WANAFOTO: Philip Guston

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06/03/25

Hauser & Wirth @ LOPF 2025 - London Original Print Fair - New releases, modern and contemporary highlights - Artists + Artworks

Hauser & Wirth @ Booth S9

London Original Print Fair 2025

20 — 23 March 2025

Thomas J Price

Rood Boy (Untitled 2), 2024

Aluminum, 24ct gold leaf, walnut, acrylic

Ed. of 10 + 2 AP

70 x 50 x 9.5 cm / 27 1/2 x 19 5/8 x 3 3/4 inches

Plate: 65 x 45 x 0.5 cm / 25 5/8 x 17 3/4 x 1/4 in

Shelf: 9.5 x 50 x 6.8 cm / 3 3/4 x 19 5/8 x 2 5/8 in

Courtesy the artist & Hauser & Wirth

Photo: Eva Herzog

Rashid Johnson

Untitled (Surrender), 2023

9-color silkscreen resist with hand-applied pigment

Co-published by Hauser & Wirth and Brand X Editions

Ed. of 51 + 15 AP

121.9 x 165.1 cm / 48 x 65 in

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer

Nicole Eisenman

Bar, 2012

Nine-color lithograph

AP 2/2, Ed. of 25 + 2 AP

78.1 x 59.7 cm / 30 3/4 x 23 1/2 in

Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Jungle Press Editions

Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer

Hauser & Wirth returns to London Original Print Fair for the 40th anniversary with an exceptional selection of works reflecting the gallery’s commitment to prints and editions. Featuring works by both contemporary and modern artists from the gallery’s roster, the booth highlights the importance of printmaking to the artists’ multifaceted practices and celebrates the collaborations between artists and master printers. The fair presentation complements the gallery’s ongoing work with printmaking, which is headquartered in a dedicated Editions space on 18th Street in New York.

Hauser & Wirth @ LOPF 2025: New releases and contemporary highlights

US artist Rashid Johnson debuts ‘Untitled (Surrender)’ (2023), a large silk screenprint which has been newly released by Hauser & Wirth and Brand X Editions. Part of the artist’s Surrender series, the large print features ghostly white faces which trace the development of his renowned Anxious Men series. The presentation also brings to London for the first time a selection of Henry Taylor’s etchings, first shown at the gallery’s editions space in New York earlier this year, including the self-portrait ‘Fade to Black, I Did Not Pay the Electric Bill’ and still life ‘I Love Looking at You’ (2024).

Henry Taylor

I Love Looking at You, 2024

Color sugarlift aquatint

Ed. of 35 + 12 AP

123.2 x 106.7 cm / 48 1/2 x 42 in

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer

William Kentridge

I Look In The Mirror, I Know What I Need, 2024

Lithograph on handmade Korean paper

Ed. of 26 + 4 AP + 4 PP + 1 Archives + 1 BNF 128 x 168 cm /

50 3/8 x 66 1/8 in

Photo: Nicolas Brasseur

Other major highlights include William Kentridge’s lithograph on handmade Korean paper ‘I Look In The Mirror, I Know What I Need’ (2024), featuring iconic motifs from the artist’s practice, such as the coffee pot. London-based artist Thomas J Price also debuts ‘Rood Boy (Untitled 2)’ (2024), which revisits an earlier print made in 2019 using 24ct gold leaf of a fictional character whose unflinching gaze meets directly with the viewer’s. Also based in London, artist Sonia Boyce’s ‘She is Benevolent’ (2024) takes inspiration from her latest video work ‘Benevolence’, a project for Palazzo della Ragione in Italy which examines traditional Italian folksongs as a powerful form of social commentary.

The booth also features recent prints by contemporary artists, including a delicate copperplate etching by London-based artist Anj Smith from 2022 titled ‘Misleading, Like Lace,’ a selection of hardground etchings from George Condo and ‘Bar,’ a nine-colour lithograph print by Nicole Eisenman from 2012 made with Jungle Press Editions.

Hauser & Wirth @ LOPF 2025: Historical modern masterworks

Philip Guston

Rug, 1981

Lithograph

AP 4/11, Ed. of 50 + 11 AP

49.5 x 73.7 cm / 19 1/2 x 29 in

Courtesy the Estate and Hauser & Wirth

Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer

Complementing the gallery’s contemporary offering, the booth highlights historic works by modern masters. Philip Guston’s ‘Rug’ (1980) depicts the groundbreaking figurative style which defines the artist’s late works and the recurring symbolic motif of shoes. The booth also includes a selection of prints by Takesada Matsutani from the 1960s – 1970s—during which time he worked at Atelier 17 in Paris, Stanley William Hayter’s printmaking studio. Additional 20th-century highlights include prints by Dieter Roth, Günther Förg and Eduardo Chillida.

