Philip GustonWriting and Talks
Philip Guston was widely recognized as an inspiring and dedicated teacher, once described by a colleague as a “zealot possessed by art,” offering insights into art, literature, and philosophy. Guston notably taught from his own experiences with the creative process, encouraging authenticity of self-expression and making students feel their ideas were worth pursuing. Many decades after his death, some of his students can still recall his critiques and their enduring impact.
On Abstract Expressionism
Talk with Audio
I prefer the term New York School by the way, because I think that appellation, it doesn't seem actual to me. It seems like a coined phrase. As a matter of fact, I don't remember in any of the get togethers I had with the painters of that period, the names of which you probably know that that word was ever used or exchanged.
Showing The Canvas
Talk with Audio
You mean, I left the canvas showing all around? Well, I seem to have done that over the past four or five years. It seemed to happen first, just in a practical way, since I don't stretch the canvas, but it's on--I just put a big canvas on the wall, keep working and try to locate these one or two images.
Writing and Speaking by Philip Guston
On Survival: Painting is a Court
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I said something spontaneously, which I still, like I said, that painting was a court. I mean, not a Louis 14th court, a legal court where, but unlike a court, the painter, the artist is his own witness. He's his own defendant. He's his own prosecutor. Prosecutor, and he's his own judge. The one-man court. That's the load that you carry. And I think to be an artist means to be always in court in that condition.
A Conversation with Harold Rosenberg
Talk
In the fifties, when I was doing certain pink pictures, people would talk about a certain beauty, how seductive they were. It was though they weren't crude, you see. And speaking of whether I had planned this beauty, I remember in the late fifties when the work started getting blockier and heavier, John Cage, who liked the work of the early fifties, was very upset, and he said, “How could you leave that beautiful land?” I mean, it was a beautiful land but I left it.
Studio Notes 1970-78
Writing
Guston kept a pad of yellow legal sheets in his studio rolltop desk, on which he penciled notes to himself, ideas for pictures, letters, and sometimes sketched images for later development. The present selection of those writings was made by Musa Mayer during research for her book Night Studio.
The Appointment (A True Story), 1974
Writing
Once there were two Philips who were friends. One was a very famous writer, a celebrity, the other a painter who had some degree of fame. Philip the Painter, who lived in the mountains and whose solitude was always being interrupted by the telephone, decided to put a stop to this thievery of time.
On The Nixon Drawings
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When I came back from Europe in the summer of I97I, I was pretty disturbed about everything in the country politically, the administration specifically, and I started doing cartoon characters. And one thing led to another, and so for months I did hundreds of drawings and they seemed to form a kind of story line, a sequence.
On Piero della Francesca
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I'm not an art historian and I'm not going to go into his life. It's not going to be a lecture on his work. I just want to point out certain elements in his work that have kept me under his spell, which, as I said, doesn't seem to diminish. On the contrary, it seems to expand and grow.
On Abstract Expressionism
Talk with Audio
I prefer the term New York School by the way, because I think that appellation, it doesn't seem actual to me. It seems like a coined phrase. As a matter of fact, I don't remember in any of the get togethers I had with the painters of that period, the names of which you probably know that that word was ever used or exchanged.Showing The Canvas
Talk with Audio
You mean, I left the canvas showing all around? Well, I seem to have done that over the past four or five years. It seemed to happen first, just in a practical way, since I don't stretch the canvas, but it's on--I just put a big canvas on the wall, keep working and try to locate these one or two images.