Published on April 4, 2026
Paris, from the beginning of contemporary art, was the main cultural center worldwide. Great European artists of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century took the city as their home and workshop, turning it into the cradle of the artistic avant-gardes of the time. Indeed, the French capital gave rise to a school of artists that included geniuses like Picasso, Matisse, and Modigliani. However, nothing is eternal. The rise of totalitarianism and World War II transformed Europe into a stage where art was relegated to a secondary role. As a result, Paris was compelled to hand over the baton of being the cultural capital to the burgeoning New York.
This shift in gravity was not incidental. Fifteen visual artists casually gathered in the 1940s and 1950s in the Big Apple. These painters, who never recognized themselves as a group and always asserted their individualism, formed the “New York School,” a term more social in nature than stylistically uniform, highlighting the importance of the skyline city as a new center of creative trends and a major art market.
Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning were some of the leading artists who made up this magnificent generation from which abstract expressionism emerged. Philip Guston was another member of this group. Born in Montreal in 1913, he soon left Canada for Los Angeles with his parents, a Jewish couple of Ukrainian origin who had fled Europe to escape anti-Semitism. At 14, he enrolled in Los Angeles Manual Arts High School, studying alongside his friend Jackson Pollock.
In the 1930s, Guston began to work professionally. His early works were murals influenced Siqueiros and Rivera but also contained references to Renaissance figures such as Giotto, Masaccio, and Piero della Francesca. Many of these murals were funded , the agency created as part of the New Deal, which aimed to pull the United States out of the Great Depression through public works. The drawings and paintings Guston created during that time were marked and social ideas, reflecting a view of the evil in humanity.
In 1937, he moved to New York, where his friend Jackson Pollock was already residing. However, it wasn’t until ten years later that Guston’s painting evolved towards the abstract expressionism already being developed York colleagues since the early 1940s. With a limited color palette of whites, greys, reds, and blacks, and compositions where the brushstrokes tended to cluster in the center of the canvas, Guston created a unique style that many associated with Monet’s work and described as “abstract impressionism.”
For over fifteen years, the artist remained faithful to this style of painting, but abstraction ultimately frustrated him, leading him, amidst loud criticism, to return to figurative work. The pieces from this new phase were more playful than the previous ones, resembling cartoonish and comic artwork but encapsulated the furious frustration Guston had carried since his childhood. At just eleven years old, he found his father hanged with a rope, shortly after suffering the loss of his brother.
The artist renounced the abstract expressionism that had elevated his generation and was treated as a deserter, a heretic who strayed from the path outlined . Guston believed that abstract art was false and distanced itself from the reality of a world filled with brutality and injustices. He then focused on the everydayness of life. He painted light bulbs, clocks, bottles, shoes, trash cans, bodies, heads… and hooded men, a clear reference to the Ku Klux Klan and the myopia of humanity. During this time, he also completed the series One-Shot-Painting, an intimate study where Guston aimed to eliminate the time between thought and execution the mornings, immediately upon waking, what he had imagined the night before.
Years passed before Philip Guston’s late work was appreciated appropriately. He died in 1980 in Woodstock, just as he was gaining recognition again after a period of cultural ostracism. Postmodernism revitalized his final legacy, and today his works, both figurative and abstract, are considered significant contributions to contemporary American painting.
A great opportunity to learn more about Philip Guston’s work is to visit one of the best contemporary art museums in Europe, the Louisiana Museum (or at least its website), which is currently showcasing an exhibition of his latest works. Furthermore, major museums like MoMA and the Tate Gallery display Guston’s works that are part of their collections on their websites.
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