HAUSER & WIRTH

www.hauserwirth.com

01/02/25

Draw Them In, Paint Them Out: Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Philip Guston @ Jewish Museum, New York

Draw Them In, Paint Them Out

Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Philip Guston

Jewish Museum, New York

Through March 30, 2025

TRENTON DOYLE HANCOCK

"Schlep and Screw, Knowledge Rental Pawn Exchange Service," 2017

Acrylic and mixed media on canvas,

60 x 60 x 6 in. (152.4 x 152.4 x 15.2 cm)

Collection of Hedy Fischer and Randy Shull,

Asheville, North Carolina

Draw Them In, Paint Them Out: Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Philip Guston examines Philip Guston’s seminal influence on Trenton Doyle Hancock and both artists’ shared commitment to investigating the legacy of white supremacism in the United States. The exhibition presents the the work of painter PHILIP GUSTON (American, b. Canada 1913–1980), the child of Jewish immigrants from Odessa (present-day Ukraine), and TRENTON DOYLE HANCOCK (American, b. 1974), a leading Black contemporary artist based in Houston, Texas, in dialogue for the first time. The exhibition explores resonant connections between their work and the role that artists play in the pursuit of social justice.

Organized by the Jewish Museum, the exhibition features key works by Philip Guston including his now iconic, late satirical Ku Klux Klan paintings in dialogue with major works Trenton Doyle Hancock created in response to his inspirational mentor, highlighting their parallel thematic explorations of the nature of evil, self-representation, otherness, and art activism. Foregrounding works that depict the Klan, the exhibition demonstrates how both artists engage with and at times even inhabit these hateful figures to explore their own identities and more broadly examine systems of institutionalized power and their feelings of complicity within them. Yet, despite the difficult subject matter and at times violent imagery presented in their work, both Hancock and Guston share an ability to conquer the pain and emotion of their art through humor that is both dark and undeniable, engaging with their shared embrace of the visual language of comics.

Philip Guston, whose early social realist and abstract work ultimately evolved into an idiosyncratic form of social satire, is now one of the most revered painters of the twentieth century. Significant examples of Guston’s buffoonish Klansmen paintings and drawings from the late 1960s and early 1970s, selected by Hancock, will be a centerpiece of the exhibition. Guston’s cartoonish style was used to defy the Klan’s bigotry as racial tensions roiled America—tensions that continue to resonate with renewed urgency today. Guston also used the hooded figure as an alter-ego wrestling with his Jewish identity and his assimilation into American culture. This phenomenon is illustrated especially in Guston’s masterful The Studio (1969), which depicts the artist as a Klansman painting a self-portrait, acknowledging his own complicity with white supremacy.

For the eclectic artist, cartoonist, and illustrator Trenton Doyle Hancock, Guston’s work has been a consistent source of inspiration for nearly 30 years. His collaged psychedelic canvases similarly draw on the language of comics to challenge and comment upon the American condition. The exhibition includes Hancock’s surreal graphic memoir that interweaves Guston’s biography with his own family tree and reports of Klan activity in the United States, past and present. Titled Epidemic! Presents: Step and Screw! (2014), the series has since developed into a substantial body of work in which Hancock’s long-standing avatar, a Black superhero named Torpedoboy, meets and engages with Guston’s Klan-hooded alter-ego. Through this series, Hancock confronts his artistic forefather and examines their respective motivations for grappling with white supremacism in their art.

Draw Them In, Paint Them Out builds upon the Jewish Museum’s ongoing commitment to exploring contemporary art in real time, providing a platform for each new generation of artists. The Museum also shares a foundational history with Guston’s work including the artist’s solo exhibition in 1966, just before the emergence of his late Klan imagery, and his seminal role in Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976 on view in 2008. The current exhibition joins a fall program at the Museum that tells complex stories from multiple points of view to spark dialogue around how society engages with and learns from historical narratives. By addressing complex and often painful histories, these stories offer opportunities to create a sense of unity around shared experiences and inspire hopeful paths toward the future.

The exhibition is organized in four thematic sections:

Co-Conspirators

The first section examines Guston’s and Hancock’s first forays into Klan imagery, produced in their young adulthoods. This gallery includes Guston’s Drawing for Conspirators (1930), a troubling image of the aftermath of a lynching that speaks to the toll of white supremacy in the United States. Guston’s mural of another lynching scene (c. 1931), painted for the John Reed Club to commemorate the plight of the Scottsboro Boys, is presented in facsimile form, as the original work was destroyed by the Los Angeles police and the KKK.

Guston’s early, politically motivated works will be presented alongside Hancock’s representations of Loid, a fictitious ghost of a 1950s Black sharecropper who appears as half Klansman, half Klan victim, conceived by the artist around the time of his discovery of Guston’s work in the mid-1990s. This harbinger of vengeance, portrayed with a white sheet and noose and wielding a hammer of justice, first emerged in a photographic self-portrait (Properties of the Hammer, 1994) by Hancock at the age of 19, and has recurred in various iterations in drawings (Judgment #2, 2000), cartoons, and paintings (Coloration Coronation, 2016) to the present day.

K-K Kan I Help You?

This next section features a selection of significant late Klansmen paintings and drawings by Guston, including The Studio (1969) and Riding Around (1969). These works represent Guston’s renewed exploration of the Klan, an exercise in both social satire and self-condemnation, following a resurgence of Klan activity in response to the advancements made by the civil rights movement in the United States.

