Night Studio

by Musa Mayer

The author shares her memories of her father, describes his career as a painter, and depicts his attitudes towards art

Genres: Art, Biography, Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography Memoir, Art History

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1988

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

[Amy]

I added this book to my "read" shelf though I only read enough to know that it's too painful to read from start to finish. I say this because the biography is written by Guston's daughter, whom he didn't want initially. He treated her with great affection and great coldness/selfishness alternately throughout her life. Ditto for his devoted wife. This must be the conundrum of the great artist--one cannot be a good person and a great artist. Is this really true? How dismal. I also cannot absorb the book in its entirety because I once wanted to be a great poet and now I will settle to be a minor player, and I know this to be true of my gift. If one is a truly great artist, then one almost must be an asshole in order to devote time to the creation. But if the gift is not present to a degree of greatness, then throwing your life away being a jerk and devoting yourself to the pursuit of mediocre art is a tragedy.

Coincidentally, there is an exhibit at the St. Louis Art Museum of American abstract painters that I cannot wait to see. Guston, of course, is among them.

[Pat · Rating 5 out of 5]

I couldn't put this book down. I read it because I was interested in Philip Guston but I loved it because of his daughter, Musa Mayer. While organizing his estate, she comes to terms with her own feelings for this great painter who was also her father.

[Peaches · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book so much. It was one of my favorite books I read this year, and with Charlie. Musa paints such an honest portrait of her father, and the many dimensions of his personality and tells her story of how her life was shaped by him. No one could have written this biography of Philip Guston like she did. Stunning.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

i devoured this. an eloquent, honest, moving, astute account by the author about growing up as the daughter of one of the 20th century's most interesting artists, while also revealing much about that artist's process, themes, development.

[Alex Wexelman · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite artist is Philip Guston. I don't have many tattoos—maybe seven—but one is of a Guston hand smoking a cigar, the tendrils of smoke floating off the ignited Freudian object in curlicues. That said, reading Night Studio, a biography of Philp Guston, written by his lone kin, daughter Musa Mayer was an eye-opening experience. I had read a lot about the artist before: his own words and others' impressions, but never had I read such a personal account of Guston.

Mayer wrote Night Studio (1988) in the same creative writing program at Columbia, from which I am soon to graduate. Composed of recollections, research, and new interviews with Guston's friends, the biography gets at the heart of the larger-than-life man who scandalized the art world with his 1970 Marlborough show and died a footnote in the story of Abstract Expressionism but who now is a titan of 20th-century art.

Mayer, at the end of her 247 pages on her father, writes, "For everything depends on the redemptive power of Art." She doesn't want to praise the myth of her father, but also doesn't want to bury the man who pushed her away and live with that guilt. "[I]n my life, I have worshipped, hated, and loved my father. I have run form him and I have run toward him. I have tried, desperately, to attract his attention. I have tried to ignore him. In the end, none of this matters. He will always be with me."

Night Studio is poignant. It's not just the story of the life of Philip Guston but also the story of the life of Musa Mayer. It's filled with ups and downs. Guston was a selfish man at times and he was dedicated to his work like no other. This meant that those close to him were often punished for taking up space. It's a sad story. But it's also redemptive and filled with love for its subject. It's a great piece of hybrid biography that I'll sit with for years to come.

[David Curry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston, written by the artist’s daughter Musa Mayer, presents Guston as a father who was essentially absent even when present, self-absorbed and involved in his art to the exclusion of his family. Mayer keeps coming back to that grievance, and it pretty quickly wears thin. What saves the booK is the author’s informed portrayal of the New York City art scene in the last half of the Twentieth Century.

Surely I’m not alone in feeling that among the chief allures of memoirs or biographies are gossip and anecdotes. Some highlights:

“One night at a party, according to friends, (Jackson) Pollack actually tried to push my father out an upper-story window during a drunken fight over who was the greatest painter.”

More on drinking: “Heavy drinking had, according to Elaine de Kooning, become epidemic by then. ‘None of us had any experience with drinking, and then the liquor began to flow, free liquor at openings. Getting drunk was exhilarating.’ She shakes her head, remembering, and tells me about the time at the Cedar bar when Franz Kline had called her over one midnight, just as she was trying to leave. ‘A waiter came over and Franz said, ‘We’ll have twelve Scotch and sodas.’ The waiter said, ‘Are you expecting more people?’ And Franz said, ‘No, for US. Six for her and six for me.’ “

I’m glad Mayer included this anecdote from her own life: “My first real boyfriend , John Rifkin, was something of a musical prodigy. Known later for his recording of Scott Joplin’s piano rags, he was a talented pianist and composer in high school, and interested in electronic music when it was barely known in the United States …. It was Josh who showed me how to sneak into Carnegie Hall through the Recital Hall next door, where he would invariably find us an empty box in the Dress Circle. Once we were seated, with the Philharmonic tuning up below us, he would open one of the scores he’d borrowed from the library for that evening’s performance, whip a baton from his pocket, and proceed to conduct the entire concert from his pilfered seat.” (The sentence beginning with “It was Josh” could use some editing to get us from the Recital Hall to the auditorium, but nonetheless it’s a memorable anecdote.)

I don’t believe I’ve ever before seen this quote from New Yorker art critic Harold Rosenberg, one of the two most influential art critics of the time, because if I had seen it I couldn’t possibly have forgotten it: “At a certain moment, the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act — rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze, or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” Kudos, Rosenberg. That should hold up in art history courses for the foreseeable future.

An October 1970 exhibit of Guston’s recent work at New York’s Marlborough Gallery drew mostly negative reaction. Hilton Kramer’s review in The New York Times, under the headline “A Mandarin Pretending to Be a Stumblebum,” was particularly dismissive. Years later, Guston said: “He did a real hatchet job. I had asked the gallery not to send any clippings. We were in Venice in November and in a weak moment I went to American Express for mail. The ‘Xerox underground’ had caught up with me and in it was the article from the Times. I was angry for about half an hour and then I threw it in one of the canals.”

