By Philip Guston
Located in New York, NY
Philip Guston at David McKee Gallery (pencil signed by Philip Guston), 1974
Lithograph and offset lithograph poster
Signed in graphite pencil under the image
24 1/2 × 20 inches
Unframed, unnumbered
Rare vintage lithographic poster of 1974 Guston exhibition at David McKee Gallery
Signed under the image in graphite pencil by Philip Guston
Another hand signed edition is in the permanent collection of Vassar College; otherwise we haven't seen another besides the present work; a true collectors item when hand signed by the artist.
Philip Guston Biography
Philip Guston (1913 – 1980) is one of the great luminaries of twentieth-century art. His commitment to producing work from genuine emotion and lived experience ensures its enduring impact. Guston’s legendary career spanned a half century, from 1930 to 1980. His paintings—particularly the liberated and instinctual forms of his late work—continue to exert a powerful influence on younger generations of contemporary painters. Born in Montreal, Canada, in 1913 to poor Russian Jewish émigrés, Guston moved with his family to California in 1919. Briefly attending the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles in 1930, he was otherwise completely self-taught.
Guston’s first precocious work, Mother and Child, was completed when he was only seventeen years of age. Influenced by the social and political landscape of the 1930s, his earliest works evoked the stylized forms of Giorgio de Chirico and Pablo Picasso, social realist motifs of the Mexican muralists, and classical properties of Italian Renaissance frescoes of Piero della Francesca and Masaccio that he had seen only in reproduction. Painted in Mexico with another young artist, the huge fresco The Struggle Against War and Fascism drew national attention in the US. Guston’s success continued in the WPA, a Depression-era government program that commissioned American artists to create murals in public buildings. While not widely known today, the young artist’s early experiences as a mural painter allowed a development of narrative and scale that he would draw upon in his late figurative work. In the early 1940s, as the WPA program was ending, Guston found work teaching at universities in the Midwestern United States. In his studio, he was working in oils on easel paintings that were more personal and smaller in scale, focusing on portraits and allegories, like Martial Memory and If This Be Not I. His first solo exhibition in Iowa was well received and, within a few years, he was offered his first solo show in New York City. Guston was awarded a Prix de Rome, allowing him to leave teaching and spend a year in Italy, studying firsthand the Italian masters he loved.
By the time he had finished The Tormentors, Guston’s move to abstraction was all but complete. On his return from Italy, he continued dividing his time between the artists’ colony of Woodstock in Upstate New York and New York City, which was then emerging as the center of the postwar art world. He rented a studio on 10th Street, where abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko also worked. For Guston, success was never what mattered most. He was already impatient with the language of pure abstraction and experimenting with larger forms, using a limited palette of grays, pinks and blacks. As his forms became still more reduced, he stopped painting altogether and embarked on a series of simplified abstract “pure drawings” in brush or charcoal. At this juncture, Guston removed himself from the art scene in New York, living and working in Woodstock for the remainder of his life.
Guston’s move was hardly a withdrawal. Freed from the distractions and formal constraints of the art world and the opinions of critics, he was able to experiment with new forms and to engage more deeply with the issues that mattered to him.
The 1960s was a period of great social upheaval in the United States, characterized by assassinations and violence, civil rights and anti-war protests. “When the 1960s came along I was feeling split, schizophrenic,” Guston later said. “The war, what was happening to America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines...
Category
1970s Abstract Expressionist Duncan Grant Art
MaterialsLithograph, Offset
