Philip Guston

Guston sketching a mural for the WPA Federal Art Project in 1939.

Philip Guston painting another Federal Art Project mural in 1940.

An early activist, in 1932, the 18-year-old Guston produced an indoor mural with artist Reuben Kadish in an effort by the communist-affiliated John Reed Club of Los Angeles to fundraise money in support of the defendants in the Scottsboro Boys Trial, nine Black teenagers falsely accused of a rape in Alabama and sentenced to death."[2] The mural was then defaced by local police forces, organized into violent anti-communist Red Squads.[2] The subsequent court ruling found no fault on the part of L.A. police, even though irreversible damage was sustained to many works of art.

In 1934, Philip Goldstein (as Guston was then known),[10] and artist Reuben Kadish joined poet and friend Jules Langsner on a trip to Mexico, where they were commissioned to paint a 1,000-square-foot (93 m²) mural on a wall in the former summer palace of the Emperor Maximilian in the state capital of Morelia. They produced the impressive The Struggle Against Terror, whose antifascist themes were clearly influenced by the work of David Siqueiros.[1] A two-page review in Time magazine quoted Siqueiros's description of them: "the most promising painters in either the US or Mexico."[1] In Mexico he also met and spent time with Frida Kahlo and husband Diego Rivera.

In 1934–35, Guston and Kadish also completed a mural that remains to this day at City of Hope Medical Center, a tuberculosis hospital at the time, located in Duarte, California.

In September 1935, at 22 years of age, he moved to New York where he worked as an artist in the WPA program during the Great Depression. In 1937, he married artist and poet Musa McKim, whom he first met at Otis, and they collaborated on several WPA murals. During this period his work included strong references to Renaissance painters such as Piero della Francesca, Paolo Uccello, Masaccio, and Giotto. He was also influenced by American Regionalists and Mexican mural painters.[3] In 1938 he painted a post office mural in the US post office in Commerce, Georgia, entitled Early Mail Service and the Construction of Railroads, and in 1944, he completed a mural for the Social Security building in Washington, D.C.

Abstract expressionism and Neoexpressionism

Zone, 1953–1954, oil on canvas, The Edward R. Broida Trust, Los Angeles

Cherries III, 1976, oil on canvas, Honolulu Museum of Art

In the 1950s, Guston achieved success and renown as a first-generation abstract expressionist,[11] although he preferred the term New York School. During this period his paintings often consisted of blocks and masses of gestural strokes and marks of color floating within the picture plane as seen in his painting Zone, 1953–1954. These works, with marks often grouped toward the center of the composition, recall the "plus and minus" compositions by Piet Mondrian or the late Nymphea canvases by Monet.

Guston used a relatively limited palette favoring black and white, grays, blues and reds. It was a palette that would remain evident in his later work despite Guston's attempts to expand his palette and reintroduce abstraction to his work, late in life, as evidenced in some of his untitled work from 1980 that has more blues and yellows.

In 1967, Guston moved to Woodstock, New York. He was increasingly frustrated with abstraction and began painting representationally again, but in a personal, cartoonish manner.[3] "It disappointed many when he returned to figuration with aplomb, painting mysterious images in which cartoonish-looking cups, heads, easels, and other visions were depicted against vacant beige backgrounds. People whispered behind his back: "He’s out of his mind, and this isn’t art,” curator Michael Auping said. “He could have ruined his reputation, and some people said he did.”[3] The first exhibition of these new figurative paintings was held in 1970 at the Marlborough Gallery in New York. It received scathing reviews from most of the art establishment.[3] Memorably, New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer ridiculed Guston's new style in an article entitled "A Mandarin Pretending to Be a Stumblebum",[12] referring to "mandarin" in the sense of an influential figure and "stumblebum" meaning a clumsy person.[12] He called the act of changing styles an "illusion" and an "artifice". The initial reaction of Robert Hughes, critic for Time magazine, who later changed his views, was put into a scathing review entitled "Ku Klux Komix".[13]

According to Musa Mayer's biography of her father in Night Studio, the painter Willem de Kooning was one of the few who instantly understood the importance of these paintings, telling Guston at the time that they were "about freedom."[14] Cherries III from 1976, held in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art, is an example of his late style representational paintings. Although cherries are a mundane subject, their spiky stems can be a metaphor for the crudeness and brutality of modern life.[15]

As a result of the poor reception of his new figurative style, Guston isolated himself even more in Woodstock, far from the art world that had so utterly misunderstood his art.[11]

In 1960, at the peak of his activity as an abstractionist, Guston said, "There is something ridiculous and miserly in the myth we inherit from abstract art. That painting is autonomous, pure and for itself, therefore we habitually analyze its ingredients and define its limits. But painting is 'impure'. It is the adjustment of 'impurities' which forces its continuity. We are image-makers and image-ridden."[16] From 1968 onward, after moving away from abstraction, he created a lexicon of images such as Klansmen, light bulbs, shoes, cigarettes and clocks.[11] In late 2009, the McKee gallery, Guston's long-time dealer, mounted a show revealing that lexicon in 49 small oil paintings on panel painted between 1969 and 1972 that had never been publicly displayed.

A catalogue raisonné of the artist's work was compiled by the Guston Foundation in 2013, coinciding with recent scholarly interest that explored the periods he spent in Italy.[17]

In the fall of 2020, Philip Guston Now, a long-planned traveling retrospective of Guston's work, which included 24 of the Klan paintings,[6] was postponed until 2024 by the traveling show's four sponsoring institutions: the National Gallery of Art; the Tate Modern; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.[18][19] In a joint press release issued by the museums, they wrote "The racial justice movement that started in the U.S. and radiated to countries around the world, in addition to challenges of a global health crisis, have led us to pause," explaining that the international tour already rescheduled because of the coronavirus was best delayed “until a time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice … can be more clearly interpreted.”[4][8] Public response led to a "deluge of criticism from inside the art world,"[6] as well as major articles in New York Magazine, the New York Times, CNN, Artforum, Tablet, and the Wall Street Journal, among other publications.

The most scathing response was collective, and organized in an open letter, published online by the Brooklyn Rail. The letter featured a "list of signatories [that] reads like a roll call of the most accomplished American artists alive: old and young, white and Black, local and expat, painters and otherwise," including Matthew Barney, Nicole Eisenman, Charles Gaines, Ellen Gallagher, Wade Guyton, Rachel Harrison, Joan Jonas, Julie Mehretu, Adrian Piper, Pope.L, Martin Puryear, Amy Sillman, Lorna Simpson, Henry Taylor, and Christopher Williams."[19] Strongly criticizing the museums' lack of courage to display the work, attempt to interpret it, or come to terms with the institutions' own "history of prejudice," the signers unanimously described the exhibition as a timely prompt for a "reckoning" — writing that's why it must proceed as scheduled.[20] As of October 3, 2020, more than 2,000 artists[2] had signed the letter, but the exhibition organizers did not respond until they rescheduled the exhibition for dates beginning in 2022.[21]