"This book ... [shows] how the artist worked out his developing ideas primarily through drawing. Included are examples of work from his early years, such as the preparatory drawings he made as a muralist for the WPA in the 1930s, in addition to the increasingly abstract work of the 1940s and 1950s, and the sequence of pictorial experiments that led to his reintroduction of the figure in the late 1960s. Also reproduced, in color, are a number of painterly gouaches and a series of acrylics"--Back cover.
"This volume introduces the diverse voices that comprise Guston's linguistic tapestry. Guston never stopped talking for too long. There may have been periods of silence precipitated by existential moments of doubt, but such lapses seem anomalous when measured against the voluminous transcriptions gleaned and edited by Clark Coolidge. Coolidge has done an admirable job arranging and presenting the book's contents, entirely relevant to anyone curious about Guston, and by extension, American Art of the post-World War II period."—Douglas Dreishpoon, chief curator at Knox-Albright Gallery
Philip Guston?s late figurative paintings were met with overwhelmingly negative critical response when first shown at Marlborough Gallery in New York City in October 1970. After the opening, Guston fled to Italy with his wife, spending eight months at the American Academy in Rome. The following spring, Guston returned to a wounded America, still at war in Vietnam, devastated by the assassinations of its leaders, and divided by antiwar protests and the social and political upheavals begun in the 1960s. It was Richard Nixon?s first term as president.0Guston?s outpouring of satirical drawings was inspired partly by conversations with his friend Philip Roth, at work on his own scathing Nixon satire, ?Our Gang?. ?When I came back from Europe in the summer of 1971,? Guston later said, ?I was pretty disturbed about everything in the country politically, the administration specifically, and I started doing cartoon characters. And one thing led to another, and so for months I did hundreds of drawings and they seemed to form a kind of story line, a sequence.? Completed during July and August 1971, these drawings were not publicly shown for three decades.0In 1975, after the Watergate scandal led to Nixon being forced to resign under threat of impeachment, Guston created more drawings and a final painting with Nixon as subject: ?San Clemente?. This book gathers this extraordinary body of work for the first time in its entirety.00Exhibition: Hauser & Wirth, New York, USA (01.11.2016-28.01.2017) / Hauser & Wirth, London, UK (19.05.-29.07.2017).
Published to accompany the exhibition ?Philip Guston and The Poets? at Gallerie dell?Accademia (May ? September 2017), this monograph exposes the artist?s oeuvre to critical literary interpretation. The exhibition draws parallels between humanist themes reflected in both Guston?s paintings and drawings as well as in the language and prose discerned in five of the twentieth century?s most prominent literary figures: D. H. Lawrence, W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Eugenio Montale and T. S. Eliot. The enormous influence that Italy itself had upon Guston and his work is also examined.0Spanning a 50-year period, ?Philip Guston and The Poets?, edited by curator Prof. Dr. Kosme de Barañano, features approximately 40 major paintings and 40 prominent drawings dating from 1930 through to 1980, the last of which were created in the final years of Guston?s life. 00Exhibition: Gallerie dell?Accademia, Venice, Italy (10.05.-03.09.2017).
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. With more than 800 images, the book illustrates Guston's key works and includes many unpublished paintings and drawings. An extensive chronology, illustrated with photographs, letters, articles, publications, and other ephemera drawn from the artist's archives and other sources, contextualizes Guston's life and provides in-depth coverage of his life at home, his work in the studio, his relationship with fellow artists and his many exhibitions. Guston was able to speak about art with unrivalled passion and fluency. In celebration of this, the book features Guston's own thoughts on his drawings and his great heroes of the Italian Renaissance.
Accompanies an exhibition of paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints from Edward R Broida's gift to the Museum of 175 works from his collection. Dating from the 1960s, the works represent a total of thirty-eight European and American artists, whose work is reproduced here.
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. .
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.