This section also features Hancock’s Epidemic! Presents: Step and Screw! (2014), the graphic series created by Hancock “as a kind of one-liner: what would happen if my alter-ego Torpedoboy met Philip Guston’s alter-ego, the Klansman?” Step and Screw! marks the first time Hancock dealt explicitly with his and his family’s personal ties to America’s haunted past. In 30 black-and-white panels, Hancock contrasts the dark comedy of his comic strip with a fantastical timeline that blends Guston’s and Hancock’s life stories and delves into their generational traumas.

Conception and Execution

The third section of the exhibition focuses on Hancock’s paintings that grew out of Step and Screw! The majority of these mixed media works, which fuse image and text and recombine elements from the original comic book, focus on the “pregnant” moment of exchange between the Klansman and Torpedoboy. In each new iteration, the characters engage in a dubious handoff, with the hooded figure offering the skeptical superhero an object associated with wisdom, be it a lightbulb, an apple, or a head. Works on view include Step and Screw: The Star of Code Switching (2020) from the Jewish Museum’s collection, in which the Klansman offers a talisman so powerful that Torpedoboy’s racial transformation is instantaneous and Lights Out (2023), in which Torpedoboy ends his tenuous affinity with the Klansman, enacting a symbolic patricide.

The Ladder of Coincidence

The final section of the exhibition serves as a coda to the presentation with a single pair of monumental paintings, Guston’s The Ladder (1978) and Hancock’s The Former and the Ladder or Ascension and a Cinchin' (2012). These works illustrate the “umbilical connection” that Hancock has described feeling toward his predecessor, and how Guston’s influence and imagery have subconsciously found their way into many facets of Hancock’s work.

This exhibition is organized by Rebecca Shaykin, Curator, The Jewish Museum, in partnership with Trenton Doyle Hancock.

A lavishly illustrated companion volume, co-published with Yale University Press and designed by the award-winning firm Morcos Key, features a lead essay by curator Rebecca Shaykin, with additional contributions by Trenton Doyle Hancock, the veteran curator and noted Black American art scholar Valerie Cassel Oliver, and the celebrated American Jewish comic artist Art Spiegelman. The texts offer multiple perspectives on the current political moment and the ways in which art, popular comics, personal narrative, and humor can deepen our understanding of Black and Jewish experiences in the United States. The book is available worldwide.

JEWISH MUSEUM, NEW YORK

1109 5th Avenue at 92nd Street, New York, NY 10128

thejewishmuseum.org

Related posts:

Philip Guston. Singularities, Hauser & Wirth Zurich , 7 June – 7 September 2024

Philip Guston Now, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, March 2 – August 27, 2023

Philip Guston - Late Paintings, Peder Lund, Oslo , September 20 - November 8, 2014

Philip Guston: Works on Paper, The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, May 2 - August 31, 2008

Philip Guston: Mind and Matter, McKee Gallery, New York, November 11 - December 23, 2003

Draw Them In, Paint Them Out: Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Philip Guston

Jewish Museum, New York - November 8, 2024 - March 30, 2025

10/06/24

Philip Guston @ Hauser & Wirth Zurich - "Philip Guston. Singularities" Exhibition

Philip Guston. Singularities

Hauser & Wirth Zurich

7 June – 7 September 2024

Philip Guston in his Woodstock studio, 1970

Photograph by F. K. Lloyd

Image courtesy of The Guston Foundation and Hauser & Wirth

Philip Guston

Painter’s Forms, 1972

Oil on panel

121.5 x 152.2 x 2.3 cm / 47 7/8 x 59 7/8 x 7/8 in

125.6 x 156.5 x 5 cm / 49 1/2 x 61 5/8 x 2 in (framed)

Courtesy the Estate of Philip Guston and Hauser & Wirth

Photo: Christopher Burke

Philip Guston

Feet on Rug, 1978

Oil on canvas

203.2 x 264.2 cm / 80 x 104 in

206.7 x 268.3 x 5.1 cm / 81 3/8 x 105 5/8 x 2 in

(framed)

Courtesy the Estate of Philip Guston and Hauser & Wirth

Photo: Christopher Burke

‘I really only love strangeness.’ – Philip Guston

Hauser & Wirth Zurich presents an exhibition of late figurative PHILIP GUSTON paintings dated between 1968 and 1979 at the gallery’s second floor Limmatstrasse space. Curated in collaboration with Musa Mayer, the artist’s daughter and President of The Guston Foundation, ‘Philip Guston. Singularities’ presents well-known paintings alongside never-before exhibited works that explore the liberated motifs and instinctual forms that emerged in Philip Guston’s late works as they continued to evolve until his death in 1980. This exhibition in Zurich follows the major retrospective ‘Philip Guston’ at the Tate Modern, which closed in February 2024.

Excerpt from Musa Mayer’s guide to the exhibition:

The strange forms that inhabit the 12 paintings in this exhibition of Philip Guston’s late works are intensely personal and packed with imagery that haunted the artist throughout his painting life. Yet they also speak to us in a metaphysical language that resists analysis, but that we grasp deeply, intuitively.

When asked, Guston would resist interpretating the iconic symbols that appeared in his paintings. He would respond that he, too, was mystiﬁed by these inexplicable forms, these singularities. ‘If I speak of having a subject to paint,’ he wrote, ‘I mean there is a forgotten place of beings and things, which I need to remember. I want to see this place.’

