ...
,
Wade Guyton
Wade Guyton (born 1972) is an American post-conceptual artist who among other things makes digital paintings on canvas using scanners and digital inkjet technology.
Early life and education
Guyton was born in Hammond, Indiana, in 1972, and grew ...
Joan Jonas
Joan Jonas (born July 13, 1936) is an American visual artist and a pioneer of video and performance art, and one of the most important artists to emerge in the late 1960s and early 1970s.Julie Mehretu,
Adrian Piper
Adrian Margaret Smith Piper (born September 20, 1948) is an American conceptual artist and Kantian philosopher. Her work addresses how and why those involved in more than one discipline may experience professional ostracism, otherness, racial ...
Amy Sillman
Amy Sillman (born 1955) is a New York-based artist, known for process-based paintings that move between abstraction and figuration, and engage nontraditional media including animation, zines and installation.Farago, Jason''The New York Times'', ...
,
Lorna Simpson
Lorna Simpson (born August 13, 1960) is an American photographer and multimedia artist. She came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s with artworks such as ''Guarded Conditions'' and ''Square Deal''. Simpson is most well-known for her work in c ...
, Henry Taylor, and Christopher Williams." Strongly criticizing the museums' lack of courage to display the work, attempt to interpret it, or come to terms with the institutions' own "history of prejudice," the signers unanimously described the exhibition as a timely prompt for a "reckoning" — writing that's why it must proceed as scheduled. As of October 3, 2020, more than 2,000 artists had signed the letter, but the exhibition organizers did not respond until they rescheduled the exhibition for dates beginning in 2022. ''Philip Guston Now'' opened at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston on May 1, 2022.
Popular culture
In "Cat and Girl versus
Contemporary Art
Contemporary art is the art of today, produced in the second half of the 20th century or in the 21st century. Contemporary artists work in a globally influenced, culturally diverse, and technologically advancing world. Their art is a dynamic co ...
," part of the '' Cat and Girl'' webcomic series, author Dorothy Gambrell critiques the difficulty and purpose of finding the meaning behind art using Guston's iconic ''Head and Bottle'' painting.
Auction record
In May 2013, Christie's set an auction record for the artist's work ''To Fellini'', which sold for US$25.8 million.
See also
*
Boston Expressionism Boston Expressionism is an arts movement marked by emotional directness, dark humor, social and spiritual themes, and a tendency toward figuration strong enough that Boston Figurative Expressionism is sometimes used as an alternate term to distingu ...
*
Max Beckmann
Max Carl Friedrich Beckmann (February 12, 1884 – December 27, 1950) was a German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, and writer. Although he is classified as an Expressionist artist, he rejected both the term and the movement. In the 1920s ...
*
Morton Feldman
Morton Feldman (January 12, 1926 – September 3, 1987) was an American composer. A major figure in 20th-century classical music, Feldman was a pioneer of indeterminate music, a development associated with the experimental New York School ...
– the composer frequently drew inspiration from Guston's abstract expressionist work (including in the four-hour chamber composition ''For Philip Guston'')
*
Red Grooms
Red Grooms (born Charles Rogers Grooms on June 7, 1937) is an American multimedia artist best known for his colorful pop art, pop-art constructions depicting frenetic scenes of modern urban life. Grooms was given the nickname "Red" by Dominic ...
*
Claes Oldenburg
Claes Oldenburg (January 28, 1929 – July 18, 2022) was a Swedish-born American sculptor, best known for his public art installations typically featuring large replicas of everyday objects. Another theme in his work is soft sculpture versions ...
*
Jean Dubuffet
Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet (31 July 1901 – 12 May 1985) was a French painter and sculptor. His idealistic approach to aesthetics embraced so-called "low art" and eschewed traditional standards of beauty in favor of what he believed to be a ...
References
Further reading
* Arnason, H. Harvard. ''Philip Guston''. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1962.
* Auping, Michael. ''Philip Guston: Retrospective'' (Thames & Hudson, 2006).
* Botelho, Manuel. ''Guston em contexto: até ao regresso da figura''. Lisbon: Livros Vendaval, 2007.
* Bucklow, Christopher. ''What is in the Dwat. The Universe of Guston's Final Decade'' (The Wordsworth Trust, 2007)
* Burnett, Craig. ''Philip Guston: The Studio''. (London and Cambridge, MA: Afterall Books / MIT Press, 2014)
* Coolidge, Clark. ''Baffling Means: Writings/Drawings'' (Stockbridge, MA: O-blek Editions, 1991).
* Corbett, William. ''Philip Guston's Late Work: A Memoir'' (Cambridge, MA: Zoland Books, 1994)
* Feld, Ross. ''Guston in Time: Remembering Philip Guston'' (Counterpoint Press, 2003)
* Mayer, Musa. ''Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston'' (originally published: New York:
Knopf
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. () is an American publishing house that was founded by Alfred A. Knopf Sr. and Blanche Knopf in 1915. Blanche and Alfred traveled abroad regularly and were known for publishing European, Asian, and Latin American writers in ...
, 1988; new edition: Da Capo Press, 1997)
* Marika Herskovic ''New York School Abstract Expressionists Artists Choice by Artists,'' (New York School Press, 2000.) . p. 18; p. 37; p. 170–173
* Marika Herskovic ''American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s An Illustrated Survey,'' (New York School Press, 2003.) . p. 150–153
* Marika Herskovic ''American Abstract and Figurative Expressionism Style Is Timely Art Is Timeless An Illustrated Survey With Artists' Statements, Artwork and Biographies.'' (New York School Press, 2009.) . p. 112–115; p. 136
* Dore Ashton, ''A Critical History of Philip Guston'', 1976
* Yale University Art Gallery, Joanna Weber and Harry Cooper. ''Philip Guston, a New Alphabet, the Late Transition'', 2000,
* Robert Storr, ''Guston'', Abbeville Press, Modern Masters, , 1986
* David Kaufmann, ''Telling Stories: Philip Guston's Later Works'' (University of California Press, 2010)
* Peter Benson Miller, ed. ''Philip Guston, Roma'' ex. cat. with texts by Peter Benson Miller, Dore Ashton, Musa McKim and Michael Semff (Hatje Cantz, 2010)
* Peter Benson Miller, ed. ''Go Figure! New Perspectives on Guston'', 2015
* Michael Semff, 'An Unknown Lithograph from Philip Guston's Late Work,' Print Quarterly, XXVIII, 2011, 462–64
* 'Philip Guston: Prints', Catalogue Raisonné, Text by Michael Semff, English, Sieveking Verlag 2015,
* 'Philip Guston: Drawings for Poets', Foreword by Michael Krüger, Text by Bill Berkson, English, Sieveking Verlag 2015,
*
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.
It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of ...
Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print books ...