Philip Guston

Philip Guston – After the loss of his father, art brought comfort

Philip Guston was born Philip Goldstein on 27 June 1913 in Montreal, Canada, the youngest of seven children in a Jewish-Russian immigrant family from Odessa. In 1919, the family moved to Los Angeles where they were confronted by the activities of the Ku Klux Klan who stood against blacks and Jews. Guston’s father suffered so much under the racial hostility, that he hanged himself in the shed. Philip Guston was only 10 or 11 when he discovered the body. Guston found comfort in the fine arts which had interested him from a young age, and in 1925, he started copying ‘Krazy Kat’ by George Herriman and other comic strips, supported and encouraged by his mother. He met Jackson Pollock at the Manual Arts High School in 1927 and studied modern painting at his side. They both caused offence the following year with satirical drawings and were expelled from the school, and Guston initially continued his education autodidactically. 

Political art against racist structures

In 1929, Philip Guston and Jackson Pollock visited the Hindu mystic Jiddu Krishnamurti and were inspired by his teachings, and in 1931 they both joined the Mexican painter José Clemente Orozco when he painted his mural Prometheus in Los Angeles. With the help of a scholarship, Guston attended the Otis Art Institute, but the teaching did not live up to his expectations and caused him to leave the school prematurely and instead orient himself to self-selected role models such as the Italian painter Giorgio di Chirico. Guston was politically involved with his painting from early on; at the age of 18 he encountered the police when he and a fellow colleague Reuben Kadish made a mural intended to support the so-called Scottsboro Boys, nine Afro-American youths accused of rape and convicted by a purely white jury. Further murals were created in Mexico and California before Guston moved to New York in 1936. 

His figurative late work still evokes controversy to this day

Philip Guston combined the style of Mexican Muralismo, as he had seen by Orozco and Diego Riviera, with the surreal cubism of Picasso and the figuration of the Ashcan School, and created highly regarded panel paintings. He later studied Renaissance painting and incorporated it into his art. In the 1960s, Guston developed a certain frustration with Abstract Expressionism and increasingly left it behind in favour of a grotesque figurative cartoon art. Several of his pictures show figures in the characteristic white hoods of the Ku Klux Klan, which caused controversy at a posthumous retrospective in 2020. Because his late work drew much ridicule and criticism even during his lifetime, and only a few connoisseurs such as the painter Willem de Kooning recognised the artistic significance of this novel style, Guston largely withdrew from the public eye and spent his last years in relative isolation. 

Philip Guston died on 7 June 1980 in Woodstock, New York.