From this forgotten place emerge the artist’s singular responses to the beauty, pain and cruelty of the world, to the intimacies of his daily life, love and the passage of time and loss. These works are neither cerebral nor removed; they are timeless. And they feel alive, as if freshly painted. Complex surfaces disclose an exuberant love of the act of painting itself, Guston’s fidelity to an ancient process cultivated over a lifetime of close observation and rigorous interrogation of the art he loved and the necessity of painting.

Philip Guston

Untitled, 1979

Oil on canvas

122 x 107 cm / 48 x 42 1/8 in

126 x 111 x 5.5 cm / 49 5/8 x 43 3/4 x 2 1/8 in (framed)

Courtesy the Estate of Philip Guston and Hauser & Wirth

Photo: EPW Studio - Ellen Page Wilson

Philip Guston

Future, 1978

Oil on canvas

213 x 272 cm / 83 7/8 x 107 1/8 inches

216 x 275 x 5 cm / 85 x 108 1/4 x 2 inches (framed)

Courtesy the Estate of Philip Guston and Hauser & Wirth

Photo: Jon Etter

Philip Guston

Untitled, 1969

Acrylic on panel, 76.2 x 101.6 cm / 30 x 40 in

Courtesy the Estate of Philip Guston and Hauser & Wirth

Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer

The exhibition opens with ‘Painter’s Forms’ (1972), one of Philip Guston’s masterpieces and according to the art historian Dore Ashton a ‘true distillation of Guston’s late oeuvre into a single painting.’ A few of his most familiar objects spew out of the painter’s mouth against a washed-out pink background: a boot, a bottle, a cigarette, the sole of a shoe, the top of an easel and a nameplate bearing his initials. It is a painting about the act of painting.

In many of these enigmatic late works, the distinction between interior and exterior space largely disappears, as domestic elements merge with outdoor scenes. In the allegorical landscapes in which these strange dramas unfold, Philip Guston’s signature cadmium red medium dominates the lower terrain, while the upper sections are a tranquil cloudless blue.

In ‘Feet on Rug’ (1978), two feet are stranded in a barren red landscape against a sky-blue horizon, standing on a rug whose fringes morph into crawling insect legs. The bug-amoeba form is echoed in ‘Future’ (1978), where it appears to rotate alongside a snail like creature as a despairing human figure sinks into a postapocalyptic ground or sea. In ‘Untitled’ (1969)—one of the never-before exhibited paintings—an earlier version of this snail form, nautilus-chambered, curls its way into a cozy but colorless domestic interior.

In a 1972 slide talk, Philip Guston told students that when he returned to Italy after first exhibiting his late work, he wanted to see the paintings of the past that he loved. But not for their beauty.

‘I wanted to see early frescoes of Last Judgments and end-of-the-world paintings. Particularly Romanesque paintings and Sienese fresco painters who paint huge, marvelous frescoes of the damned, all the tortures in hell, and so on. Heaven is always very dull, just a lot of people lined up. Like trumpets, they’re all lined up. There’s not much to look at. But when they’re going to hell the painter really goes to town. All kinds of marvelous stuff. That’s when they really enjoyed painting. I feel we live in comparable times. Oh yeah, and I want to paint that. I don’t want to copy, but I feel that’s the big subject matter. I don’t know how it’s going to come out. Well, I’ve begun. I’ve begun with this story.’

Philip Guston

Door and Room, 1978

Oil on canvas

203.2 x 292.1 cm / 80 x 115 in

Courtesy the Estate of Philip Guston and Hauser & Wirth

Photo: Sarah Muehbauer

Philip Guston

Aegean, 1978

Oil on canvas

172.7 x 320 cm / 68 x 126 in

176.5 x 322.9 x 5.7 cm / 69 1/2 x 127 1/8 x 2 1/4 in (framed)

Courtesy the Estate of Philip Guston and Hauser & Wirth

Photo: Genevieve Hanson

‘Door and Room’ (1978), on view for the first time, suggests a story of forced entry into the artist’s studio. The realities of the world intrude into his sanctuary, leaving the artist as witness to perpetual acts of war. The red and black scene is relieved only by the narrow strip of blue at the top, like a slight breath of air or a hope for peace. Yet in the bloody field of combat are unmistakable signs of a painterly, exuberant celebration of dynamic form and color.

A demonstration of Philip Guston’s ability to introspectively capture the struggles of his time with meticulous composition and nuanced detail is ‘Aegean’ (1978). In this large painting, the convergence of outstretched hands, arms and shields in the form of trash can lids recalls his early work from the ‘40s, in which he depicted childhood street fights that mimicked the theatrics of warfare. But these games are clearly more than child’s play; they are precursors of war. The late Philip Guston addresses the inherent nature of violence as it manifested in the political turmoil of his era, evoking the Holocaust, the Vietnam War and the civil unrest that permeated the late 1960s. Expanding on this theme, Guston’s ‘Untitled’ (1979)—made in the last year of his life—can also be understood as an allegory of human struggle. Shields float in the void, creating a bizarre scene that oscillates between violence and humor. Philip Guston said, ‘I wanted to include everything. I felt, like everybody, disturbed about everything to such an extent that I didn’t want to exclude it from the studio, from what I did. Paint it. I didn’t think I was illustrating anything.’

