Philip Guston was an iconic American painter. Throughout a prolific and varied oeuvre, he transitioned from Abstract Expressionism to a deeply personal, idiosyncratic painterly lexicon characterized by its cartoonish imagery and pink palette that has had a major influence on generations of artists. Born Philip Goldstein on June 27, 1913 in Montreal, Canada to Ukranian-Jewish immigrant parents, he grew up in California, where he attended the Los Angeles Manual Arts High School with Jackson Pollock. Guston later became an integral part of the New York School art scene in the 1950s, alongside artists like Willem de Kooning and his former classmate Pollock. He would famously abandon the success and dialogue he had with abstraction by the late 1960s, resulting in the loss of his gallery representation and virulent scorn from critics. Guston’s late representational work, however, has proven to be his most lasting contribution to art history: featuring recurring imagery such as hooded figures, light bulbs, cigarettes, and huge eyeballs, these paintings helped launch Neo-Expressionism and establish Guston firmly in the canon of 20th-century masters. His work can be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Tate Gallery in London, among many others. Guston died on June 7, 1980 in Woodstock, NY.
