Philip Guston: Retrospective Book

Philip Guston's early, figurative work and his mature abstractions have become much sought after by museums and private collectors, although they remain less familiar to the museum-going public than works by his friends Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, and Franz Kline. At the same time, his late figurative works—including his so-called "Klan paintings"—have had a powerful impact on artists who embraced figuration after decades in which abstraction dominated American painting. This book and the retrospective exhibition it accompanies bring together the different bodies of Guston's work, exposing the connective threads between each of the artist's developmental stages. The most comprehensive survey of Guston's art to date, the book begins with figurative works dating from the 1930s and 1940s, followed by a small and pivotal group of transitional works that show the artist's rapid and bold entry into abstraction. The core works of the book, a major group of Guston's lush pure abstractions from the 1950s and 1960s, were critically acclaimed when first exhibited but have rarely been seen since. The book then tracks the artist's evolution back into figuration and the various themes and symbols that comprise his controversial late works. Also included are selections of drawings that act as both prelude and restatement at each stage of the artist's career, and a number of works from guston's estate that have never before been exhibited and that shed new light on his development. The essays, by a noted group of critics and art historians, discuss topics such as Guston's early formal influences and the emergence of symbols that would resurface and play prominent roles in his late work; the artist's philosophy regarding abstraction and the role his paintings played in the larger development of Abstract Expressionism; his interest in music and film; the iconography of his late figurative works; and the roles played by autobiography, literature, and poetry. In addition, a number of Guston's own essays on art and innovation will be reprinted. 145 illustrations, 120 in color.Read More