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Philip Guston, USA | 1913-1980 Poor RichardClark Coolidge + Philip Guston A Car Part To Draw is to Make Be More Than One Start ...Smoking and Drawing To Release It Needs A Grip So Strong ...I Need to I Have a Large Dog I Taught to Lie Still Whobody I Kicked Into Precise Space Without Touching Lines, Drops" ...I am the First to Have Seen Where I Live ...BorderlandsWilliam Corbett + Philip Guston The Richard Nixon Story Easter... (c. 1975) Memorial Day (1975)Stanley Kunitz + Philip Guston Untitled (From "Vita Nuova") (1976) Journal for My Daughter (1976)Musa Mckim + Philip Guston Awakened by a Mosquito in the Villa Aurelia You I Thought I would never write anything down again Unhappy Drugstore A Black No Summer (1953)Stanley Kunitz + Philip Guston The Testing Tree (1976)RELATED RESOURCES: Philip Guston's "Poor Richard" in UbuWeb Historical
Debra Balken on Philip Guston's "Poor Richard" in UbuWeb Papers
Philip Guston was born in Montreal, Canada to a family who emigrated from Odessa, in the Ukraine. His family moved to Los Angeles where Guston attended high school and where he met Jackson Pollock. By age 15, he had decided to become an artist, and enrolled at the Otis Art Institute 1930. In 1932, Guston and Pollock watched David Alfaro Siquieros paint his well-known mural at Pomona College, and in 1936, Guston joined Pollock in New York City where he worked in the mural painting division of the Federal Art Project. In the early 1940's, he held teaching positions in the Mid-West, returning to New York in 1947. Guston's career spans fifty years. He began as a political muralist, and by the early 1950's was associated with the second generation of Abstract Expressionists. He called his signature style abstract impressionism, a style of irregular abstraction with small brushstrokes of delicate color on a white field.
In the late 1960's, Guston returned to figurative painting. He developed a complex and highly personal iconography including images of Ku Klux Klan members, shoes, and bottles that are brightly and sometimes crudely painted. Guston's vision had become apocalyptic and fantastic yet disquietingly comic.
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