Painting, Smoking, Eating: The Painter Philip Guston

Synopsis

The American painter Philip Guston was one of the most celebrated abstract painters of the 1950s and 1960s, alongside Mark Rothko and his childhood friend Jackson Pollock.Philip Guston is one of the most influential American painters of the last 100 years. Born in Canada to a Jewish Ukrainian immigrant family, he grew up in the US and became one of the most celebrated abstract expressionism painters of the 1950s and 1960s, alongside Mark Rothko and his childhood friend Jackson Pollock. Guston was indeed a founding figure of the New York School, which established New York as the new center of the global art world. His early work addressed racism and wars. In the late 1960s, his style turnt into neo-expressionism while he began producing figurative paintings of comic-like figures, representing evil and the perpetrators of racism. In 2013, his painting To Fellini set an auction record at Christie's when it sold for $25.8 million. A retrospective was co-organised by Tate Modern, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and was exhibited in 2024 at the Tate Modern in London.