Philip Guston

Biography

In 1970 an exhibition opened at the Marlborough Gallery in New York by a painter who for twenty years had been known as an abstractionist. On the canvases were figures in white pointed hoods, cigars, shoes, brick walls and light bulbs on a cord, drawn with a thick line, as in a comic strip. Hilton Kramer in the New York Times headed his review “A Mandarin Pretending to Be a Stumblebum”; Robert Hughes in Time wrote of “Ku Klux Komix” and only years later took his words back. De Kooning, as the artist’s daughter recalls, was one of the few who understood at once what was going on, and told Guston that these pictures were about freedom.

He was born on 27 June 1913 in Montreal, as Phillip Goldstein, into a family of Jews who had fled the pogroms of Odessa. In 1919 the family moved to Los Angeles, where the Ku Klux Klan, which harassed Jews and Black people across California, was known at first hand. In 1923 his father died. He began drawing with comics, his mother enrolled him in a correspondence course from a Cleveland school of cartooning, and in 1927, at the Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, he struck up a lifelong friendship with Jackson Pollock; their teacher Schwankovsky told them about European modernism and Eastern philosophy, and for a pamphlet against the school’s cult of sport both were expelled. Apart from a year’s scholarship at the Otis Art Institute, which left him dissatisfied, he taught himself: from de Chirico, whom he cited all his life, and from the Italian frescoes of Piero della Francesca, Masaccio, Uccello and Giotto.

In 1932, at eighteen, together with Reuben Kadish, he painted a mural in Los Angeles for the John Reed Club to raise money for the defence of the nine Black teenagers of Scottsboro, sentenced to death on a false charge; a police “Red Squad” defaced the mural, and the court cleared the police. In 1934 he left with Kadish and the poet Jules Langsner for Mexico, where they were given a wall in the former summer palace of the Emperor Maximilian in Morelia. “The Struggle Against Terror”, about 95 square metres, with antifascist subjects under the plain influence of Siqueiros, already contained the hooded figures that stayed with him to the end. Time gave it a two-page spread and quoted Siqueiros: “the most promising painters in either the US or Mexico”. There, too, they met Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. The mural was later hidden behind a false wall, rediscovered in the 1970s and, after a long restoration, opened to the public in 2025. In 1934–1935 Guston and Kadish painted a hospital in Duarte, California; that mural survives.

In September 1935 he moved to New York and painted walls under the federal WPA programme; in 1937 he married the painter and poet Musa McKim, and several murals they made together. The post office in Commerce, Georgia, received in 1938 “Early Mail Service and the Construction of Railroads”, the Social Security Building in Washington in 1943 “Reconstruction and Well-Being of the Family”. From 1941 to 1945 he taught at the University of Iowa, until 1947 in St. Louis, later at New York University and Pratt. At the turn of 1947–1948 he painted his first abstract picture, “The Tormentors”, and in the 1950s became an acknowledged first-generation Abstract Expressionist, though he himself preferred to say “New York School”; he took part in the Ninth Street Show. In “Zone” (1953–1954) strokes and patches of colour thicken towards the middle of the canvas and float in it, recalling, as has been observed, Mondrian’s pluses and minuses and Monet’s late water lilies. His palette even then was narrow: black, white, grey, blue, red. As early as 1960, at the height of abstraction, he said that painting is never pure and that we are “image-makers and image-ridden”.

In 1967 he moved to Woodstock, New York, and went back to figures.

After the scandal of 1970 he shut himself away in Woodstock and from 1968 built up his vocabulary: Klansmen, light bulbs, shoes, cigarettes, clocks; from 1973 to 1978 he travelled once a month to run a seminar at Boston University. He drew satires of Nixon during the Vietnam War. Of the hoods he said that they were self-portraits and that he saw himself behind the hood: the idea of evil preoccupied him. In 2009 the McKee Gallery showed 49 small panels of 1969–1972 that had never been exhibited before. He died in Woodstock on 7 June 1980.

In the autumn of 2020 four museums, the National Gallery in Washington, Tate Modern and the museums of fine arts of Houston and Boston, postponed his retrospective, with its 24 Klan paintings, until 2024, judging the moment unsuitable; more than two thousand artists signed an open letter against the postponement, and the exhibition opened in Boston on 1 May 2022. In 2022 his daughter, Musa Mayer, promised the Metropolitan Museum 96 paintings and 124 drawings.