Published on March 24, 2026
Paris has long been considered the epicenter of global culture since the advent of modernity. The great European artists of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century made the city their home and studio, transforming it into the cradle of the era’s avant-gardes. Indeed, it was the French capital that gave rise to a school of artists that included geniuses such as Picasso, Matisse, and Modigliani. However, nothing lasts forever. The rise of totalitarian regimes and World War II relegated art in Europe to a secondary role, forcing Paris to relinquish its title as the cultural capital to the burgeoning New York.
This shift did not happen in a vacuum. In the 1940s and 1950s, fifteen artists gathered casually in the Big Apple. These painters, who never recognized themselves as a group and consistently asserted their individuality, formed the “New York School,” a label more social than stylistically uniform, highlighting the significance of the skyscraper city as a new center for emerging trends and a grand art market.
Notable figures such as Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning were part of this remarkable generation from which abstract expressionism was born. Philip Guston was another pivotal member. Born in Montreal in 1913, he moved to Los Angeles with his parents, a Jewish couple of Ukrainian origin who fled Europe to escape antisemitism. At the age of fourteen, he enrolled in Los Angeles Manual Arts High School, where he studied alongside his friend Jackson Pollock.
In the 1930s, Guston began to work professionally. His early pieces were murals deeply influenced such as Siqueiros and Rivera, as well as references to Renaissance masters like Giotto, Masaccio, and Piero della Francesca. Many of these murals were funded (Works Progress Administration), which was established as part of the New Deal initiative to pull the United States out of the Great Depression through public works. The drawings and paintings Guston created during this period were marked and social ideas, reflecting his vision of human malevolence.
In 1937, Guston relocated to New York, where Pollock had already settled. However, it wasn’t until a decade later that Guston’s painting evolved towards the abstract expressionism that his New York peers had been developing since the early 1940s. With a limited color palette of whites, grays, reds, and blacks, and compositions with brushstrokes tending to cluster at the center of the canvas, Guston created a distinctive style that many associated with Monet’s work, describing it as “abstract impressionism.” For over fifteen years, the artist remained true to this way of painting, but eventually, abstraction frustrated him, and he returned to figuration amid vocal criticism. The works from this new phase were more playful than before, leaning towards cartoonish styles and comics, yet they were imbued with the furious frustration Guston had carried since childhood. At just eleven years old, he discovered his father hanging from a rope, shortly followed of his brother.
Guston’s departure from the abstract expressionism that had elevated his generation led to him being treated as a traitor, a heretic abandoning a path dictated . He believed that abstract art was false, distancing itself from the harsh realities of a world filled with brutality and injustices. He thus focused on the everyday life around him. He painted lightbulbs, clocks, bottles, shoes, trash cans, bodies, heads… and hooded men—an unmistakable reference to the Ku Klux Klan and the closed-mindedness of man. During this period, he also created the series “One-Shot-Painting,” an intimate endeavor aimed at eliminating the time gap between thought and execution the mornings what he had envisioned the night before.
It took years for Philip Guston’s later works to receive the recognition they deserved. He passed away in 1980 in Woodstock, just as he was beginning to regain acknowledgment following a culture of ostracism. Postmodernism revitalized his legacy, and today, both his figurative and abstract works are regarded as significant contributions to American contemporary painting.
For those seeking to learn more about Philip Guston’s oeuvre, a visit to one of Europe’s premier contemporary art museums, the Louisiana Museum, is advisable, as it currently hosts an exhibition of his late works. Additionally, major institutions like MoMA and the Tate Gallery feature Guston’s pieces in their collections, accessible through their respective websites.