Philip Guston - Böcker

Illuminating reflections on painting and drawing from one of the most revered artists of the twentieth century'Thank God for yellow ochre, cadmium red medium, and permanent green light'How does a painter see the world? Philip Guston, one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, spoke about art with unparalleled candour and commitment. Touching on work from across his career as well as that of his fellow artists and Renaissance heroes, this selection of his writings, talks and interviews draws together some of his most incisive reflections on iconography and abstraction, metaphysics and mysticism, and, above all, the nature of painting and drawing.'Among the most important, powerful and influential American painters of the last 100 years ... he's an art world hero' Jerry Saltz, New York Magazine'Guston's paintings make us think hard' Aindrea Emelife, Guardian

This is the premier collection of dialogues, talks, and writings by Philip Guston (1913-1980), one of the most intellectually adventurous and poetically gifted of modern painters. Over the course of his life, Guston's wide reading in literature and philosophy deepened his commitment to his art - from his early Abstract Expressionist paintings to his later gritty, intense figurative works. This collection, with many pieces appearing in print for the first time, lets us hear Guston's voice - as the artist delivers a lecture on Renaissance painting, instructs students in a classroom setting, and discusses such artists and writers as Piero della Francesca, de Chirico, Picasso, Kafka, Beckett, and Gogol.

This is the premier collection of dialogues, talks, and writings by Philip Guston (1913-1980), one of the most intellectually adventurous and poetically gifted of modern painters. Over the course of his life, Guston's wide reading in literature and philosophy deepened his commitment to his art - from his early Abstract Expressionist paintings to his later gritty, intense figurative works. This collection, with many pieces appearing in print for the first time, lets us hear Guston's voice - as the artist delivers a lecture on Renaissance painting, instructs students in a classroom setting, and discusses such artists and writers as Piero della Francesca, de Chirico, Picasso, Kafka, Beckett, and Gogol.

Five contemporary writers respond to Guston’s work through imaginative fiction that proves his continual influence on today’s creative cultureIn the short story collection Five Stories for Philip Guston, edited by Emmie Francis and Mark Godfrey, contemporary writers Christopher Alessandrini, Ben Okri, Thessaly La Force, Lou Stoppard and Audrey Wollen have created new fiction in conversation with Philip Guston (1913–80) and his painting. Christopher Alessandrini’s queer, drily witty “Maverick Road” brings us to the contemporary environs of Guston’s upstate haven. Ben Okri’s “Bloodymindedness” is a stark portrait of violence and subversion. In “Looking,” Thessaly La Force writes of the lingering power of painting and reputation with a tribute to Guston’s exhibition in Venice’s Gallerie dell’Accademia. Lou Stoppard’s courtroom crucible “A Verdict” is a study in Kafkaesque atmosphere. Audrey Wollen works deftly with a kind of Oulipo constraint exercise—Giotto is there, but is Guston himself in “The Line”? Look for him, and he is everywhere.

A sweeping retrospective of Philip Guston’s influential work, from Depression-era muralist to abstract expressionist to tragicomic contemporary masterA Wall Street Journal 2020 holiday gift guide pickPhilip Guston—perhaps more than any other figure in recent memory—has given contemporary artists permission to break the rules and paint what, and how, they want. His winding career, embrace of “high” and “low” sources, and constant aesthetic reinvention defy easy categorization, and his 1968 figurative turn is by now one of modern art’s most legendary conversion narratives. “I was feeling split, schizophrenic. The war, what was happening in America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything—and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?”And so Guston’s sensitive abstractions gave way to large, cartoonlike canvases populated by lumpy, sometimes tortured figures and mysterious personal symbols in a palette of juicy pinks, acid greens, and cool blues. That Guston continued mining this vein for the rest of his life—despite initial bewilderment from his peers—reinforced his reputation as an artist’s artist and a model of integrity; since his death 50 years ago, he has become hugely influential as contemporary art has followed Guston into its own antic twists and turns.Published to accompany the first retrospective museum exhibition of Guston’s career in over 15 years, Philip Guston Now includes a lead essay by Harry Cooper surveying Guston's life and work, and a definitive chronology reflecting many new discoveries. It also highlights the voices of artists of our day who have been inspired by the full range of his work: Tacita Dean, Peter Fischli, Trenton Doyle Hancock, William Kentridge, Glenn Ligon, David Reed, Dana Schutz, Amy Sillman, Art Spiegelman and Rirkrit Tiravanija. Thematic essays by co-curators Mark Godfrey, Alison de Lima Greene and Kate Nesin trace the influences, interests and evolution of this singular force in modern and contemporary art—including several perspectives on the 1960s and ’70s, when Guston gradually abandoned abstraction, returning to the figure and to current history but with a personal voice, by turns comic and apocalyptic, that resonates today more than ever.

