Philip Guston

Philip Guston, born Phillip Goldstein (June 27, 1913 – June 7, 1980), was a painter and printmaker in the New York School, an art movement that included many abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. In the late 1960s Guston helped to lead a transition from abstract expressionism to neo-expressionism in painting, abandoning so-called "pure abstraction" in favor of more representational, cartoonish renderings of various personal situations, symbols and objects. He is known to the world for his cartoonish paintings of an existential, lugubrious nature that used a limited palette and were created in the period after 1968. Moreover, he was a lecturer and teacher at a number of universities and so he is also regarded for his words and teachings, collected in the book Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations (Documents of Twentieth-Century Art). 2Childhood and education (1913–1930) Born in 1913 in Montreal, Guston moved with his family to Los Angeles as a child. His Ukrainian Jewish parents had escaped persecution when they moved to Canada from Odessa, Ukraine. Guston and his family were aware of the regular Ku Klux Klan activities against Jews, blacks and others which took place across California. In 1923, possibly owing to persecution or the difficulty in securing income, his father hanged himself in the shed, and the young Guston found the body. Guston's early art was figurative and representational. His mother supported his artistic inclinations and he often made drawings in an environment of his choosing: a small closet, lit by a hanging bul