Philip Guston

We discovered Philip Guston's paintings at the Tate Museum in London in 2023. He is considered a representative of the so-called "abstract expressionism" and a pioneer of the "New Image Painting".

Philip Guston's life was multi-faceted. He was born in Montreal in 1913 as one of seven children of a Russian-Jewish family from Odessa, who emigrated to Canada in 1905. As a child in California, he was confronted with the activities of the Ku Klux Klan. His father committed suicide and his mother supported him as an artist. He was thrown out of Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, he left frustrated the Otis Art Institute early and continued his education largely self-taught. Guston moved to New York in 1936.

Guston was always a politically critical painter. In the 1940s, he combined the style of the Mexican muralists with Picasso's surreal cubism. In Iowa City, he focused on Renaissance painting. From 1947 to 1949, Guston spent time in Italy, Spain and France on a scholarship. On Ischia, he created drawings with forms ranging from abstraction to representationalism, for which he used less expressive gestures and more short brushstrokes like Claude Monet. Back in America in the 1960s, he then developed a new, figurative repertoire of everyday objects (objects from his studio, hooded men, smoldering cigarettes). These pictures are considered key images of postmodern painting. Philip Guston died in Woodstock (New York) in 1980.

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