Philip Guston

Philip Guston (1913–1980) was a groundbreaking American painter whose career spanned social realism, abstraction, and the bold figuration for which he is now best known. In the 1930s, his murals portrayed social injustice as well as less politically engaged subjects for US government buildings. Achieving recognition for his easel paintings during the 1940s, he rose to prominence in the following decade as a leading abstract expressionist in New York. 

Amid the political and social upheaval of the late 1960s, Guston made a radical shift to raw, painterly imagery of hooded figures, everyday objects, and urban fragments, confronting themes of violence and racism, culpability, and deeply personal allegories of the human condition. His initially controversial transformation is now celebrated for its courage, vision, and enduring influence on contemporary art.