Philip Guston
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
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)
- 1958: The New American Painting , Berlin University of the Arts
- 1959: documenta 2 art after 1945 Kassel
- 1960: 30th Venice Biennale
- 1980: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (traveling exhibition)
- 1995: 46th Venice Biennale
- 1999: Alchemies of the Sixties Rose Art Museum, Waltham / Examining Pictures Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago / Paintings 1947–1979 , Kunstmuseum Bonn (September 2, 1999 - January 11, 2000), then: Württembergischer Kunstverein , Stuttgart (February 16, 1999) - April 24, 2000), National Gallery of Canada , Ottawa (May 12 - July 30, 2000)
- 2000: In Memory of My Feelings Parrish Art Museum , Southampton, New York / Philip Guston Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven
- 2003: Philip Guston Metropolitan Museum , New York / Happiness - A Survival Guide for Art and Life Mori Art Museum, Tokyo / Philip Guston San Francisco Museum of Modern Art / Philip Guston Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth
- 2004: From Pollock to Marden Aspen Art Museum / Faces in the Crowd Whitechapel Art Gallery , London / The Undiscovered Country UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles / Matisse to Freud: A Critic's Choice British Museum , London / Art and Utopia - Limited Action Museu d´Art Contemporani, Barcelona / AT WAR CCCB Barcelona / Philip Guston Grimm Fine Art, Amsterdam / Voir en Peiture Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw / The MoMA in Berlin Neue Nationalgalerie , Berlin / The Art of Philip Guston Royal Academy of Arts, London / Philip Guston Timothy Taylor Gallery, London
- 2005: 20: TWENTY Cornerhouse Manchester / Big Bang Center Pompidou , Paris / 51st Venice Biennale 2005 / EXIL UND MODERNE Angermuseum, Erfurt / Faces in the Crowd Castello di Rivoli, Turin / Elective Affinities Das Städel , Frankfurt am Main / Contemporary Voices Museum of Modern Art , New York / Apocalypse Then Krannert Art Museum, Champaign
- 2006: (until March 4, 2007) Magritte and Contemporary Art Los Angeles County Museum of Art / THE FOOD SHOW Chelsea Art Museum, New York / Philip Guston McKee Gallery, New York / RESONANCE Frith Street Gallery, London / Modernity and Self Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis / Enigma Variations Santa Monica Museum of Art / Plane / Figure Kunstmuseum Winterthur / Inner Worlds Outside Irish Museum of Modern Art , Dublin / Back to the Future RISD Museum, Providence / The New Landscape Cheim & Read Gallery, New York / Against the Grain Museum of Modern Art , New York / Inner Worlds Outside Whitechapel Art Gallery, London / Drawings Valerie Carberry Gallery, Chicago / Inner Worlds Outside Fundacion la Caixa, Madrid
- 2007: (March 1, 2007 - May 20, 2007) Philip Guston. Works on paper Kunstmuseum Bonn , then: (June 1, 2007 - August 26, 2007) Louisiana Museum of Modern Art , Humlebaek, (September 7 - November 25, 2007) Albertina , (December 13, 2007 - March 2, 2008) State Graphic Collection Munich / (March 10, 2007 - May 27, 2007) paint it blue Neues Museum Weserburg , Bremen / (April 27, 2007 - June 30, 2007) "Philip Guston - Paintings" Galerie Aurel Scheibler, Berlin (first single -Exhibition of his paintings in a German gallery)
- 2008: The Private Eye of Philip Guston: The Gemini Editions , Gemini GEL at Joni Moisant Weyl, New York
- 2009: Philip Guston: 1954–1958 , L&M Arts, New York, Philip Guston: Small Oils on Panel, 1969–1973 , McKee Gallery, New York
- 2010: Philip Guston: Works on Paper , Timothy Taylor Gallery, London, England
- 2013: Philip Guston: The great late work , Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt , 2014 in the Deichtorhallen , Hamburg
- 2014: Philip Guston , Louisiana Museum of Modern Art , Humlebæk , Denmark.
- 2015: New York Painting (with overview exhibitions by Philip Guston, Robert Ryman and Brice Marden ), Kunstmuseum Bonn
Works in museums and collections
- Akron Art Museum
- Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
- Berkeley Art Museum
- Birmingham Museum of Art , Birmingham / Alabama
- Blanton Museum of Art, Austin
- Center Georges Pompidou , Paris
- Denver Art Museum
- Des Moines Art Center
- Winterthur Art Museum
- Los Angeles County Museum of Art
- Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis
- Minneapolis Institute of Arts
- MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge / MA
- MMoCA Madison
- Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth
- Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona
- Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
- Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
- National Gallery of Canada , Ottawa
- Museo Reina Sofía , Madrid
- Rose Art Museum, Waltham
- Saint Louis Art Museum
- San Antonio Museum of Art
- Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington
- State Graphic Collection Munich
- Yale University Art Gallery , New Haven
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
- Literature by and about Philip Guston in the catalog of the German National Library
- Materials by and about Philip Guston in the documenta archive
- The Philip Guston Foundation
- Philip Guston at artchive.com
- Examples of his work and biographical notes (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ 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)
- ^ Members: Philip Guston. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 1, 2019 .
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ 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) |