Biography from AskART:
| Born in Montreal, Canada, Philip Guston had a career that vacillated
between deeply intense figurative painting and totally abstract
painting. He remains well known as one of the leading Abstract
Expressionists of the 1950s and 1960s and for his paintings in the last
part of his career that combined expressionism and realism. Influences
in addition to Abstract Expressionism were paintings by Renaissance
Masters, California surrealism and 1930s Mexican muralism.
When
Guston was six years old, he moved to Los Angeles with his Russian
immigrant parents. In high school, he was a friend of future
gestural painter Jackson Pollack, and the two of them got into trouble
for circulating a satirical pamphlet and were expelled from
school. As an adult Guston continued his focus on social issues,
and joining the John Reed Club, aligned himself with left-wing
political causes.
To earn money while painting on his own as a
young man, Philip Guston worked as a movie extra. He was
primarily a self-taught painter except for three months of study at the
Otis Art Institute. Major influences during that time were modernists
Lorser Feitelson and Reuben Kadish. Guston created a mural panel
about American Negroes in American society and depicted a Ku Klux
Klansman whipping a black man who had been tied up. Angry local
authorities destroyed the mural.
Guston's 1934 travels in
Mexico where he observed muralist work, especially that of David
Sisqueros, reinforced his interest in creating large murals with strong
political-social messages. Reuben Kadish was Guston's traveling
companion on this trip, which included the painting of a mural in the
former summer palace of Emperor Maximilian.
In 1935, he went
to New York City and did representational art including WPA murals for
the 1939 World's Fair, the Queensbridge Housing Project in New York
City in 1940 and the Social Security Building in Washington DC in
1942. He also did easel paintings beginning 1940, including
"Bombardment", which was a political statement about the Spanish Civil
War.
In the late 1940s, Philip Guston turned to abstraction with
symbolism rooted in the mysteries of a child's world expressed in
flattened forms. His first solo exhibition was 1945, and that year he
won first prize in the Carnegie Institute annual exhibition. Shortly
after, he traveled in Europe and in 1950, settled in New York
City. He turned from figurative painting to Abstract
Expressionism including a series of "white paintings" that had
geometric constructions combined with color and brush-work derived from
impressionism. His work grew increasingly large and abstract with
heavy texture and much grey and black color.
Then In the 1970s,
he returned to figurative painting and increasingly more to
recognizable subjects and messages hearkening back to his earlier
period of narrative comment on societal subjects. Some of his paintings
had common objects, disembodied, and references to urban ugliness and
"menacing, gangster-like figures in a deliberately awkward style."
(Zellman 953)
Philip Guston combined teaching with his painting
career and was a member of the faculties of Yale and Columbia
Universities and the University of Iowa. From 1973 until his death in
1980, he taught at Boston University and became an influential figure
in Boston art circles.
In 2005, California collector and real-estate developer Edward R. Broida gave a gift of 36 works
by Philip Guston to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Included are twelve paintings, sixteen drawings and eight prints dating
from 1938 to 1980.
Sources:
Michael David Zellman, "300 Years of American Art"
Matthew Baigell, "Dictionary of American Art"
Peter Falk, "Who Was Who in American Art"
Carol Vogel, 'The Modern Gets a Sizable Gift of Contemporary Art', New York Times, October 12, 2005
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Philip Guston is also mentioned in these AskART essays:
Abstract Expressionism
Modernism
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