Philip Guston
Philip Guston was born Philip Goldstein in Montreal, Canada, in 1913 to Russian emigrés from Odessa. The family moved to Los Angeles in 1919. In 1925, he took a correspondence course in cartooning. As a high school student in 1927 he made friends with Jackson Pollock. After both were expelled for distributing a broadside that satirized the English department, Guston studied on his own. He had his first solo exhibition at Stanley Rose's bookshop and gallery in Los Angeles in 1931. He joined the mural division of the WPA in 1935 and over the next seven years completed various mural commissions, having moved to New York at Pollock's urging in 1937. Beginning in 1940, Guston taught at several colleges throughout the United States; in 1975 he received the Distinguished Teaching of Art Award from the College Art Association. In 1951, Guston painted his first abstract works, which lead to the first solo exhibition of his abstract work at the Peridot Gallery in New York. In 1967, Guston relocated permanently to Woodstock, New York, and gradually shifted from abstraction to cartoon-like still lifes and figure studies. Guston died in Woodstock in 1980.
National Museum of American Art (CD-ROM) (New York and Washington D.C.: MacMillan Digital in cooperation with the National Museum of American Art, 1996
