Philip Guston (Modern Masters Series, Vol 11)

Rating:
Summary: Great intro to Guston
Review: Given most art criticism, which focuses on theory with polysyllabic intensity, this book is a perfect, easy to read intro to the artist and one that makes his work more accessible. Don't fear to immerse yourself in this fine, brief bio and its color pics!

Rating:
Summary: Great intro to Guston
Review: Given most art criticism, which focuses on theory with polysyllabic intensity, this book is a perfect, easy to read intro to the artist and one that makes his work more accessible. Don't fear to immerse yourself in this fine, brief bio and its color pics!

Rating:
Summary: Very good history
Review: Philip Guston's long career had three distinctive phases. As a young man, he took up painting with the WPA artist program and made left-leaning, social-realist murals and canvases in many places around the country. By the late 1940's, he had moved on to abstraction, producing shimmering, painterly works that were somewhere between the dynamism of Jackson Pollock and the stillness of Mark Rothko. In the last ten years of his life, influenced by the restlessness of the 60's, he painted Robert Crumb-like cartoonish images that hinted at even darker comic nightmares than Crumb ever imagined (and, more occasionally, the uplifting power of love and idealism). This last phase may have been the best of all. Storr's great book is an excellent exegesis of all three of these hard-to-follow transitions, by an artist that simply did not make analysis easy. The mostly full-color illustrations complement the text almost perfectly.

Rating:
Summary: Very good history
Review: Philip Guston's long career had three distinctive phases. As a young man, he took up painting with the WPA artist program and made left-leaning, social-realist murals and canvases in many places around the country. By the late 1940's, he had moved on to abstraction, producing shimmering, painterly works that were somewhere between the dynamism of Jackson Pollock and the stillness of Mark Rothko. In the last ten years of his life, influenced by the restlessness of the 60's, he painted Robert Crumb-like cartoonish images that hinted at even darker comic nightmares than Crumb ever imagined (and, more occasionally, the uplifting power of love and idealism). This last phase may have been the best of all. Storr's great book is an excellent exegesis of all three of these hard-to-follow transitions, by an artist that simply did not make analysis easy. The mostly full-color illustrations complement the text almost perfectly.