Philip Guston & the Poets

by Philip Guston (Artist), Kosme de Baranano (Editor)

Philip Guston and the Poets explores the artist’s oeuvre in relation to critical literary interpretation. The book 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 20th century’s most prominent literary 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. Spanning a 36-year period, Philip Guston and the Poets features approximately 60 major paintings and 25 prominent drawings dating from 1944 through 1980, the last of which were created in the final year of Guston’s life. The monograph also includes an extensive essay from Kosme de Barañano, an internationally respected art historian and Guston scholar. A contemporary of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston (1913–80) first came to fame as an Abstract Expressionist. He began reintroducing figurative elements―clumsy hands, cigarettes, light bulbs―into his work in the late 1960s. These late paintings were first exhibited, to savage critical reception, in 1970.

182 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1962

About the author

"Philip Guston (June 27, 1913 – June 7, 1980) was a painter and printmaker in the New York School, which included many of the abstract expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. In the late 1960s Guston helped to lead a transition from abstract expressionism to neo-expressionism in painting, abandoning the so-called "pure abstraction" of abstract expressionism in favor of more cartoonish renderings of various personal symbols and objects." - wikipedia