Illuminating reflections on painting and drawing from one of the most revered artists of the twentieth century

'Thank God for yellow ochre, cadmium red medium, and permanent green light'

How does a painter see the world? Philip Guston, one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, spoke about art with unparalleled candour and commitment. Touching on work from across his career as well as that of his fellow artists and Renaissance heroes, this selection of his writings, talks and interviews draws together some of his most incisive reflections on iconography and abstraction, metaphysics and mysticism, and, above all, the nature of painting and drawing.

'Among the most important, powerful and influential American painters of the last 100 years ... he's an art world hero' Jerry Saltz, New York Magazine

'Guston's paintings make us think hard' Aindrea Emelife, Guardian

A sweeping retrospective of Philip Guston's influential work, from Depression-era muralist to abstract expressionist to tragicomic contemporary master

A Wall Street Journal 2020 holiday gift guide pick

Philip Guston--perhaps more than any other figure in recent memory--has given contemporary artists permission to break the rules and paint what, and how, they want. His winding career, embrace of high and low sources, and constant aesthetic reinvention defy easy categorization, and his 1968 figurative turn is by now one of modern art's most legendary conversion narratives. I was feeling split, schizophrenic. The war, what was happening in America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything--and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?

And so Guston's sensitive abstractions gave way to large, cartoonlike canvases populated by lumpy, sometimes tortured figures and mysterious personal symbols in a palette of juicy pinks, acid greens, and cool blues. That Guston continued mining this vein for the rest of his life--despite initial bewilderment from his peers--reinforced his reputation as an artist's artist and a model of integrity; since his death 50 years ago, he has become hugely influential as contemporary art has followed Guston into its own antic twists and turns.

Published to accompany the first retrospective museum exhibition of Guston's career in over 15 years, Philip Guston Now includes a lead essay by Harry Cooper surveying Guston's life and work, and a definitive chronology reflecting many new discoveries. It also highlights the voices of artists of our day who have been inspired by the full range of his work: Tacita Dean, Peter Fischli, Trenton Doyle Hancock, William Kentridge, Glenn Ligon, David Reed, Dana Schutz, Amy Sillman, Art Spiegelman and Rirkrit Tiravanija. Thematic essays by co-curators Mark Godfrey, Alison de Lima Greene and Kate Nesin trace the influences, interests and evolution of this singular force in modern and contemporary art--including several perspectives on the 1960s and '70s, when Guston gradually abandoned abstraction, returning to the figure and to current history but with a personal voice, by turns comic and apocalyptic, that resonates today more than ever.

This is the premier collection of dialogues, talks, and writings by Philip Guston (1913-1980), one of the most intellectually adventurous and poetically gifted of modern painters. Over the course of his life, Guston's wide reading in literature and philosophy deepened his commitment to his art--from his early Abstract Expressionist paintings to his later gritty, intense figurative works. This collection, with many pieces appearing in print for the first time, lets us hear Guston's voice--as the artist delivers a lecture on Renaissance painting, instructs students in a classroom setting, and discusses such artists and writers as Piero della Francesca, de Chirico, Picasso, Kafka, Beckett, and Gogol.

Philip Guston's legendary, prescient political satire of Richard Nixon

In the summer of 1971--two years before the Watergate hearings--Richard Nixon was an incumbent whose grip on power was being tested by the Pentagon Papers. Inspired in part by the work of his friend Philip Roth, who had just finished the novel Our Gang, Philip Guston began drawing the object of his political anger and despair--Richard Nixon, transformed into the character Poor Richard, rendered with a distinctively phallic nose and scrotal jowls, and accompanied by henchmen Spiro Agnew, John Mitchell, and Henry Kissinger.

Guston carefully sequenced the drawings in 1971 and planned to publish them as a book, even designing an original title page. But he held back, and the images were never released during his lifetime; only in 2001 were they first exhibited, accompanied by a publication of the series from the University of Chicago Press by Debra Bricker Balken. Today, as we face yet another moment of presidential crisis and global turmoil, Poor Richard is more relevant than ever.

Poor Richard by Philip Guston brings Guston's series back into print. Following Guston's own sequencing, layout and original title page from 1971, Poor Richard by Philip Guston presents this shockingly fresh, delightfully profane series, with beautiful new reproductions. The publication marks the promised gift of these 73 drawings by The Guston Foundation to the National Gallery of Art, where they will be preserved and studied as a monument of contemporary satirical art and virtuoso drawing.