Philip Guston’s late paintings retain a mysterious quality and all are driven by the artist’s desire to tell stories that not only reflect his state of mind but also provide insights into the social and political climate of his time. When seen together, they show the singular depth and complexity of his rich personal iconography.

Related posts:

Philip Guston Now, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, March 2 – August 27, 2023

Philip Guston - Late Paintings, Peder Lund, Oslo , September 20 - November 8, 2014

Philip Guston: Works on Paper, The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, May 2 - August 31, 2008

Philip Guston: Mind and Matter, McKee Gallery, New York, November 11 - December 23, 2003

Hauser & Wirth Zurich, Limmatstrasse

Limmatstrasse 270, 8005 Zürich

www.hauserwirth.com

31/01/23

Philip Guston Now @ National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Philip Guston Now

National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

March 2 – August 27, 2023

Philip Guston

Nude Philosopher in Space-Time, 1935

oil on canvas

overall: 116.21 × 62.87 cm (45 3/4 × 24 3/4 in.)

Private Collection

Philip Guston

Passage, 1957-1958

Oil on canvas

Overall: 165.1 × 188.6 cm (65 × 74 1/4 in.)

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Bequest of Caroline Wiess Law, 2004.20

One of America's greatest modern painters, PHILIP GUSTON (1913–1980) bridged the personal and the political, the abstract and the figurative, and the humorous and the tragic in paintings of lively touch and memorable impact. A major retrospective of the artist, Philip Guston Now, presents of the full scope of the artist's 50-year career. Organized by the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Tate Modern, London, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the exhibition is on view in the National Gallery's East Building from March 2 through August 27, 2023. The exhibition will then travel to Tate Modern, which will be its final venue.

“Philip Guston has inspired generations of artists—not just for his remarkable paintings, but also for his courage. We hope this complete look at Guston’s career connects a wide audience with his art’s power and continued relevance,” said Kaywin Feldman, director, National Gallery of Art. “We are grateful to the many people, both inside and outside the museum, whose voices have challenged, guided, and inspired us as we prepared our presentation of the exhibition. The lessons we’ve learned and new processes we’ve implemented will allow us to better fulfill our mission of serving the nation in all its complexity.”

The presentation at the National Gallery will include approximately 110 paintings and 115 drawings from some 40 public and private collections—the largest presentation among the four venues, with more than 30 paintings and drawings on view only in Washington. Also unique to the museum’s presentation is a separate installation on the East Building Ground Floor of all 73 drawings from Guston’s series of Poor Richard drawings, inspired by the life and career of Richard Nixon, which are a promised gift of the Guston Foundation to the National Gallery of Art.

Related programs offer both in-person and virtual opportunities to get inspired by Philip Guston's art. A conversation on Guston’s public artworks is also a rare chance to see one of his largest commissioned murals, The Reconstruction and Well-Being of the Family (1943) in the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building in Southwest DC. Other offerings include a virtual studio that invites participants to make their own artistic creations.

Since the exhibition’s postponement in 2020, the National Gallery has been broadly rethinking its exhibitions processes, including how to meaningfully engage a wider range of perspectives. Among these are the voices of external advisors, including thinkers, artists, educators, and community leaders, and internal advisors, including staff most directly involved with the public. These conversations, framed by the National Gallery’s people-centered mission, vision, values and strategic priorities, have generated new insights into the impact of our work, and have influenced interpretive, design, and operational decisions, including the opening date of the exhibition. The new opening date of March 2, 2023, rather than February 26, 2023, allows more time for training and conversation for front-facing staff and also addresses concerns about opening the exhibition during Black History Month.

Philip Guston

Untitled, 1968

Acrylic on panel

Overall: 49.53 × 41.91 cm (19 1/2 × 16 1/2 in.)

Private Collection

Philip Guston

Untitled (Shoe), 1968-1973

Oil on panel

Overall: 24.77 × 30.48 cm (9 3/4 × 12 in.)

Private Collection

Philip Guston

Poor Richard (no. 37), 1971

Ink on paper

Overall: 26.67 × 35.24 cm (10 1/2 × 13 7/8 in.)

The Guston Foundation

Philip Guston

Painting, Smoking, Eating, 1973

Oil on canvas

Overall: 196.85 × 262.89 cm (77 1/2 × 103 1/2 in.)

Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS

Philip Guston Now charts the 50-year career of one of America’s most influential modern artists. The exhibition follows Philip Guston’s epic, winding career as he changes artistic styles, explores abstraction, moves in and out political involvement, and finally arrives at the dark, tragicomic imagery of his late work.

Following a new short biographical video, the exhibition begins with Guston’s Painter’s Table (1973), a promised gift of Ambassador and Mrs. Donald Blinken to the National Gallery. This “painting about painting” features various motifs Guston used in his late works—cigarette butts, books, an eyeball, shoes, irons, a lightbulb, and spikes.

