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

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 "poempictures," 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.

When Philip Guston turned to the medium of lithography in the early sixties, he was regarded as one of the leading figures of Abstract Expressionism in the United States. At that time, his art was already showing signs of the change that would lead to the later representational works that dominated the last decade of his career. The impressive series of black-and-white lithographs that Guston made shortly before his death in 1980 incorporates, as a sort of visual autobiography, the complete repertoire of objects that marked his return to powerful pictorial representation: simple everyday items, clocks, shoes, books, cigarettes, ashtrays, and occasionally his beloved sandwiches and cherries. All of these things, taken from the world of the private and intimate, are given a unique vitality by Gusto' s ironic eye and deliberate hand in the soft cadences of the lithographic crayon.

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.

Additional Contribution By Duncan Phillips, Frederick S. Wight And Rosalind Irvine.

Additional Contribution By Duncan Phillips, Frederick S. Wight And Rosalind Irvine.

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.

In 1971, as the race for the presidency heated up, the artist Philip Guston (1913-1980) created a series of caricatures of Richard Nixon titled Philip Guston's Poor Richard. Produced two years before Watergate and three years before Nixon's resignation, these provocative, searing condemnations of a corrupt head of state are remarkable, prescient political satire. The drawings mock Nixon's physical attributes--his nose is rendered as an enlarged phallus throughout-as well as his notoriously dubious, shifty character. Debra Bricker Balken's book is the first book--length publication of these drawings.
A visual narrative of Nixon's life, the drawings trace Nixon from his childhood, through his ascent to power, to his years in the White House. They incorporate Henry Kissinger (a pair of glasses), Spiro Agnew (a cone-head), and John Mitchell (a dolt smoking a pipe). They depict Nixon and his cohorts in China, plotting strategy in Key Biscayne, and shamelessly pandering to African Americans, hippies, and elderly tourists.
As Balken discusses in her accompanying essay, these drawings also reflect a dramatic transformation in Guston's work. In response to social unrest and the Vietnam War, he began to question the viability of a private art given to self-expression. His betrayal of aesthetic abstraction in favor of imagery imbued with personal and political meaning largely engendered the renewal of figuration in painting in America in the 1970s. These drawings not only represent one of the few instances of an artist in the late twentieth century engaging caricature in his work, they are also a witty, acerbic take on a corrupt figure and a scandalous political regime.