Born Phillip Goldstein in Montreal, Canada, American painter, draftsman and print maker Philip Guston made his reputation as a member of the powerful New York School and as a first generation Abstract Expressionist. But he is best-known for rebuking, in the late 1960s, the “pure abstraction” championed by powerful critics like Clement Greenberg and practiced by his Abstract Expressionist colleagues Mark Rothko, Barnet Newman and Jackson Pollock, in favor of cartoonish figurative works. … (read more)

Born Phillip Goldstein in Montreal, Canada, American painter, draftsman and print maker Philip Guston made his reputation as a member of the powerful New York School and as a first generation Abstract Expressionist. But he is best-known for rebuking, in the late 1960s, the “pure abstraction” championed by powerful critics like Clement Greenberg and practiced by his Abstract Expressionist colleagues Mark Rothko, Barnet Newman and Jackson Pollock, in favor of cartoonish figurative works.

In the 1940s and 50s Guston achieved success as a painter with abstract canvases of thick short strokes that often coalesced into blocks or cross-like forms, always done in some combination of his distinctive palette of pinks, reds, oranges, greens, blacks and whites. By the end of the 1960s however, Guston had become frustrated with abstraction and its dubious claims to “purity.” He showed his first group of figurative works at a now infamous solo show at Marlborough Gallery in New York in 1970. Guston’s later works exhibited the same palette as his abstract canvases but his colors were now in service to his strange and often aggressive motifs including hooded Klu Klux Klan figures, cigarettes, clocks, cherries, trashcans and boots.

Ironically, save but for a few defenders like Willem De Kooning, the art establishment rejected these works outright; his gallery dropped Guston and the show was critically panned at the time. But it was these later paintings that influenced later artists (particularly the Neo-Expressionists of the 1980s) and are today Guston’s best-known and most popular work.

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