Philip Guston’s legendary, prescient political satire of Richard NixonIn the summer of 1971—two years before the Watergate hearings—Richard Nixon was an incumbent whose grip on power was being tested by the Pentagon Papers. Inspired in part by the work of his friend Philip Roth, who had just finished the novel Our Gang, Philip Guston began drawing the object of his political anger and despair—Richard Nixon, transformed into the character “Poor Richard,” rendered with a distinctively phallic nose and scrotal jowls, and accompanied by henchmen Spiro Agnew, John Mitchell, and Henry Kissinger.Guston carefully sequenced the drawings in 1971 and planned to publish them as a book, even designing an original title page. But he held back, and the images were never released during his lifetime; only in 2001 were they first exhibited, accompanied by a publication of the series from the University of Chicago Press by Debra Bricker Balken. Today, as we face yet another moment of presidential crisis and global turmoil, Poor Richard is more relevant than ever.Poor Richard by Philip Guston brings Guston’s series back into print. Following Guston’s own sequencing, layout and original title page from 1971, Poor Richard by Philip Guston presents this shockingly fresh, delightfully profane series, with beautiful new reproductions. The publication marks the promised gift of these 73 drawings by The Guston Foundation to the National Gallery of Art, where they will be preserved and studied as a monument of contemporary satirical art and virtuoso drawing.

Philip Guston was born in Montreal, Quebec in 1913, the seventh child of Ukrainian immigrants. Raised in Los Angeles and largely self-taught, he found inspiration for his early murals in the masters of the Italian Renaissance. Early acclaim as a figurative painter and years spent teaching in the mid-West were followed by a Prix de Rome in 1948-49, after which he moved permanently to New York and turned to abstraction, joining contemporaries Pollock, De Kooning, Kline and Rothko. In the mid-1960's, Guston withdrew from the New York art scene to Woodstock, where he worked on the late figurative paintings for which he is now best known. He died in 1980, weeks after the opening of a major retrospective.After his Jewish Museum exhibition in 1966, Guston moved to Florida and, during a period of personal crisis, stopped painting. Instead, he turned to producing simple drawings. '1 drew constantly... Drawing very pure lines, very few lines. Some of them ended up just one line or two lines on the paper.' For Guston, 'the successful ones ... were the ones where the space felt filled and they weren't just lines.’

When Philip Guston turned to the medium of lithography in the early sixties, he was regarded as one of the leading figures of Abstract Expressionism in the United States. At that time, his art was already showing signs of the change that would lead to the later representational works that dominated the last decade of his career. The impressive series of black-and-white lithographs that Guston made shortly before his death in 1980 incorporates, as a sort of visual autobiography, the complete repertoire of objects that marked his return to powerful pictorial representation: simple everyday items, clocks, shoes, books, cigarettes, ashtrays, and occasionally his beloved sandwiches and cherries. All of these things, taken from the world of the private and intimate, are given a unique vitality by Gusto' s ironic eye and deliberate hand in the soft cadences of the lithographic crayon.