Customer Reviews

Philip Guston (Modern Masters Series, Vol. 11)

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Philip Guston's long career had three distinctive phases. As a young man, he took up painting with the WPA artist program and made left-leaning, social-realist murals and canvases in many places around the country. By the late 1940's, he had moved on to abstraction, producing shimmering, painterly works that were somewhere between the dynamism of Jackson Pollock and the stillness of Mark Rothko. In the last ten years of his life, influenced by the restlessness of the 60's, he painted Robert Crumb-like cartoonish images that hinted at even darker comic nightmares than Crumb ever imagined (and, more occasionally, the uplifting power of love and idealism). This last phase may have been the best of all. Storr's great book is an excellent exegesis of all three of these hard-to-follow transitions, by an artist that simply did not make analysis easy. The mostly full-color illustrations complement the text almost perfectly.

Written by a leading art critic, this study of Guston's life and work is at the same time comprehensive and easy to read. From his figurative beginnings and his murals in the 1930's and 1940's, to his abstract expressionnist period of the 1950's and 1960's and his controversial return to figurative art with cartoon-like characters influenced by H.Crumb's comics in the 1970's, this book covers the entire career of one of America's most influencial artists. The many illustrations add to the value of this book as being, in my opinion, the best available on Philip Guston.

Given most art criticism, which focuses on theory with polysyllabic intensity, this book is a perfect, easy to read intro to the artist and one that makes his work more accessible. Don't fear to immerse yourself in this fine, brief bio and its color pics!

Being an artist , I love a book that bursts with color, if you love color or use it in your work, this book will make you happy. I do have to say, he uses an orange-pink in many of his works toward the end of his career, for some , it could be boring, but to an artist.... there is a teaching in keeping a cohesiveness. I think when artists do this...... like DeKooning's gold shade, and the repeat of Rothko's colorfield images, and when one thinks of Jackson Pollack, they think of his drip paintings, even Kline's huge black and white paintings, his signature appeal. Smart artists know that collectors want a recognizable art piece that may give them a status that they know their art. I don't blame collector's in this choice, for some of them will buy 4 or 5 of that artist's paintings and they may feel that they contributed to the artist's rise. This is more of a book with a full colored page ...... opposite a description of the work and the year. If you want to know more about his life, get the Biography written by his daughter called " Night Studio". Guston went through an amazing transformation. He did it slow enough that he did not offend his collectors. Some of these Klan looking paintings, I do believe have nothing to do with the klan, I think he had found a character he could use.... like I use a dog character to bring cohesiveness to my work. But the abstract color field paintings in the center of his career are so well thought out and he works with the similar colors that he uses in what one would think is his old cartoon characters. I think these may have been deep seeded images he might have seen growing up as a child, but the characters do rub off on you. I love many artists , but it did take me awhile to love Guston's work. I do believe the colors are very close to his original colors of the paintings and I do believe they picked a variety from start to finish, they could of have used a few more Mural paintings. This book does get one closer to his work in an intimate way.