National Gallery's curator talks Philip Guston

Philip Guston, Painting, Smoking, Eating (detail), 1973, collection of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 

Close your eyes and visualize for a moment stubby fingers and heads, cigarette butts, an eyeball here, some shoes over there, a lightbulb, flabby, cartoonish fleshly colored characters and parts and what or who comes to mind?

Just the strange world of Philip Guston (1913-1980) whose 225 art works are set to leave the National Gallery of Art on August 27 after a five-months' stay.

Martial Memory, 1941, oil on canvas, Saint Louis Art Museum, Eliza McMillan T

Philip Guston, Martial Memory, 1941, Saint Louis Art Museum, Eliza McMillan Trust.

HauMartial M emory, 1941, oil on canvas, Sainrt Resource, 

Philip Guston, Passage, 1957–1958, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Bequest of Caroline Wiess Law.

The NGA calls him "one of America's greatest modern painters....[and] one of America's most influential modern artists" and has devoted 17,640 square feet of exhibition space on two floors in its East Building for Philip Guston Now.

The arrangements are laid out chronologically following  Guston's style changes, according to Harry Cooper, the Gallery's senior curator and head of the department of modern and contemporary art, who organized the Washington presentation.

"I wanted to tell Guston’s story and show his development as clearly as possible," Cooper emailed.

The Guston show has already run at the Museums of Fine Art in Houston and Boston and when it leaves Washington, will travel to the Tate Modern, London, for its last venue.

Each of the four places approached their presentation of the exhibition differently, Cooper noted.

Philip Guston, Untitled, 1964, National Gallery of Art, Gift of Musa Guston Mayer.

Philip Guston, Untitled, 1968, oil on panel, private collection.

Interest in Guston has grown since the four museums postponed the show scheduled for 2020 because of Guston's Ku Klux Klan works and the clash with culture and turmoil sweeping the U.S. then, largely as a result of the murder in Minneapolis of George Floyd the same year.

Some 2,600 artists protested the postponement. The National Gallery has segregated the KKK drawings in a different gallery with signs warning visitors about their content.

Philip Guston, Untitled, 1968, brush and ink, private collection.

Philip Guston, Head II, 1969, charcoal on paper mounted to paperboard, National Gallery of Art, gift of Edward R. Broida.

Philip Guston, The Studio, 1969, promised gift of Musa Guston Mayer to The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Whether this is a self-portrait like the wall copy says, Mr. Cooper wrote: "I might prefer to call it a self-image because it is obviously not a likeness."

Guston's daughter, Musa Guston Mayer (who has the same first name as her mother and Guston's wife), attended the National Gallery's opening and proclaimed it "a gorgeous exhibition; a beautiful show," complimenting Cooper and the NGA staff.

Mayer was "thrilled" the show would hang for "a significant period of time which would not have happened without the postponement." Mayer is also the president and founder of the Guston Foundation which has promised the Gallery her father's complete Richard Nixon drawings which followed his watershed exhibition in 1970 at the Marlborough Gallery in New York.

There his art announced publicly that Guston was eschewing abstract expressionism for cartoonish figures and anti-heroes which Cooper attributes to "pure courage and conviction and  personal/aesthetic necessity."

(And rather than "abstract impressionism," Mr. Cooper wrote that it is "a term that some critics used to describe Philip Guston’s style of a softer abstract expressionism. I find it misleading because he had no interest in most of the Impressionists.")

Only one of Guston's pieces sold at the Marlborough.  (Not to miss: 12 of the original Marlborough 33 works in the separate gallery.)

Harry Cooper addresses the press at the National Gallery of Art, Mar. 2, 2023 with Guston's Dawn, right, and Caught, left, in the background with colors counter to the originals/By Patricia Leslie

Philip Guston, Painter’s Table, 1973, National Gallery of Art, Gift (Partial and Promised) of Ambassador and Mrs. Donald Blinken in memory of Maurice H. Blinken and in honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art.

Philip Guston,The Ladder (detail), 1978, National  Gallery of Art, Gift of Edward R. Broida. That's Guston's wife's head surfacing on the horizon.

Cooper and Mayer both described Guston's art as "darkening" over time. Said Mayer about her father's change from color to dark colors: "I think it had to do with the darkening times."

Guston had been traumatized by current events, including the Vietnam War; he felt he could not ignore what was happening around him and began a shift from complete abstraction.

In 1968, the year of the Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy assassinations, Guston started painting hooded figures like members of the Ku Klux Klan which he called "self-portraits … I perceive myself as being behind the hood … The idea of evil fascinated me … I almost tried to imagine that I was living with the Klan." 

He is quoted in the catalog and on a Gallery wall:

“So when the 60s came along I was feeling split. Schizophrenic. The [Vietnam] war, what was happening to [in] America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into [a] frustrated fury about everything – and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue."

The Marlborough criticism sent Guston packing to Italy for eight months when, upon returning to the U.S. and inspired by his friend, Philip Roth's novel, Our Gang, the artist began work on his Richard Nixon series.

They are 73 drawings which satirize the president and his henchmen, Henry Kissinger, John Mitchell, and Spiro Agnew, all completed in one year, 1971. The National Gallery has the entirety of the set on the walls on the main East Building floor.

