Philip Guston American, 1913-1980

Overview
View works. Philip Guston, Lamp, 1979
Lamp, 1979
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Philip Guston was a pivotal American painter whose career spanned five decades and multiple major stylistic shifts, making him one of the most influential and complex figures in 20th-century art.
Known for creating work driven by raw emotion and personal experience, Guston’s bold, instinctive paintings, especially his later works, continue to inspire and shape generations of contemporary artists.
Biography
View works. Philip Guston, Lamp, 1979
Lamp, 1979
View works
He began his career in the 1930s, became associated with Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s, and then made a dramatic return to figurative painting in the late 1960s—developing a raw, cartoonish visual language that dealt with politics, mortality, and the absurdity of everyday life.
Guston’s later paintings, filled with hooded figures, light bulbs, cigarettes, and worn-out shoes, were initially polarizing but are now widely celebrated for their honesty, humor, and emotional complexity. Today, he’s regarded as one of the most influential artists of the 20th-century.

 

Throughout his lifetime and beyond, Philip Guston was the subject of numerous major monographic exhibitions at renowned institutions worldwide, including:

 

  • Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1962)

  • Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1964, 1982)

  • Jewish Museum, New York (1966)

  • Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1973, 2003)

  • San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1978)

  • Philips Collection, Washington, D.C. (1981)

  • Museum of Modern Art, New York (1988)

  • La Fundación La Caixa, Barcelona (1988)

  • Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2000)

  • Royal Academy, London (2003)

 

Guston also participated in significant international exhibitions, such as the São Paulo Biennial (1957) and the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (1950).

 

 

Works
  • Philip Guston, Lamp, 1979
    Lamp, 1979
Press