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The Morgan Library
& Museum
225 Madison Avenue
at 36th Street
New York
212-685-0008
Philip Guston: Works on Paper
May 2-August 31, 2008

“It is the nakedness of drawing that I like. The act of drawing is what locates, suggests, discovers. . .”

— Philip Guston

Together with Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Guston is recognized as one of the most influential American artists of the twentieth century. The exhibition marks the first retrospective of his drawings in 20 years and the Morgan is the only American venue.

The extraordinary drawings of Philip Guston (1913-1980) are the subject of Philip Guston: Works on Paper examines the importance of drawing throughout key periods of Guston’s career, from the mid-1940s to 1980. While the artist is primarily known for his paintings, his drawings occupy a special place in his oeuvre as they influenced new phases of creativity and served to articulate radically different approaches.

This exhibition features more than 100 drawings, including many rarely seen works that were left in the artist’s studio after his death as well as major loans from museums and private collections.

Guston was a prolific draftsman who often turned to drawing to explore new directions before applying them to painting. Several times in his career he stopped painting altogether to concentrate on drawing. Such phases mark the dramatic changes that characterized Guston’s art from figuration to abstraction and vice versa.

“Philip Guston’s work expresses the tensions and conflicts of the modern world with a sense of urgency that still resonates today,” said Isabelle Dervaux, curator of modern drawings at the Morgan. “The relevance of his work to this day can be seen in its wide influence on contemporary artists.”

In the 1950s, when Guston was a central figure of the abstract expressionist movement, he developed a form of abstract, linear drawings characterized by concern with structure and balance, in contrast to the more spontaneous gesture typical of the New York school. A prime example of his style in period is Drawing Related to Zone (Drawing No. 19; 1954) which derives its rhythm from its balanced composition as well as from variations in the thickness and pressure of the ink strokes.

From 1966 to 1968, Guston stopped painting and produced only drawings of startling economy. Even in his most abstract drawings, however, he did not exclude references to the real world. Simple forms evoke primitive renderings of common objects, as in Untitled (1967), where an oval shape can be read as a stone or a head. It was through the hundreds of drawings in this period that Guston found inspiration to retreat from abstraction and embrace figurative, almost cartoonlike imagery that typified his work during the last decade of his life.

It was a transformation that shocked the art world in 1970, as Guston turned to depictions of everyday objects such as shoes, books, and irons. At the same time, disturbed by the social and political upheavals of the late 1960s, Guston addressed the violence of the contemporary world through images of hooded figures reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan.

From the mid-1970s on, autobiographical references became more frequent in Guston’s drawings which included images of himself and his wife, Musa, often in situations reflecting the artist’s anxieties. In Web (1975), for instance, the two figures, half-hidden under a pile of shoes, are caught in a spider web. Guston’s late drawings combine allegorical imagery, dominated by body fragments and accumulations of detritus, with more direct evocations of simple objects from his surroundings, as in Untitled (Cherries) (1980).

A fully illustrated hardcover catalogue for Philip Guston: Works on Paper, published by Hatje Cantz in 2007, features essays by Michael Semff, Christoph Schreier, Isabelle Dervaux, and Poul Erik Tøjner (216 pages, 116 illustrations, 76 in color).

Born Phillip Goldstein in 1913 in Montreal, Canada, Guston moved with his family to Los Angeles as a child. His Russian-Jewish parents escaped persecution when they moved from Odessa, Russia. He and his family were aware of the regular Klan activities against Jews, Blacks and others that took place across California during Guston's childhood.

When Guston was 10 or 11, his father hanged himself in the shed, and the young Guston found the body. Guston began painting at the age of 14, and in 1927 he enrolled in the Los Angeles Manual Arts High School, where both he and Jackson Pollock studied under Frederick John de St. Vrain Schwankovsky and were introduced to Modern European art, oriental philosophy, theosophy and mystic literature. This early work was figurative and representational, and though his parents did support his artistic inclinations, he often made drawings in his closet, lit by a hanging bulb.

Apart from his high school education and a one-year scholarship at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, Guston remained a largely self-taught artist. During high school, he and Jackson Pollock published a paper opposing the high school's emphasis on sports over art. Their criticism led to both being expelled, but Guston returned and graduated. At Otis on scholarship, Guston felt unfulfilled by the academic approach that limited him to drawing from plaster casts instead of the live model.

Before dropping out of Otis, he spent a night in the studio making drawings of these figurative plasters scattered all over the studio floor. As an 18 year old, politically-aware painter, Guston made an indoor mural in L.A. depicting the Scottsboro Boys. This mural was defaced by local police officers, which impacted Guston's political and social outlook. Guston, as Philip Goldstein, along with Reuben Kadish, completed a significant mural in 1935 at City of Hope, a tuberculosis hospital located in Duarte, California, that remains to this day.

In 1936, Guston moved to New York, and worked as an artist under the WPA program. During this period his work included strong references to Renaissance painters such as Paolo Uccello, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, and Giotto. He was also influenced by American Regionalists and Mexican mural painters. During this period he accepted a teaching position at Washington University, St. Louis. He held this position from 1945 to 1947.

In the 1950s, Guston achieved success and renown as a first-generation Abstract Expressionist. His paintings then consisted of color masses floating in the middle of the canvas. Guston favored a white-black-red color range in these works.

In the late 1960s, Guston was frustrated with abstraction and began again to paint representationally, but in a rather cartoonish manner. When criticized about the impurity of these paintings, he responded, "There is something ridiculous and miserly in the myth we inherit from abstract art. That painting is autonomous, pure and for itself, therefore we habitually analyze its ingredients and define its limits. But painting is 'impure'. It is the adjustment of 'impurities' which forces its continuity. We are image-makers and image-ridden. There are no wiggly or straight lines..." In this work he created a lexicon of images such as Klansmen, lightbulbs, shoes, cigarettes, and clocks. Guston is best known for his late existential and lugubrious paintings, which at the time of his death had reached a wide audience, and found great popular acceptance. Guston died in 1980 in Woodstock, New York.