The exhibition continues with works Guston made at the beginning of his career in the 1930s and 1940s, including early forays into politics and contemporary events such as Bombardment (1937), from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, made in response to the April 1937 Nazi bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica. Philip Guston’s progress toward abstraction is shown in such pivotal examples as The Tormentors (1947–1948) from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Next comes a presentation of Philip Guston's abstract period—a rich group of some 20 paintings and drawings made between 1950 and 1965 showing his embrace of abstract expressionism (the dominant tendency in New York at the time), followed by his growing doubts about that movement. This gallery includes several works not seen at the previous venues, including Native’s Return (1957), from the Phillips Collection, and The Return (1956–1958), from Tate Modern.

The experiments that gradually brought Philip Guston all the way back to figuration are represented by a dazzling array of some 50 small works made between 1966 and 1972, including what he called “pure” drawings and “object” drawings, in which he developed his new vocabulary of hoods, books, bricks, and shoes. These objects would appear in the large-scale paintings that were displayed in his groundbreaking Marlborough Gallery show in 1970.

The Marlborough show was shocking at the time for Philip Guston’s abandonment of abstraction in favor of a raw, cartoony figuration—but today it is the paintings’ anti-hero, a hooded Ku Klux Klan figure, that grabs our attention. Guston was impelled to return to this figure, which had first appeared in his protest art of the 1930s, by Vietnam War and civil rights demonstrations that triggered childhood memories of Klan racist violence and police brutality.

As Guston contemplated his own unwitting complicity in the injustices of his time, he made “self-portraits” of artists in Klan hoods in works such as The Studio (1969). Philip Guston Now includes the largest reunion of paintings from his pivotal Marlborough Gallery show—in total 12 of the original 33 paintings shown. At the National Gallery these include the imposing Courtroom (1970), from the Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection.

Philip Guston

Legend, 1977

Oil on canvas

Overall: 175.26 × 199.39 cm (69 × 78 1/2 in.)

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Museum purchase funded by the Alice Pratt Brown Museum Fund, 88.35

Philip Guston

The Ladder, 1978

Oil on canvas

Overall: 177.8 x 274.3 cm (70 x 108 in.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Edward R. Broida

The final three rooms of the exhibition present a powerful selection of large, often symbolic and confessional paintings of the later 1970s that form the artist's last major artistic statement. Works in this section only on view in Washington are The Street (1977) from The Metropolitan Museum of Art; two related paintings, Balance (1979) and Reverse (1979), from private collections; and seven smaller single images (a sandwich, a pile of cherries, a kettle) in acrylic and ink made in 1980 in Philip Guston's final days. In an adjoining auditorium visitors can watch Michael Blackwood’s 1982 documentary, Philip Guston: A Life Lived, which features extensive interviews with the artist.

Upstairs, a separate installation displays the full set of Philip Guston’s Poor Richard drawings, a promised gift to the nation from the Guston Foundation. Conceived by the artist as a book, the satirical drawings of Richard Nixon and his associates were unpublished during his lifetime. These galleries also include the only painting the artist made of Nixon—San Clemente (1975), from Glenstone Museum—and City (1969), a promised gift of Musa Guston Mayer to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

EXHIBITION DATES

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, May 1–September 11, 2022 Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, October 23, 2022–January 15, 2023 National Gallery of Art, Washington, March 2–August 27, 2023, Tate Modern, October 3, 2023–February 25, 2024

EXHIBITION ORGANIZATION

The exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Tate Modern, London; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

EXHIBITION CURATOR

The National Gallery of Art’s presentation of Philip Guston Now is organized by Harry Cooper, senior curator and head, department of modern and contemporary art.

PUBLICATIONS

PHILIP GUSTON NOW

Published in 2020 by the National Gallery of Art and D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, Inc., Philip Guston Now includes essays by the exhibition's co-curators and leading art historians; a detailed chronology of the artist’s life and work based on new research; and reflections by 10 of the most daring contemporary artists on their engagement with Guston and the impact of his work and legacy.

PHILIP GUSTON, POOR RICHARD

Also released in 2020, Poor Richard by Philip Guston publishes the artist’s 73 satirical, imaginative drawings of Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Spiro Agnew, and John Mitchell, including an original title page. Conceived as a book, the drawings were unpublished during Philip Guston’s lifetime were not exhibited until September 2001.

Both publications are available at shop.nga.gov

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART

Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue NW, Washington DC

www.nga.gov

20/09/14

Philip Guston - Late Paintings, Peder Lund, Oslo

Philip Guston - Late Paintings

Peder Lund, Oslo

September 20 - November 8, 2014

Peder Lund is proud to announce an exhibition of late paintings by the American painter Philip Guston (1913-1980). Bringing works by Guston to Norway for the first time, Peder Lund exhibits six paintings and two drawings made in the last decade of the painter’s life, two of which are on loan from Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Four of the paintings have been part of the travelling exhibition Philip Guston: Late Works, celebrating the centennial of the artist’s birth, which opened in November, 2013, at Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, and travelled to Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, through August, 2014.

