Philip Guston

by Musa Mayer

Written by Musa Mayer – Philip Guston's daughter and President of the Guston Foundation – this book brings Guston's life and his hugely rich and diverse output together into one succinct volume.

Split into three sections covering Guston's early career, his mid-century Abstract Expressionist work, and his controversial but now hugely influential late period, the book offers a complete introduction and overview of a mercurial figure.

128 pages, Paperback

Published October 13, 2020

About the author

Musa Mayer is an author, advocate, and 14-year breast cancer survivor. She left a career as a mental health counselor to pursue an MFA from Columbia University in writing. While she was a student at Columbia, she published her first book, Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston, her own story of growing up in the New York art world of the 1950s. Less than a year later, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She has since published two books on breast cancer: her 1993 memoir, Examining Myself: One Woman's Story of Breast Cancer Treatment and Recovery, Advanced Breast Cancer: A Guide to Living with Metastatic Disease (O'Reilly & Associates, 1998), the only book of its kind; and her latest, After Breast Cancer: Answers to the Questions You're Afraid to Ask. In After Breast Cancer, Mayer explores the the feelings of uncertainty and fear that breast cancer patients commonly face after treatment. She offers survival statistics and the voices of 40 breast cancer survivors to help readers cope and thrive.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although this volume was written by Philip Guston's daughter, it's a fairly straightforward introduction to the life and work of the artist. A good place to start if you know nothing about Guston, but otherwise nothing extraordinary.

[Jiyan · Rating 4 out of 5]

To reduce the book to a small section, the middle period featured here is perhaps a great study of whiteness in its status as signifier, from the pure white of subjects' klan hoods, to the cadmium red of their 'white' skin, the same colour as their cadmium red bloodstains. The same cadmium red of the cityscapes they aimlessly drive through. These figures smoke, bored, sit around beside windows in bizarrely normal, disturbingly relatable, postures.

Their smoke drifts from their room to the city outside. The lines their eyes peek through become the windows of the high-rise buildings behind them. In his cityscapes of Italy, it is impossible to differentiate between hoods and buildings and disembodied limbs.

Later in the book's collection, we see Guston as cyclops, a huge, bloated eye staring blankly into void, a massive 'dumb' (in his terms) head separate from any body.

Reminds me of season 3 of Atlanta, interrogating whiteness as a signifier without reducing anyone down to just this signifier itself. Surely an important influence on contemporary Afrosurrealist cinema.

And it's written by his daughter! Cool!

[Janet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Philip Guston's work has intrigued me for some time. I wasn't able to comprehend the strangely figurative works with the fleshy red colors that he used. The book, Philip Guston, gave me some insights as to how his work developed from abstraction to more figurative works. I found it interesting to learn of his regard for Pop Art and how it affected him and fellow abstractionists. The illustrations of his works were accompanied by explanations of his imagery.