PHILIP GUSTON
(American, born Canada, 1913-1980)
Multiplied, 1972
Oil on canvas
66 x 80 1/2" (167.64 x 204.47 cm.)
Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery
By exchange, Gift of Seymour H. Knox, Jr., 2000

Philip Guston’s career spanned a fifty-year period of radical changes in the art world. Widely acclaimed as a political painter and muralist in the 1930s and 1940s, he was equally lauded in the 1950s and 1960s as one of the most lyrical painters of the abstract expressionist group. Paintings, such as this one, created in the 1970s, were the result of yet another fundamental shift in his art. In an art world dominated by formalist abstraction, Guston’s late paintings, with their quirky colors and comic-book style, proved to be pivotal to the development of expressionist painting in the 1980s.

Born Philip Goldstein in 1913 in Montreal, Canada, the youngest of seven children, his family moved to Los Angeles in 1919. From the age of twelve, Guston drew incessantly, often copying newspaper comic strips. This early interest, coupled with a humanitarian and political consciousness, came full circle in his late work when he abandoned abstraction for this crude, childlike style in richly painted, yet disconcerting, shades of gray, pink, and red. Some of Guston’s recurring images are seen in this painting. A hooded figure (on the far right), bricks (in the form of a wall), the soles of shoes (here they seem to be on legs planted in the ground), and the glowing form of the sun in the background. Guston’s late style was a rebellion against the supposed "purity" of formalist abstraction and reflected his desire to re-introduce narrative and meaning into painting. Initially, critics condemned his use of recognizable imagery and the suggestion of storytelling, but today Guston’s work is lauded as having heralded changes in the art world of the following decade.

— Jennifer Bayles

Copyright © 2003 The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy