Philip Guston

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Philip Guston at work on a wall painting, 1940
Signature (1969)

Philip Guston (born June 27, 1913 as Phillip Goldstein in Montreal , Canada , † June 7, 1980 in Woodstock , New York ) was an American painter . He was one of the most important representatives of Abstract Expressionism . He is considered to be the forerunner of New Image Painting .

life and work

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Guston was the youngest of seven children of a Russian-Jewish family from Odessa who emigrated to Canada in 1905 and moved to Los Angeles ( USA ) in 1919 .

His family was confronted with the activities of the Ku Klux Klan against Jews and black Americans in California . When Philip Guston was 10 or 11 years old, his father hanged himself in the shed and Philip found his body.

From 1925 onwards Guston, encouraged by his mother, copied comic strips such as Krazy Kat by George Herriman . In 1927 he befriended Jackson Pollock and Manuel Tolegian at Manual Arts High School ; her teacher Frederick John de St. Vrain Schwankovsky introduced her to contemporary painting.

The following year Guston and Pollock were expelled from school for satirical drawings; Guston continued his self-taught education. In 1929 they visited the Hindu mystic Jiddu Krishnamurti in the Ojai Valley together.

Guston's early work was still figurative. In addition to his high school education, Guston also received a one-year scholarship to the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. Essentially, however, Guston remained an autodidact as an artist .

Guston found his training at the Otis Art Institute not very fruitful and too academic and ended it prematurely. He left the institute after a nightly painting session that left traces.

In 1931, at the age of 18, Guston was a politically critical painter. In the same year he and Pollock visited the Mexican painter José Clemente Orozco while he was working on the mural Prometheus at Pomona College in Los Angeles. Guston himself created a large wall painting in an interior room in Los Angeles, which thematized the case of the so-called Scottsboro Boys , an obviously racially motivated judicial scandal of that time with black youth. This mural was defaced by the local police. From 1934 to 1935 Guston stayed in Mexico , where he was able to do the mural The Struggle Against Terrorism together with Reuben Kadish through the mediation of Diego Rivera in the former summer residence of Emperor Maximilian .

In 1935, Guston (as Phillip Goldstein ) created a wall painting in the City of Hope National Medical Center (a tuberculosis hospital) in Duarte, California , together with Reuben Kadish, which has survived to this day.

In 1936 Guston moved to New York. He has now worked for the Federal Art Project (FAP) (a job creation program for artists under the (WPA) Works Progress Administration program).

In 1940 Guston moved to Woodstock for the first time and now concentrated on the panel painting. In doing so, he combined the clear style of the Mexican muralists with Picasso's surreal Cubism of the 1930s, but also with the figurative conception of the Ashcan School . After moving to the State University of Iowa in Iowa City , he dealt intensively with Renaissance painting, for example with the works of Paolo Uccello , Masaccio , Piero della Francesca and Giotto .

From 1947 to 1949 Guston was a Guggenheim Fellow at the American Academy in Italy , where he met Giorgio de Chirico and the young John Cage , as well as in Spain and France . Drawings were made on Ischia , which were an important step towards clarifying the forms towards the non-representational.

In 1949 Guston returned to New York and was now close friends with Robert Motherwell , who played a central role in the New York art scene. From 1951 to 1959 he taught as a lecturer at New York University .

In Guston's non-representational painting phase from 1950 on, he preferred less expressive gestures than layers of short brushstrokes that were more reminiscent of Claude Monet , which is why the catchphrase of Abstract Impressionism was coined for these works. Guston remained an outsider within the New York School group , comparable to Adolph Gottlieb and Joan Mitchell .

In the mid-1960s he became frustrated with abstract painting . In 1966 he even turned his back on painting for two years. A large number of drawings arose in which he developed a new, representational repertoire, which mainly shows everyday objects, things from his studio, hooded men and cigarettes that are always smoldering. In this way he returned to the symbolic realism of harrowing expressiveness that had already shaped his early work. The pictures from this period are still the best known of his oeuvre today.

Guston's statement about his non-representational pictures, “I was just fed up with this purity! I wanted to tell stories again. ”, Illustrates how radical it was for the painter himself, but also for his contemporaries, to turn away from the leading style of the post-war period, abstract expressionism. In taking this step, he became a key figure in postmodern painting.

Philip Guston lived and worked for many years in the artists' colony in Woodstock ( New York ), where he died on June 7, 1980 at the age of 66. Shortly before his death, Guston was elected an Associate Member ( ANA ) of the National Academy of Design . Since 1972 he was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters . Galerie Hauser & Wirth manages his estate .

Exhibitions (selection)

Works in museums and collections

Literature and Sources

  • Ashton, Dore; A Critical Study of Philip Guston . University of California Press, Berkeley 1990.
  • Dervaux, Isabel; Schreier, Christoph; Semff, Michael; Tojner, Paul E .; Schreier, Christoph (ed.); Semff, Michael (ed.): Philip Guston: Works on paper; Ostfildern 2007 ISBN 978-3-7757-1908-7 ISBN 3-7757-1908-3 .
  • Field, horse; Guston, Philip; Rubins, Josh (Ed.): Memories of Philip Guston; Schmieheim 2005 ISBN 3-938715-01-4 .
  • Guston, Philip: Philip Guston, Tableaux, Paintings 1947–1979; Ostfildern-Ruit 2000 ISBN 3-7757-1000-0 .
  • Schreier, Christoph; Kunstmuseum Bonn (ed.): Philip Guston, painting 1947–1979 Ostfildern-Ruit 1999 ISBN 3-7757-0896-0 .
  • Exhibition catalog for documenta II (1959) in Kassel : II.documenta'59. Art after 1945 ; Catalog: Volume 1: Painting; Volume 2: Sculpture; Volume 3: Graphic Art; Text tape; Kassel / Cologne 1959.
  • David Sylvester: A conversation with Philip Guston. With four texts and a lecture by the artist; With an afterword by Dieter Schwarz; Piet Meyer Verlag, Bern / Vienna 2013 ISBN 978-3-905799-28-6
  • Philip Guston: Prints. Catalog raisonné; German English; Sieveking Verlag Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-944874-18-0
  • Philip Guston: Drawings for Poets; English; Sieveking Verlag Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-944874-19-7

Web links

Commons : Philip Guston  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ nationalacademy.org: Past Academicians "G" / Guston, Philip ANA 1980 ( Memento of the original from January 16, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (accessed June 25, 2015) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.nationalacademy.org
  2. ^ Members: Philip Guston. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 1, 2019 .
  3. ↑ Website of the gallery: We are delighted to announce that we now represent the Estate of Philip Guston ( Memento of the original from September 1, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.hauserwirth.com
  4. ↑ Museum page on the exhibition , accessed on May 4, 2014.
personal data
SURNAME Guston, Philip
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Goldstein, Phillip (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American painter
DATE OF BIRTH June 27, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH Montreal , Canada
DATE OF DEATH June 7, 1980
Place of death Woodstock (New York)