Philip Guston The Poets

Published to accompany the exhibition ?Philip Guston and The Poets? at Gallerie dell?Accademia (May ? September 2017), this monograph exposes the artist?s oeuvre to critical literary interpretation. The exhibition draws parallels between humanist themes reflected in both Guston?s paintings and drawings as well as in the language and prose discerned in five of the twentieth century?s most prominent literary figures: D. H. Lawrence, W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Eugenio Montale and T. S. Eliot. The enormous influence that Italy itself had upon Guston and his work is also examined.0Spanning a 50-year period, ?Philip Guston and The Poets?, edited by curator Prof. Dr. Kosme de Barañano, features approximately 40 major paintings and 40 prominent drawings dating from 1930 through to 1980, the last of which were created in the final years of Guston?s life. 00Exhibition: Gallerie dell?Accademia, Venice, Italy (10.05.-03.09.2017).

"This volume introduces the diverse voices that comprise Guston's linguistic tapestry. Guston never stopped talking for too long. There may have been periods of silence precipitated by existential moments of doubt, but such lapses seem anomalous when measured against the voluminous transcriptions gleaned and edited by Clark Coolidge. Coolidge has done an admirable job arranging and presenting the book's contents, entirely relevant to anyone curious about Guston, and by extension, American Art of the post-World War II period."—Douglas Dreishpoon, chief curator at Knox-Albright Gallery

An illustrated examination of Philip Guston's comic and complex painting The Studio. Throughout his career, Philip Guston's work metamorphosed from figural to abstract and back to figural. In the 1950s, Guston (1913–1980) produced a body of shimmering abstract paintings that made him—along with Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Franz Kline—an influential abstract expressionist of the “gestural” tendency. In the late 1960s, with works like The Studio came his most radical shift. Drawing from the imagery of his early murals and from elements in his later drawings, ignoring the prevailing “coolness” of Minimalism and antiform abstraction, Guston invented for these late works a cast of cartoon-like characters to articulate a vision that was at once comic, crude, and complex. In The Studio, Guston offers a darkly comic portrait of the artist as a hooded Ku Klux Klansman, painting a self-portrait. In this concise and generously illustrated book, Craig Burnett examines The Studio in detail. He describes the historical and personal motivations for Guston's return to figuration and the (mostly negative) critical reaction to the work from Hilton Kramer and others. He looks closely at the structure of The Studio, and at the influence of Piero della Francesca, Manet, and Krazy Kat, among others; and he considers the importance of the column of smoke in the painting—as a compositional device and as a ghost of abstraction and metaphysics. The Studio signals not only Guston's own artistic evolution but a broader shift, from the medium-centric and teleological claim of modernism to the discursive, carnivalesque, and mucky world of postmodernism.

Literary Nonfiction. Art. Essays on art; artist profiles; digressions on art and culture. ONE FOOT IN THE OTHER WORLD represents the first years of poet Paul Maziar's work as an art writer. The essays in this volume include Ann Craven: In Search of Lost Time; Soutine & Sander's Pastry Chefs; Robert Frank's The Americans; Katherine Bradford's Luminous Nocturnes; A Beautiful Space That Slips Away: Philippe Soupault and the French Avant-Garde and many more.

In 1971, as the race for the presidency heated up, the artist Philip Guston (1913-1980) created a series of caricatures of Richard Nixon titled Philip Guston's Poor Richard. Produced two years before Watergate and three years before Nixon's resignation, these provocative, searing condemnations of a corrupt head of state are remarkable, prescient political satire. The drawings mock Nixon's physical attributes—his nose is rendered as an enlarged phallus throughout-as well as his notoriously dubious, shifty character. Debra Bricker Balken's book is the first book—length publication of these drawings. A visual narrative of Nixon's life, the drawings trace Nixon from his childhood, through his ascent to power, to his years in the White House. They incorporate Henry Kissinger (a pair of glasses), Spiro Agnew (a cone-head), and John Mitchell (a dolt smoking a pipe). They depict Nixon and his cohorts in China, plotting strategy in Key Biscayne, and shamelessly pandering to African Americans, hippies, and elderly tourists. As Balken discusses in her accompanying essay, these drawings also reflect a dramatic transformation in Guston's work. In response to social unrest and the Vietnam War, he began to question the viability of a private art given to self-expression. His betrayal of aesthetic abstraction in favor of imagery imbued with personal and political meaning largely engendered the renewal of figuration in painting in America in the 1970s. These drawings not only represent one of the few instances of an artist in the late twentieth century engaging caricature in his work, they are also a witty, acerbic take on a corrupt figure and a scandalous political regime.

Focuses on drawings that grew out of Guston's (1912-1980) interactions and collaborations with poets during the last decade of his life. Long associated with the New York School of painters, in the late 1960s Guston turned from abstract work and began integrating lines, passages and, in some cases,