Philip Guston was born in Montreal in 1913 as the youngest son of Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants, who had fled the pogroms in Odessa, Ukraine. The family relocated to Los Angeles in 1919, and Philip Guston began to draw at the age of 14. He earned a scholarship from the Otis Art Institute in 1930, but left the art school after three months and set out as an autodidactic painter, before travelling to Mexico in 1934, where he got involved with the Mexican Mural Movement. Returning to America, Guston left Los Angeles for New York in 1936 and joined the Work Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project (WPA/ FAP) (1935-43), the visual arts initiative of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programme, for which Guston made a number of murals on public buildings. A fascination with Italian Medieval and Renaissance artists came to influence Philip Guston’s murals, and the painter further explored this interest when he travelled across Italy, Spain and France between 1948 and 1949. This fascination endured throughout Philip Guston’s oeuvre and came to play a significant part in his late, figurative works.

After leaving the WPA project, Philip Guston began to frequent the vibrant circle of Abstract Expressionists, also known as the New York School that was forming in New York, and he developed close friendships with painters including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, as well as the minimalist composers John Cage and Morton Feldman. Guston almost exclusively produced non-figurative art between 1951 and -54, but the grand narratives about art that the New York School propagated did not interest Guston, and he refused the Formalist theories of Clement Greenberg that coloured the work of the New York School. The return to figuration in Philip Guston’s paintings in the decade that followed famously provoked the New York art scene, and Guston insisted that each of his paintings justified itself and that none of his paintings were part of an overall theoretical scheme. He also dismissed the Modernists’ neglect of the tumultuous external affairs that coloured the political landscape at the time, and stated, “what kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything – and then going home into my studio to adjust a red to a blue […].”

Philip Guston relocated to the remote Woodstock in upstate New York in 1967, where he frequented other artists and poets and further developed his interest in Renaissance art, as well as the work of painters such as Pablo Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico and Max Beckmann. These influences now stood alongside an attraction to cartoons and comic strips – the work of the cartoonist George Herriman in particular. Cartoon-like figures and recurring themes such as soles or piles of shoes, people’s heads, boxy cars, self-portraits of the artist smoking, and anthropomorphic figures that Philip Guston called “Hoods” (a reference to Ku Klux Klans men) began to appear in his work, and the blocky shapes and open brushwork seen in his non-figurative period had now become caricatured humans and objects. The paintings on display at Peder Lund show several of the recurring themes in Guston’s late paintings – the “Hoods,” shoes, books, amputated legs and heads with protruding eyes. Guston's late paintings have had an unprecedented impact on artists working from the 1980s and up until the present and have earned Philip Guston the standing as one of the most important painters that reintroduced figuration into painting in the second half of the 20th Century.

Philip Guston’s work has been the subject of a vast number of exhibitions at some of the world’s most prestigious public institutions. Recent solo exhibitions include Philip Guston, which ran through 2003-04, and travelled from the Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth, to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; and the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Guston’s work is featured in numerous public collections worldwide, including those of Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Tate Gallery, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.

PEDER LUND

Tjuvholmen allé 27 - 0252 Oslo

pederlund.no

27/04/08

Philip Guston: Works on Paper, The Morgan Library & Museum, New York

Philip Guston: Works on Paper

The Morgan Library & Museum, New York

May 2 - August 31, 2008

Philip Guston

Untitled, 1950

Ink on parchment paper, 47.6 x 60.3 cm (18 ¾ x 23 ¾ in)

Private Collection

Courtesy McKee Gallery, New York

Photo Credit: Sara Wells, New York

Philip Guston

Drawing Related to Zone (Drawing No. 19), 1954

Ink on paper, 44.5 x 59.1 cm (17 ½ x 23 ¼ in)

Private Collection

Courtesy McKee Gallery, New York

Photo Credit: Michael Korol, New York

Philip Guston

Untitled, 1958

Ink on paper, 43.2 x 56.6 cm (17 x 22 ¼ in)

Courtesy McKee Gallery, New York

Philip Guston

Celebration, 1961

Ink on paper, 65.4 x 77.5 cm (25 ¾ x 30 ½ in)

Courtesy McKee Gallery, New York

Photo Credit: Sara Wells, New York

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

The extraordinary drawings of Philip Guston (1913–1980) are the subject of a major exhibition at The Morgan Library & Museum. Together with Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Philip 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 twenty years and the Morgan is the only American venue.

Organized by the KunstMuseum Bonn, and the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung Munich, in cooperation with the artist’s estate, 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.

The Morgan Library & Museum’s presentation of the exhibition features more than one-hundred 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.

“The Morgan Library & Museum is thrilled to be the only American venue for this outstanding exhibition,” said Morgan director William M. Griswold. “This is one of the Morgan’s first exhibitions devoted to a twentieth-century artist and Guston is one of the greats of the modern era. This show demonstrates the amazing range and versatility of his work. It is truly remarkable to see so many of his drawings together in one show.”

Philip Guston was a prolific draftsman who often turned to drawing to explore new directions in his art before applying them to painting. Several times during the course of his career he stopped painting altogether to concentrate on drawing. Such phases mark the dramatic changes that characterized Philip 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 Philip Guston was a central figure of the abstract expressionist movement, he developed a form of abstract, linear drawings characterized by a great concern with structure and balance, in contrast with the more spontaneous gesture typical of the New York school. A prime example of his style during this period is Drawing Related to Zone (Drawing No. 19; 1954) which derives its wonderful rhythm from its balanced composition as well as from variations in the thickness and pressure of the ink strokes.

