Philip Guston

Philip Guston (1913–80) is one of the outstanding figures in 20th-century American art. Beginning as a muralist in the 1930s, Guston embraced the lyrical vocabulary of Abstract Expressionism in his paintings and drawings after his move to the East Coast. Following an artistic crisis in the mid-1960s, his return to figuration—focusing first on simple things of ordinary life, later evolving to the enigmatic and iconic cartoonlike forms for which he is now best known—shook the art world.
Night Studio is a deeply personal account of growing up in the shadow of a great artist, a daughter’s quest to better understand her father, based on letters and notes by the artist and interviews with those who knew him. First published to critical acclaim in 1988, this richly illustrated new edition includes a new afterword by Mayer.
Musa Mayer’s first book about her father, the memoir Night Studio, was published in 1988 by Alfred A. Knopf. A lavishly illustrated new edition was published in 2016 after Hauser & Wirth took over the representation of the estate of Philip Guston from the McKee Gallery. Since her retirement from a 25-year career as a research and patient advocate for people living with breast cancer, she has curated Guston exhibitions in New York, London, Hong Kong and Los Angeles. Her second book with Hauser & Wirth Publishers, Philip Guston: Nixon Drawings 1971 and 1975, coauthored with Debra Bricker Balken, was awarded the FILAF d’Or international prize as the best international art book of 2017. Besides managing the estate of Philip Guston, Mayer is president of the Guston Foundation, whose projects include the website PhilipGuston.org, which is built around a chronology of Guston’s career and exhibition history as well as catalogues raisonnés of his paintings, drawings and archives. Mayer lives in New York City with her husband, Tom.

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Philip Guston—perhaps more than any other figure in recent memory—has given contemporary artists permission to break the rules and paint what, and how, they want. His winding career, embrace of “high” and “low” sources, and constant aesthetic reinvention defy easy categorization, and his 1968 figurative turn is by now one of modern art’s most legendary conversion narratives. “I was feeling split, schizophrenic. The war, what was happening in America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything—and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?”

And so Guston’s sensitive abstractions gave way to large, cartoonlike canvases populated by lumpy, sometimes tortured figures and mysterious personal symbols in a palette of juicy pinks, acid greens, and cool blues. That Guston continued mining this vein for the rest of his life—despite initial bewilderment from his peers—reinforced his reputation as an artist’s artist and a model of integrity; since his death 50 years ago, he has become hugely influential as contemporary art has followed Guston into its own antic twists and turns.

Published to accompany the first retrospective museum exhibition of Guston’s career in over 15 years, Philip Guston Now includes a lead essay by Harry Cooper surveying Guston's life and work, and a definitive chronology reflecting many new discoveries. It also highlights the voices of artists of our day who have been inspired by the full range of his work: Tacita Dean, Peter Fischli, Trenton Doyle Hancock, William Kentridge, Glenn Ligon, David Reed, Dana Schutz, Amy Sillman, Art Spiegelman and Rirkrit Tiravanija. Thematic essays by co-curators Mark Godfrey, Alison de Lima Greene and Kate Nesin trace the influences, interests and evolution of this singular force in modern and contemporary art—including several perspectives on the 1960s and ’70s, when Guston gradually abandoned abstraction, returning to the figure and to current history but with a personal voice, by turns comic and apocalyptic, that resonates today more than ever.

In the summer of 1971—two years before the Watergate hearings—Richard Nixon was an incumbent whose grip on power was being tested by the Pentagon Papers. Inspired in part by the work of his friend Philip Roth, who had just finished the novel Our Gang, Philip Guston began drawing the object of his political anger and despair—Richard Nixon, transformed into the character “Poor Richard,” rendered with a distinctively phallic nose and scrotal jowls, and accompanied by henchmen Spiro Agnew, John Mitchell, and Henry Kissinger.

