GUSTON, PHILIP

GUSTON, PHILIP (1913–1980), U.S. painter. Born Philip Goldstein in Montreal, Canada, Guston moved with his Russian immigrant parents to Los Angeles when he was seven years old. At 14 he became interested in art and by 17 he began formal art training at the Otis Art Institute (1930), where he remained for three months. Amalgamating the influences of the Mexican muralists, Italian Renaissance painters, and ultimately Cubism, Guston executed several murals for the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project. His murals include works for the 1939 World's Fair, the Queensbridge Housing Project in New York City (1940), and the Social Security Building in Washington, D.C. (1942). In 1941–45 Guston was artist-in-residence at the State University of Iowa in Iowa City, followed by two years teaching at the School of Fine Arts at Washington University at Saint Louis. During this time, Guston assimilated aspects of abstraction and mythology, making gestural paintings comprised of short brushstrokes often in hatched configurations. By the 1950s Guston's entirely non-objective paintings were characterized by critics as "Abstract Impressionist" based on his heavily laid paint and lyrical use of color. After retrospectives at the Guggenheim (1962) and New York's Jewish Museum (1966), Guston boldly returned to figuration. Expressing a desire "to tell stories," Guston made blocky, cartoon-inspired narratives using a limited palette of pale colors, particularly salmon pink, white, black, and gray. In several of these paintings Guston included a hooded figure, often employed as a surrogate self-portrait. While he painted hooded Ku Klux Klan members in social realist works of the 1930s, the hooded figures that emerged in the late 1960s were influenced by the legend of the clay-sculpted Golem. Guston's noted body of work as both an abstract and a figurative artist makes him unique among 20th century painters. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: D. Ashton, Yes, But … A Critical Study of Philip Guston (1976); R. Storr, Philip Guston (1986); J. Weber, Philip Guston: A New Alphabet, The Late Transition (2000); M. Auping, Philip Guston: Retrospective (2003). (Samantha Baskind (2nd ed.)