When you go, enter the gallery on your right and circle, ending on the left with "Nixon cookie," "Spiro's Sponge Cake," and "Kissinger Pot Pie." (Those are not to miss!)

Guston planned to make the drawings into a book but held back. Finally, 21 years after his death, they came out in an exhibition and release of Philip Guston's Poor Richard by Deborah Bricker Balken, the University of Chicago Press. (A new edition, Poor Richard by Philip Guston with afterword by Mr. Cooper, is available.**)

Philip Guston, Poor Richard entrance, National Gallery of Art. In the center is Guston's San Clemente, Nixon's escape place after he resigned in 1974. It's the only painting  Guston made of the former president. See below/By Patricia Leslie

Philip Guston, San Clemente, 1975, Glenstone Museum. The wall label notes that Nixon has some pencils in his pocket, possibly a signal from the artist who may have sympathized with a celebrity under fire whose leg is bandaged from ill effects of phlebitis and Washington's attacks. 

Philip Guston, Poor Richard (no. 52), 1971, ink , the Guston Foundation, promised gift to the National Gallery of Art by Musa Guston Mayer. Guston's tatoos on Nixon's arms were prescient,  about 50 years ahead of the tatoo craze.

Philip Guston, Poor Richard (no. 46), 1971, ink , the Guston Foundation, promised gift to the National Gallery of Art by Musa Guston Mayer. Nixon in black face, patronizing black Americans with Spiro Agnew on left, and Henry Kissinger (or is that John Mitchell?), center. Notice hanging objects.

Philip Guston, Poor Richard (no. 37), 1971, ink , the Guston Foundation, promised gift to the National Gallery of Art by Musa Guston Mayer. In center left near the bottom are small letters with the words "Key Biscayne  Aug. 1971". Sink or swim?  Looks like Nixon and Kissinger are sinking, caught by the throes of the monster above, themselves?

At Poor Richard by Philip Guston, National Gallery of Art, Washington/By Patricia Leslie

Musa Guston Mayer welcomes guests to the Guston exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Mar. 2, 2023/By Patricia Leslie

Guston was born in Canada in 1913 where his parents had fled in 1905 to escape persecution in Ukraine.

When Philip was 10, the family moved to Los Angeles where, unable to find work, Guston's father committed suicide by hanging in the same year as the family's move. Whether Philip's mother or Philip himself found his father is debated.  According to the catalog's chronology, a few years later found Philip withdrawing to a closet with a single light bulb to read and to draw when family members came calling.   

Nine years later his brother died in a car accident.

When asked whether his father's death affected Guston's art, Cooper replied:

"Deeply. Look at the essay I wrote for the catalogue of the 2000 Yale-Harvard show, which was reprinted in the journal October. [Not easily accessible.] Most basically, I think his interest in hanging things (light bulbs, pull cords on shades) refers back to this trauma."

Once you are made aware of these objects and their connections to Guston's past, they seem to appear in almost every piece of his art.

Although several references, including label copy at the exhibition, say Guston was self-taught, Dr. Cooper said Guston "is not self-taught. He went to an arts high school (where he was friends with Jackson Pollock) and then went to Otis College of Art and Design for a few months."


Wikipedia says that at Los Angeles Manual Arts High School, he and Pollock protested the school's emphasis on sports vs. art and both were expelled, however, the catalog says only Pollock was caught and expelled but later graduated. Guston's graduation is not listed in the catalog.

Encouraged by Pollack to move east, Mr. Guston relocated to New York in 1936 where he quickly found work for the Federal Art Project as a muralist. Later, he joined abstract expressionists to create art representing the unconscious rather than reality or "inner" concepts rather than "outer" concepts.

Forty institutions and private collectors loaned art for the show, but the National Gallery has up 30 more than any of the other showplaces, including Guston's last works, single images made in 1980, the year he died. 

In an auditorium at the exhibition, an enthralling documentary, Philip Guston: A Life Lived (58 minutes, 1981), by Michael Blackwood runs continuously and features long interviews with Guston. In it the artist says art flowed from him; he was a mere vessel of transmittal.

The highest price ever paid for a Guston work was $25.8 million at Christie’s in 2013 for the abstract painting To Fellini (1958). His Smoking II (1973) sold for $7.65 million at Phillips in New York in 2019, neither of which appears in the show.


The Terra Foundation for American Art is a major sponsor of the international exhibition.

Out of respect for Black History Month in February, the Gallery postponed the opening of the exhibition until March of this year.

*The catalog, Philip Guston Now ($65), sold in the gift shops, is hardcover with 280 pages, most in color, a comprehensive chronology of Guston's life, and the lead essay by Harry Cooper.

**Also see Poor Richard by Philip Guston, $21, paperback, 73 drawings which Amazon calls " a monument of contemporary satirical art and virtuoso drawing."

What: Philip Guston Now

When: Through August 27, 2023. The National Gallery hours are 10 a.m. - 5 p.m. daily.

Where: East Building Concourse and Ground Floor, National Gallery of Art, 6th and Constitution, Washington

How much: Admission is always free at the National Gallery of Art.

Metro stations for the National Gallery of Art:
Smithsonian, Federal Triangle, Navy Memorial-Archives, or L'Enfant Plaza

For more information: (202) 737-4215

Accessibility information: (202) 842-6905


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