Book Review - Guston

Philip Guston is considered a modern master and his life is 'a chronicle of ideas and events that transformed American painting in the 20th Century'.

He was born in 1913, went to High School with Jackson Pollock, and by age 13 began to draw profusely. Most of his education was outside of school. He learned about Art by studing artists from the Renaissance like Ucello and della Francesca and modern artists like Picasso and de Chirico. He saw Orozco paint a mural at Pomona College and became a political muralist in the 1930's, at the time of America Social Realism and Regionalism. He was a painting teacher at the University of Iowa in Iowa City and in St. Louis, the heartland of American Regionalism, before moving to New York.

The isolation of the midwest enabled him develop a personal imagery, combining the monumentality of the Renaissance masters into 'bold volumetric forms and complex spatial dynamics' influenced by modern artists Max Beckman, and Picasso's Guernica.

He wasn't satisfied with the method of developing a 'cartoon' or diagram of the composition to modify the painting on the easel. His painting switched to the 'improvised spontaneous legible recording of all decisions going into the conception and realization' of the Abstract Expressionist painting.

Before we can learn our craft we need to lear

n How To Learn. One time-honored method is

to study various master artists and incorporate their ideas and solutions into our methods.

In the 1950's, the influence of John Cage and D. T. Suzuki's teaching of Zen and its inclusiveness of everything and nothing, provided an alternative to the Existentialism prevalent at the time.

The late 60's America provided an end of the Kennedy optimism and we suffered with assassinations, demonstrations and police violence and cynicism. Guston developed a new form of figurative art, still keeping the influence of Piero and Rembrandt as well as Mondrian, de Chirico, Picasso, Beckman and introducing comics like Mutt and Jeff and Krazy Kat that he had loved as a child. We see also influences of George Grosz caricatures, engravings of Jose Guadalupe Posada, Tiepolo and Goya.

We are lucky in having ALL the previous methods and schools of ART available to us, to steal our ideas from. Let us continue to have a Process that involves constantly inputting ideas and giving ourselves the ability not only to succeed but also to fail. That is how we will learn.