Word: guston
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...York, the pessimistic vision of the late Philip Guston...
...artist in particular, though, did change-and was not thanked for it. He was Philip Guston, whose retrospective of 106 works spanning 50 years from 1930 to 1980 is now on view at the Whitney Museum in New York City...
...What Guston did was turn into a figurative painter in his late middle age. This need not have looked bad in itself: the human figure, in various states of smearing and dissection, had long been visible in the work of his friend Willem de Kooning. But the paintings Guston began to make in the late '60s, and first showed in 1970, looked so unlike his established work that they seemed a willful and even crass about-face. Instead of the Gustons the art world knew-abstract paintings with vaporous, knitted surfaces of pearl gray and subtle pinks, like fragments...
...have turned out that way. In the intervening decade, there has been a riotous growth of deliberately clumsy, punkish figurative painting in America: paintings that ignore decorum or precision in the interest of a cunningly rude, expressionist-based diction. Quite clearly, Guston is godfather to this manner, and for this reason his work excites more interest among painters under 35 than that of any of his contemporaries. He would never have gained this following had he stayed abstract, and it is sadly ironic that he died last year, at age 66, shortly after the current retrospective opened in San Francisco...
DIED. Philip Guston, 66, influential U.S. painter; of a heart attack; in Woodstock, N. Y. The Canadian-born son of Russian immigrants, Guston joined Jackson Pollock, a schoolmate of his in Los Angeles, and other contemporaries like Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko in forging the abstract expressionist movement in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In the past decade he returned from his often dreamlike works to representational painting. His explanation: "I got sick and tired of all the purity. I wanted to tell stories...