Guston carefully sequenced the drawings in 1971 and planned to publish them as a book, even designing an original title page. But he held back, and the images were never released during his lifetime; only in 2001 were they first exhibited, accompanied by a publication of the series from the University of Chicago Press by Debra Bricker Balken. Today, as we face yet another moment of presidential crisis and global turmoil, Poor Richard is more relevant than ever.

Poor Richard by Philip Guston brings Guston’s series back into print. Following Guston’s own sequencing, layout and original title page from 1971, Poor Richard by Philip Guston presents this shockingly fresh, delightfully profane series, with beautiful new reproductions. The publication marks the promised gift of these 73 drawings by The Guston Foundation to the National Gallery of Art, where they will be preserved and studied as a monument of contemporary satirical art and virtuoso drawing.

In 1970, Philip Guston (1913–80) went public with his return to figuration, in an infamous show at the Marlborough Gallery in New York City, a show that garnered devastatingly negative reviews—"Clumsy," "embarrassing" and "simple-minded," culminating in Hilton Kramer's infamous "A mandarin pretending to be a stumblebum.

Immediately after, he left the country for a residency at the American Academy in Rome that lasted into 1971. Resilience: Philip Guston in 1971 sheds light on the pivotal year that launched Guston into the final prolific decade of his career, during which he painted what are now celebrated as some of the most important works of art of the 20th century. This volume includes examples from two major series of that year: the Roma paintings, works spurred on by Guston's year among the ruins and landscape of Rome; and the Nixon drawings, narrative satirical drawings produced in response to the political and social turmoil back in the United States. Together, these series bear witness to an artist at the height of his powers, wholly responsive to his world.

Lavish plates capture the variety of cadmium red, pinks and whites in the Roma paintings, as well as the withering details of the Nixon drawings. This volume also includes a text by Musa Mayer, Guston's daughter, that offers an intimate view of her father's state of mind throughout 1971.

The book draws parallels between humanist themes reflected in both Guston’s paintings and drawings as well as in the language and prose discerned in five of the 20th century’s most prominent literary figures: D.H. Lawrence, W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Eugenio Montale and T.S. Eliot. The enormous influence that Italy itself had upon Guston and his work is also examined.

Spanning a 36-year period, Philip Guston and the Poets features approximately 60 major paintings and 25 prominent drawings dating from 1944 through 1980, the last of which were created in the final year of Guston’s life. The monograph also includes an extensive essay from Kosme de Barañano, an internationally respected art historian and Guston scholar.

A contemporary of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston (1913–80) first came to fame as an Abstract Expressionist. He began reintroducing figurative elements—clumsy hands, cigarettes, light bulbs—into his work in the late 1960s. These late paintings were first exhibited, to savage critical reception, in 1970.

Philip Guston: Nixon Drawings is the first comprehensive collection of Guston’s legendary satirical caricatures of the 37th President of the United States, Richard Nixon. Expanding on Poor Richard (University of Chicago Press, 2001, now out of print and rare), it features some 180 works depicting Nixon and his cronies from 1971 and 1975. The book opens with an introduction by Philip Guston’s daughter, Musa Mayer, and also includes the transcript of a panel discussion moderated by Phong Bui with William Corbett, Irving Sandler, Lisa Yuskavage, Bob Mankoff and Katy Siegel.

These trenchant works were created in the tumultuous political climate of the early 1970s; the US was reeling from the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, the chaos of the 1968 presidential election and the enduring violence of the Vietnam War. The publication of the Pentagon Papers, and Nixon’s unsuccessful attempts to prevent their disclosure, made the president look both amoral and somewhat hapless. This is the “Poor Richard,” a slyly political little sneak, that appears in Guston’s cartoons from the period.

A contemporary of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston (1913–80) first came to fame as an Abstract Expressionist. He began reintroducing figurative elements—clumsy hands, cigarettes, light bulbs—into his work in the late 1960s. These late paintings were first exhibited, to savage critical reception, in 1970; Guston began his Nixon drawings at precisely this point in his career. Caricaturing Nixon, Guston began to refine a pictorial language equally sensitive to inner pathos and the turmoil of the public world.