In addition to her own memories, Mayer conducted interviews and relied on others’ interviews, correspondence, newspaper and magazine articles, and other sources, all dutifully recorded in endnotes. She isn’t shy when it comes to raising doubts about some of her interviewees’ memories.when they conflict with her own.

[Beverly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Musa Mayer does a superb job of outlining Philip Guston’s amazing career while revealing his intense feelings about his work, his hunger for privacy, and his wife. He remained a lonely figure and essentially remote to his only child. She writes a lot about her feelings and relationship with her father, yet never allows this to be mainly about her but as a way to understand her father. A model biography/memoir.

[Connie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though I've been drawn to his work for decades, I didn't know much about the artist himself until reading this biography.

His daughter wrote that Guston was a gregarious character, charming, narcissistic, devoted to his art above all else and everybody else. Including her.

I'm incredibly drawn to his images, his metaphors, and how incisive his work is, while simultaneously being repulsed by his treatments of those closest to him.

We humans are complicated.

[Lora Arbrador · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a masterful work seamlessly weaving Meyer's own story with biography about her father Philip Guston. She is brutally honest while still exposing his genius as well as flaws and self-doubt. She captures the angst of the creative process and her own search for meaning and right livelihood. The book never sags and the writing is impeccable.

[Sue Dale · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my bestest ever reads. Bought on my trip to USA NYC where I became obsessed with Gustons work after seeing it in real life. Since then I have shared it with someone & never returned. You are sorely missed☹️

[Z Yama · Rating 4 out of 5]

Living with an artist, the action of art making, and the afterlives of art. Less about understanding Guston’s work and more about the circumstances of his life. Good writing on creativity and its imbalances.

[Julia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Memorable book, I believe. Simple Freudian problem underlies the narrative. The author is likely aware of it, but will never admit it to herself. If she were pretty like her mother, and had better taste, her artist father would’ve liked her more.

[Clara Talajic · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this one, sometimes painful but very honest and insightful

[Kyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Musa Mayer is the daughter of painter Philip Guston and poet/painter/mother Musa Guston. Her memoir “Night Studio” is a memoir of Philip Guston, but also a memoir of her own experience with Philip Guston as a person, and having one of the last artists who fulfilled the bad-boy painter, tortured genius, Abstract-Expressionist cliche for a father. The memoir is notable in its split personality and its (totally understandable) inability to judge Philip Guston as a human being — the painter remains both the neglectful father/borderline emotionally abusive, cheating husband and the towering genius of modern art, the artist who might be the biggest touchstone of contemporary painting.

The story itself is great, though. To immerse yourself into the book is to dive into a very mid-20th-century version of bohemia. There’s the studio/house in Woodstock, New York, there are the intermittent visits to the Cedar Tavern and the brushes with Jackson Pollock that Musa experiences as a result of her father (whom she refers to by his first name). These scenes out in the woods are striking and beautiful but also poignant as Musa depicts three separate people, mother, father, daughter, sequestering themselves in their own studios and pursuing their own thoughts.

Elsewhere, there are the tales of wandering the woods with Musa Guston, collecting the organic odds and ends that formed the remainder of her creative output. There’s how Musa caught the end of the folkie era in Greenwich village and ended up with her father’s friend’s son for a first husband. There’s little sense of danger in the narrative, or of her testing her own creative output or attempting to forge her own path; Musa seems to tail off painting and art-making the moment her father fails to complement it.

That’s not to say there couldn’t be — Musa has a harrowing emotional life. It’s just not the subject of the book. Maybe it could have been.

The overwhelming conflict of the memoir is Musa’s struggle to find any sort of adequacy in relation to her father’s shadow. I don’t think Musa ever escaped, for one moment, her father’s shadow, but maybe the reason it was so natural for her to stay there was because she had been brought up under him, her needs subjugated so clearly to his own. The resolution of the book comes when Musa resolves to complete her father’s catalogue raisonne, researching and documenting every work he had ever made. There’s an ironic poetry in the conclusion that the author accepts, but one still gets the sense that the principal focus/source of the memoir is not, in the end, Musa herself, but Philip, as reflected in Musa. I guess that’s the “a memoir of Philip Guston” subhead.

Those wanting to get a personal experience into the life and personal impact of a Great Artist should pick this one up right away. The book should also divulge some of the lies of that myth, and is more valuable for it.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

for now, a few excerpts to illustrate:

"...the underlying reality was always this: that we lived with a great and irresistable force that my father claimed and yet didn't claim as his own, a force that moved through him, that tormented and exalted him, and all of us."

"And then he becomes an ordinary man again, imperfect, flawed, someone to rage against and forgive. Someone to grieve for. Then he becomes, simply, my father.

But it never sticks. Philip Guston was more than my father."

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's so sad...not burst into tears sad, but I've never felt so sorry for someone before. The author is the daughter of an abstract impressionist painter and is basically unwanted and just gets in the way. I hope there's some sort of resolution...

[Baanoo · Rating 4 out of 5]

5 stars for content. -1 star for Musa's loop that she writes herself into (becoming particularly clear and exhausting towards the very end of the book). Guston was a fascinating person, though, and a brilliant artist, however, and it was a really insightful text.

[Bonnie Wright · Rating 3 out of 5]

I learned that I am very glad I was not married to Philip Guston. He was a brilliant artist (I think ) but . . .

[Lucy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written by Philip Guston's daughter, Musa - lived and painted in Woodstock - hung out with Philip Roth - good read.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

really true

[Ally · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love learning the back story on great creative minds. This book about Guston was great!