Featuring nearly 90 paintings and drawings from Philip Guston's (1913-1980) Abstract Expressionist period, this book explores a decade in which the artist confronted aesthetic concerns of the New York School, questioning modes of image making and what it means to paint abstractly. In the number and quality of paintings from this period, the book parallels Guston's important 1966 survey exhibition held at the Jewish Museum in New York, a half century ago. As its title suggests, this volume offers an intimate look at Guston's unique relationship to painting and the process by which his work evolved. The publication also includes an expanded chronology on the artist, which includes archival material, historic installation views, plus conversations with Guston and texts by him. Philip Guston: Painter concludes with a section of 50 of Guston's pure drawings from the late '60s.

Guston's Richard Nixon drawings are nasty, scabrous, witty, grossly unfair and one of the juster verdicts handed down on our 37th president, the only one to resign from office. -William Corbett, The Brooklyn Rail

Philip Guston: Nixon Drawings is the first comprehensive collection of Guston's legendary satirical caricatures of the 37th President of the United States, Richard Nixon. Expanding on Poor Richard (University of Chicago Press, 2001, now out of print and rare), it features some 180 works depicting Nixon and his cronies from 1971 and 1975. The book opens with an introduction by Philip Guston's daughter, Musa Mayer, and also includes the transcript of a panel discussion moderated by Phong Bui with William Corbett, Irving Sandler, Lisa Yuskavage, Bob Mankoff and Katy Siegel.

These trenchant works were created in the tumultuous political climate of the early 1970s; the US was reeling from the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, the chaos of the 1968 presidential election and the enduring violence of the Vietnam War. The publication of the Pentagon Papers, and Nixon's unsuccessful attempts to prevent their disclosure, made the president look both amoral and somewhat hapless. This is the Poor Richard, a slyly political little sneak, that appears in Guston's cartoons from the period.

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; Guston began his Nixon drawings at precisely this point in his career. Caricaturing Nixon, Guston began to refine a pictorial language equally sensitive to inner pathos and the turmoil of the public world.

On the pivotal year that launched Philip Guston into the final, daring decade of his career

In 1970, Philip Guston (1913-80) went public with his return to figuration, in an infamous show at the Marlborough Gallery in New York City, a show that garnered devastatingly negative reviews--Clumsy, embarrassing and simple-minded, culminating in Hilton Kramer's infamous A mandarin pretending to be a stumblebum.

Immediately after, he left the country for a residency at the American Academy in Rome that lasted into 1971. Resilience: Philip Guston in 1971 sheds light on the pivotal year that launched Guston into the final prolific decade of his career, during which he painted what are now celebrated as some of the most important works of art of the 20th century. This volume includes examples from two major series of that year: the Roma paintings, works spurred on by Guston's year among the ruins and landscape of Rome; and the Nixon drawings, narrative satirical drawings produced in response to the political and social turmoil back in the United States. Together, these series bear witness to an artist at the height of his powers, wholly responsive to his world.

Lavish plates capture the variety of cadmium red, pinks and whites in the Roma paintings, as well as the withering details of the Nixon drawings. This volume also includes a text by Musa Mayer, Guston's daughter, that offers an intimate view of her father's state of mind throughout 1971.

• Philip Guston: Poetry Drawings features the illustrative works by Guston accompanied by an authoritative essay by Bill Berkson, the great American poet and the artist's long-time friend - a testimony to just how fascinating the interplay of text and image can be

Philip Guston always had eminent artist friends.

Tireless in his quest for the unknown, the still undiscovered, Guston engaged poets and literati in intense dialogues that, starting in the sixties, led to fruitful collaborations - including the creation of numerous illustrations and cover images for works by poets such as William Corbett, Bill Berkson, and Clark Coolidge.

In his poem-pictures, Guston ultimately turned to producing interactions of text and drawings - as responses to poems by his writer friends or as independent works that incorporated selected lines of poetry.

Also available: Philip Guston: Prints ISBN 9783944874180.

This is the premier collection of dialogues, talks, and writings by Philip Guston (1913-1980), one of the most intellectually adventurous and poetically gifted of modern painters. Over the course of his life, Guston's wide reading in literature and philosophy deepened his commitment to his art--from his early Abstract Expressionist paintings to his later gritty, intense figurative works. This collection, with many pieces appearing in print for the first time, lets us hear Guston's voice--as the artist delivers a lecture on Renaissance painting, instructs students in a classroom setting, and discusses such artists and writers as Piero della Francesca, de Chirico, Picasso, Kafka, Beckett, and Gogol.