Philip Guston

Philip Guston (* 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 a forerunner of the 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 1919 moved to Los Angeles (USA).

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

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

The following year, Guston and Pollock were expelled from school because of satirical drawings; Guston formed autodidactically. In 1929, she went to visit the Hindu mystic Jiddu Krishnamurti in Ojai Valley.

The early work of Guston was marked figural. In addition to his high school education Guston also received a one-year scholarship at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. Essentially, however, Guston was a self-taught as an artist.

His training at the Otis Art Institute was Guston little stimulating and academically and ended it prematurely. He left the Institute after an overnight painting action, the traces left behind.

1931, at the age of 18 years, Guston was a politically - critical painter. In the same year he visited Pollock with the Mexican painter José Clemente Orozco during its work on the mural Prometheus at Pomona College in Los Angeles. Guston himself created a large wall painting in an interior space in Los Angeles, addressed the issue of the case, the so-called Scottsboro Boys, an obviously racist judicial scandal this time with black youth. This mural was defaced by local police. From 1934 to 1935 Guston lived in Mexico, where he could run through the mediation of Diego Rivera in the former summer residence of Emperor Maximilian, together with Reuben Kadish the mural The Struggle Against Terrorism.

In 1935 Guston created (as Phillip Goldstein ) a mural at the City of Hope ( a tuberculosis hospital) in Duarte (California), together with Reuben Kadish, which is preserved to this day.

1936 Guston moved to New York. He then worked for the Federal Art Project (FAP ) ( a job creation program for artists in the context of (WPA ) Works Progress Administration program ).

1940 Guston moved to Woodstock for the first time and now focused on the painting. He joined the clear style of the Mexican muralists with Picasso's surreal cubism in the 1930s, but also with the figure considers the Ashcan School. After his move to the State University of Iowa in Iowa City, he worked intensively with Renaissance painting, for example, with the works of Paolo Uccello, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca and Giotto.

In the years 1947 to 1949, Guston kept as a Guggenheim fellow of the American Academy in Italy, where he, as well as the young John Cage met Giorgio de Chirico, as well as in Spain and in France. On Ischia, drawings emerged, which signified an important step to clarify the forms towards abstraction.

1949 Guston returned back to New York and was now a close friend of Robert Motherwell, who occupied a central role in the New York art scene. From 1951 to 1959 he lectured at New York University.

In Guston phase of nonrepresentational painting from 1950, he preferred less expressive gestures rather than reminiscent of Claude Monet layers short brush strokes, so also the buzzword from abstract impressionism was coined for these works. Guston remained within the group of New York School an outsider, comparable to Adolph Gottlieb and Joan Mitchell.

Mid-1960s was characterized with him a frustration with the abstract painting from. In 1966 he returned even painting for two years back. There was a variety of drawings in which he developed a new representational repertoire that things mainly shows everyday objects from his studio, hooded men and over again smoldering cigarettes. So he returned to a symbol containing realism of shattering power of expression, the already characterized his early work. The pictures this time are still the most famous of his oeuvre.

Guston's statement about his abstract pictures, " I was just tired of this purity! Wanted to tell stories again. ", Illustrates how radically for the painter himself, but also for his contemporaries to turn away from the leading style of the post-war period, abstract expressionism was. As he took this step, he became a key figure in the post-modern painting.

Philip Guston lived and worked for many years in the artists' colony in Woodstock (New York), where he died on 7 June 1980 at the age of 66 years.

Important 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, Ross; Guston, Philip; Rubin, Josh ( Eds.): 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; Catalogue: Volume 1: Painting; Volume 2: sculpture; Volume 3: Prints; Text band; Kassel / Cologne 1959.
  • David Sylvester: A Conversation with Philip Guston. With four texts and a presentation of the artist; With an afterword by Dieter Schwarz; Piet Meyer Verlag, Bern / Vienna 2013 ISBN 978-3-905799-28-6
Duarte, California Woodstock (disambiguation) Surrealism Iowa City, Iowa American Academy in Rome Ischia (disambiguation) Berlin Chicago Parrish Art Museum Metropolitan Museum of Art Fort Worth, Texas Aspen (Colorado) Whitechapel Gallery Amsterdam Warsaw Neue Nationalgalerie Erfurt Providence, Rhode Island Albertina Bremen Gemini G.E.L. Integrated Authority File
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