Philip Guston

Created to accompany the Philip Guston exhibition, this fully illustrated catalogue presents a sweeping retrospective of Philip Guston’s influential work, from Depression-era muralist to abstract expressionist to tragicomic contemporary master.

Philip Guston - perhaps more than any other figure in recent memory - has given contemporary artists permission to break the rules and paint what, and how, they want. This long-overdue retrospective celebrates his influential work, from social realism to abstract expressionism to tragicomic, cartoony figuration.

Alongside the first retrospective museum exhibition of Guston’s art in fifteen years, the exhibition book traces the unconventional path of this hugely important painter (1913–1980). Incisive essays from leading art historians reveal Guston’s thematic influences and interests, while an authoritative, illustrated chronology shares many new discoveries about his life and work. We also hear from ten of the most relevant artists of our day, for whom Guston’s bold, often provocative work has served as inspiration.

Featuring a magnificent array of colour images derived from exquisite new photographs of Guston’s paintings, this generously illustrated volume also highlights rarities including little-known cartoons drawn by Guston in his youth and intimate, previously unpublished photographs of his studio and painting materials.

This book offers the first truly balanced examination of Guston’s career — from socially committed public art in the 1930s and ’40s, to abstract expressionism in the 1950s, to his defining, defiant turn away from abstraction — and toward the figure — in the late 1960s and ’70s. This final decade was also his most productive, when he created large canvases of cartoon-inspired, antiheroic figures that combine the personal and the political, the comic and the apocalyptic, and the abstract and the figurative in memorable ways that resonate with artists and art-loving audiences today more than ever.

With contributions from artists Tacita Dean, Peter Fischli, Trenton Doyle Hancock, William Kentridge, Glenn Ligon, David Reed, Dana Schutz, Amy Sillman, Art Spiegelman and Rirkrit Tiravanija, this is an exhibition book not to be missed.

Harry Cooper is Senior Curator and Head, Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, at the National Gallery of Art.

Mark Godfrey is an independent curator and art historian based in London. From 2007 to 2021 he was Senior Curator, International Art at Tate Modern.

Alison de Lima Greene is Isabel Brown Wilson Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Kate Nesin is Adjunct Curator, Contemporary Art, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Jennifer Roberts is Research Associate, Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, at the National Gallery of Art.

• Artist Philip Guston
• Exhibition Philip Guston
• Dimensions 28.9 x 23.9 cm
• Material FSC certified paper and card
• ISBN 9781849766944
• Paperback Yes
• Number of illustrations 280
• No of pages 320