Philip Guston

Philip Guston (1913–1980) was a Canadian American artist known for his profound influence on the development of Abstract Expressionism and later for his controversial return to figurative painting. Guston was a founding figure of the mid-century ‘New York School’, referring to a wide range of American artists whose work was expressive of the individual self.

Guston was born in 1913 in Montreal, Canada and moved with his family to Los Angeles in 1919. In 1927 Guston began painting and enrolled in the Los Angeles manual Arts High School. There, he struck up a lifelong friendship with Jackson Pollock. Guston has subsequently earned a one-year scholarship at the Otis Art Institute, but was considered largely self-taught, drawing inspiration from Renaissance masters and early modernists including Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico.

Philip Guston navigated through four distinct idioms in a career that spanned half a century. Like others of his generation who came to be known as Abstract Expressionists, Guston was inspired by the muralists Gabriel Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera. He produced his earliest works in this format and was part of the New Deal / W.P.A. (Works Progress Administration) Art Project. The shift to easel painting took place in the realm of social realism, a logical segue from the deeply political arena of the mural. From there to abstraction was a more complicated transition, but one which earned Guston a reputation among the finest painters of that moment.

Despite his success in abstract art, Guston underwent a dramatic transformation in the late 1960s. Disillusioned with abstraction’s limitations, this period marked the emergence of his dark, figurative style, including his satirical drawings of Richard Nixon during the Vietnam War and featuring often grotesque imagery such as hooded Klansmen, oversized heads and everyday objects like shoes and clocks.

Living a relatively isolated life in upstate New York, over the next decade Guston grew troubled by the inappropriateness of his art amidst the increasingly traumatic political climate in America. Radically altering course, the artist moved away from his painstakingly ordered nonobjective painting by attempting to paint, without thinking, whatever he could see. Beginning by painting all the flotsam lying around his attic, Guston soon recognised, like René Magritte, Giorgio de Chirico and Max Beckmann before him, the bizarre metaphysical power of reality and the objective world. Guston’s later paintings began to depict the world as a sparse and often desolate, Beckett-like landscape, translating the raw ordinariness of the everyday into fascinating and troubling metaphors of the absurd. Guston died in 1980 in Woodstock, New York.

Throughout his career, Philip Guston remained a restless and innovative artist, continually challenging himself and his audience. His legacy is marked by his fearless exploration of personal and societal themes, making him one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. In 2013 Guston’s To Fellini (1958) set a world auction record at Christie’s New York, selling for US425,883,750.