Philip Guston

Untitled, 1966

Ink on paper, 48.3 x 60.6 cm (19 x 23 7/8 in)

Courtesy McKee Gallery, New York

Photo Credit: Richard P. Goodbody, Inc., New York

Philip Guston

Untitled, 1967

Ink on paper, 44.5 x 57 cm (17 ½ x 22 ½ in)

Courtesy McKee Gallery, New York

Photo Credit: Sara Wells, New York

For a two-year period, from 1966 to 1968, Philip 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 created during this period that Philip Guston would find inspiration to move away from abstraction and embrace a figurative, almost cartoonlike imagery that would typify his work during the last decade of his life.

Philip Guston

Untitled (Book), 1968

Gouache on paper board, 51 x 76 cm (20 x 30 in)

Courtesy McKee Gallery, New York

Photo Credit Richard P. Goodbody Inc., New York

Philip Guston

Untitled, 1968

Charcoal on paper, 45.4 x 57 cm (17 7/8 x 22 ½ in)

Private Collection

Courtesy McKee Gallery, New York

Photo Credit: Sara Wells

Philip Guston

Figure in Interior, 1970

Pencil on paper, 35.6 x 43.2 cm (14 x 17 in)

Private Collection

Courtesy McKee Gallery, New York

Philip Guston

Web, 1975

Ink on paper, 48.3 x 61 cm (19 x 24 in)

Private Collection

Courtesy McKee Gallery, New York

Photo Credit: Michael Korol, New York

It was a transformation that shocked the art world in 1970, as Philip 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, Philip 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 Philip 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. Philip 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.

Philip Guston

Untitled, 1980

Ink on paper, 47.6 x 66.7 cm (18 3/4 x 26 1/4 in)

Private Collection

Courtesy McKee Gallery, New York

Photo Credit: Richard P. Goodbody Inc., New York

Philip Guston

Untitled (Cherries), 1980

Ink and acrylic on board, 50.8 x 76.2 cm (20 x 30 in)

Private Collection

Philip Guston: Works on Paper is organized by the KunstMuseum Bonn and the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich. The exhibition premiered at the KunstMuseum Bonn (March 1 - May 20, 2007) and traveled to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark (May 31 – August 26, 2007), the Albertina in Vienna (September 7 - November 25, 2007) and most recently the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in Munich (December 13, 2007 - March 2, 2008).

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).

THE MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM

225 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

www.themorgan.org

10/11/03

Philip Guston: Mind and Matter, McKee Gallery, New York

Philip Guston: Mind and Matter

McKee Gallery, New York

November 11 - December 23, 2003

From Plato to Descartes to the present time philosophy's inquiry into the duality of mind and matter was the basis for explaining human individual and social existence. The events of the mental world were absolute, pure and superior; the events of the physical world, received through the senses and nourished by our appetites, were impure, clumsy, chaotic. Although both mind and matter were parts of the human composition, mind was considered the higher order in life.

At the time Philip Guston broke through the prescriptions against figuration, mind was considered the higher order in art as well. Abstract Expressionism had a spiritual momentum and then Color Field dogma narrowed the artist's realm of possibilities. But Philip Guston had much more to say. He opened the door, believing that the whole truth of human existence, the world of the mind and the world of the senses, was the proper subject of art, and it alone could satisfy him as a human being and as an artist. He was comfortable in the perfect realm of the intellect, but he was a man in time and space as well, where the everyday life of painting, sleeping, eating, politics, his wife Musa, were essential.

The inspiration for this show is a painting called Pyramid and and Shoe 1976, currently on exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in which Philip Guston accepts the duality of mind and matter and redresses the imbalance. The pyramid is the symbol of absolute pure thought and the clumsy shoe stands beside it as an everyday imperfect object. They are on equal footing. From 1968 until his death in 1980, Philip Guston continued to paint forms derived from the intellect and forms derived from the material world. Unlike some critical assertions, he never abandoned either source as a fertile terrain for painting.

The first section of this exhibition is devoted to Matter: the physical world. Paintings such as Painter's Head 1975, Anxiety 1975, Eating 1977, Alfie in Small Town 1979, and drawings Untitled (pasta) 1969, Objects on Table 1976.

The second section is Mind: forms of the intellect. Balance 1979, To J.S. 1977 (the Surrealist poet, Jules Supervielle), Martyr 1978, Aegean 1978.

The third room includes work with related forms. Wall Forms and Blue Sea 1978 is the more mental version and Rock 1978 the more material one; Untitled 1968 and Untitled 1980, relate in the same way.

Philip Guston's figuration, now widely admired as some of the greatest work of 20th Century American art, was revolutionary in the 1970's. Guston wondered why people didn't understand the paintings, since, after all, they are about us.

A retrospective exhibition is currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, until January 4, 2004. It was organized by the Museum of Modern Art at Fort Worth, and will continue on to the Royal Academy, London, opening January 20, 2004.

MCKEE GALLERY

745 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10151

www.mckeegallery.com