Description
Philip Guston was born in Montreal in 1913, the youngest of seven children. In 1919 his family moved to Los Angeles, where Guston's father committed suicide five years later. Guston attended Manual Arts High School until, with his closest friend, Jackson Pollock, he was expelled for writing a satirical broadside about the school's English department. On his own, he studied the Italian Renaissance painters, cartooning, and a variety of other political and art topics, and in 1934 traveled to Mexico to work as an assistant to David Alfaro Siqueiros on a mural entitled The Struggle Against War and Fascism. On his return, he followed Jackson Pollock to New York City and joined the mural section of the Work Projects Administration (WPA). After resigning from the WPA in 1940, Guston concentrated on his own painting. He taught at universities around the country and had his first solo New York exhibition in 1945. In 1947 Guston won a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 1948 spent a year in Europe after winning the Prix de Rome. Reproduction of this image, including downloading, is prohibited without written permission from the artist or by contacting the Curatorial and Tour Services Office at 518-473-7521. From the early 1940s until his death in 1980, Guston's painting developed in three distinct stages. Unlike most of the painters of the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, Guston had a relatively successful early career as a realist painter. His paintings from this period appear to be influenced by Picasso, and their themes are often the harsh social conditions of the time. In 1947 and 1948, along with artists such as Franz Kline, Jack Tworkov, and James Brooks, Guston adopted an abstract style, eventually producing delicately brushed, textured paintings with pastel patches of color floating in an amorphous space. In the late 1950s and into the sixties Guston's palette grew more subdued and his characteristic rectangular images within a textured ground became more defined. In 1970, however, Guston surprised the many admirers of his abstract paintings by showing pictures that reincorporated the figurative imagery of his earlier realist paintings.
Details
- Work Date:
- 1963
- Location:
- Corning Tower Concourse Lobby
- Dimensions:
- 5'-10 1/4" x 6'-4"
- Medium:
- Oil on canvas