Philip Guston: A Life Spent Painting

by Robert Storr

Philip Guston: A Life Spent Painting is the most authoritative and comprehensive retrospective of the work of the visionary, adventurous, and influential painter Philip Guston. Driven and consumed by art, Guston painted and drew compulsively and talked about it with an unrivalled passion and fluency.

Preeminent art critic, curator, and artist Robert Storr maps Guston’s career, providing an accessible and revealing analysis of his work from the early social realist murals, to his poetic easel paintings of the 1940s, his shimmering abstract expressionist works of the 1950s and early 1960s, and his new and powerful language of figurative painting of the later 1960s and 70s.

The book also contains talks and writings by Guston himself that evince his approach to drawing and love of old masters, as well as an in-depth chronology. Extensively illustrated with all the artist’s best-known works, many lesser-known and previously unpublished, the book will also include photographs of the artist at home, at work, at exhibitions and with other artists.

Genres: Art

304 pages, Hardcover

Published April 14, 2020

About the author

Robert Storr is an American curator, critic, painter, and writer.

Reviews

[Sungyena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Art book reading may just be the worst, but PG has lots of great quotes that’s peppered throughout this enormous tome: “When you start working, everybody is in your studio - the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all your own ideas. But if you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left alone. Then if you’re lucky, even you leave.” Fantastic reproductions with just about everything you’d want to know about the man, his process, historical context of his work and his contemporaries.

[Van_Veren]

4.6