Friday, December 16, 2022 – ANOTHER ARTIST WHO STARTED WITH WORKS OF THE WPA
FROM THE ARCHIVES
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2022
THE 862nd EDITION
THE ART OF
PHILIP GUSTON
SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM
MANY OF THE WORKS OF PHILIP GUSTON WILL NOW BE ON DISPLAY AT THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM.
LINK TO TODAY’S NY TIMES.:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/14/arts/design/philip-guston-met-museum-gift.html?searchResultPosition=1
Philip Guston was born Philip Goldstein in Montréal, Canada, in 1913 to Russian emigrés from Odessa. The family moved to Los Angeles in 1919. In 1925, he took a correspondence course in cartooning. As a high school student in 1927 he made friends with Jackson Pollock. After both were expelled for distributing a broadside that satirized the English department, Guston studied on his own. He had his first solo exhibition at Stanley Rose’s bookshop and gallery in Los Angeles in 1931. He joined the mural division of the WPA in 1935 and over the next seven years completed various mural commissions, having moved to New York at Pollock’s urging in 1937. Beginning in 1940, Guston taught at several colleges throughout the United States; in 1975 he received the Distinguished Teaching of Art Award from the College Art Association. In 1951, Guston painted his first abstract works, which lead to the first solo exhibition of his abstract work at the Peridot Gallery in New York. In 1967, Guston relocated permanently to Woodstock, New York, and gradually shifted from abstraction to cartoon-like still lifes and figure studies. Guston died in Woodstock in 1980.
National Museum of American Art (CD-ROM) (New York and Washington D.C.: MacMillan Digital in cooperation with the National Museum of American Art, 1996)
Philip Guston’s parents came to Canada from Russia at the turn of the century and Philip grew up with the surname Goldstein, which he changed to Guston in his twenties. The family moved to Los Angeles in 1919 where, unable to secure a job, his father committed suicide. As a child Guston found comfort in drawing, hiding in the closet at night to draw by the glow of a single hanging bulb, an image that would appear in his later paintings. In 1927 he entered Los Angeles’s Manual Arts High School, where he met his lifelong friend Jackson Pollock. The two rebellious young artists hit it off, but their unruly behavior got them expelled. The dapper Guston ended up on the back lots of Hollywood working as a film extra. In the early 1930s he visited Mexico, where public murals about the Mexican Revolution fired his own social consciousness. After moving to New York he promptly joined the mural division of the Works Progress Administration. Guston associated with several activist leftist groups through the 1930s. He painted abstract works from the late 1940s until around 1970, when he returned to a cartoonish kind of representational painting. He died of a heart attack just before his sixty-seventh birthday. (Storr, Philip Guston, 1986)
- Philip Guston, Early Mail Service and Construction of Railroads (mural study, Commerce, Georgia Post Office), 1938, tempera on fiberboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the Internal Revenue Service through the General Services Administration , 1962.8.77
- Philip Guston’s mural study shows the history of mail service on the frontier, from the days when sacks of mail arrived on horseback to the coming of railroads and telegraph lines that displaced much of the mail traffic. Artists working for the government in the 1930s considered themselves members of America’s workforce and sympathized with laborers. After Guston submitted his study, government officials noted that he had lavished more attention on the workers than the rest of the image and specified that “The strength of drawing reflected in the two workmen laying the rails … is the quality of draftsmanship we would like you to characterize in the entire design.” The bureaucratic process required that Guston submit several versions of the composition to the superintendent of the Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture. After he had made the revisions required by the officials, the composition was approved for the post office in Commerce, Georgia. He finished the mural in 246 days and was paid $510 for his efforts. (Edward B. Rowan to Philip Guston, January 4, 1938, SAAM curatorial file)
Philip Guston, Painting No. 6, 1951, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase, 1974.96
Philip Guston, “Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do.”–St. Thomas Aquinas, Two Precepts of Charity, 1273. From the series Great Ideas of Western Man., 1952, oil on paper mounted on paperboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Container Corporation of America, 1984.124.112
- Philip Guston, Painter III, 1960, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of S.C. Johnson & Son, Inc., 1969.47.59
- Painter III is an anxious, agitated painting that was completed shortly before Guston rejected abstraction and returned to recognizable imagery. “When the 1960s came along,” he said, “I was feeling split, schizophrenic. The [Vietnam] war, what was happening in America, the brutality of the world. What kind of a 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.” In 1970 he shocked the New York gallery scene when he opened a show that featured paintings with cartoon-like images of clocks, eyes, the soles of shoes, and other seemingly symbolic forms.
Philip Guston made a name for himself as an abstract expressionist, but by the late 1960s he had grown weary of “all that purity.” He began creating crudely rendered and emotionally charged paintings filled with cartoony figures and mundane objects. The artist’s shift in creative practice, referenced in this work’s title, was not a slow and graceful transition but an abrupt right turn. Transition shows Guston hiding behind a canvas, as if taking refuge from the blast of bad press he received after his new work was shown in 1970. A tiny, clownish doorway suggests a move from one place to another, while the clock near the center points to the artist’s canvas, as if ticking away the time Guston had left to paint. At once comic and disturbing, the painting is a surreal mix of allegorical and personal references.
Friday Photo of the Day
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THURSDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
BMT Q Car Number 1612C (1908, rebuilt 1938) – Flickr
Rebuilder: Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation, 1938, to Q Car. Service: 1908-1969. Routes: Brooklyn elevated lines, 1908-1923; Astoria and Flushing …
GLORIA HERMAN, ALEXIS VILLAFANE, ARON EISENPREISS, PAT SCHWARTZBERG, GOT IT,
ANDY SPARBERG GOT THE DETAILS RIGHT!!!
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