Whether the Guston myth (that he was quite so singular and in opposition to the art of his times) is entirely true, he definitely seems super-relevant to today.

And I suppose in the Collected Writings there's a lot of repetition and this smaller Penguin edition has the important stuff; the interview with Rosenberg, and the Studio Notes.The editorial model adopted—allow someone else to do all the work, then conveniently “forget” the fact—no doubt helps to keep overheads low, but should we really be happy that the accountants have won again? Guston, one of the most influential and provocative American artists of the 20th century, had turned his back on the hip New York scene.

Remember that when Guston had his first 'stumble-bum' exhibition there was lots of exciting figurative painting and image-making happening. This book captures the breadth and depth of his thinking, and also captures the feeling of an intensely lively era when artists like Cage, Feldman and Guston felt that making art was a branch of philosophy. Its lack of introduction or contextual detail, aside from Coolidge’s brief notes carried over from the previous publication, isolates Guston’s statements as aphorisms or nuggets of adaptable wisdom. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. No reader could finish the book with a sense of Guston as a painter with a singular and unwavering vision of his work and its place in the world.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Usually I don’t mind reading things like this even if I’m not familiar with the artist but I genuinely felt like I was retaining zero information from this. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

During his lifetime he seemed an outsider, but now the world of painting seems to have regrouped around him. His foregrounding of doubt – about what he was painting, which often shifted in the making, or what his own work was about, or what motivated him to do it at all – was what infused his late paintings with the ability to generate new ideas in the heads and hands of others. His declaration that ‘I think of my pictures as a kind of figuration’ is borne out in the works he was making at the time, many of which have matter-of-fact titles ( Table, Vessel, Branch, all 1960) that are worlds away from the highfalutin sublimity of those of his New York School peers.The latest edition of the Yogyakarta biennial explores ‘Titen’, a Javanese word for the art (or science? Figurative painting allowed him to do in art what he’d always loved about talking: to lurch from subject to subject, to butt up against contradictions, to make wisecracks, to repeat himself. Whereas the UCal book was a labor of love, some years in the making—the cassette and reel-to-reel recordings were transcribed, and the book edited, by Guston’s close friend, the poet Clark Coolidge—one suspects that I Paint was whipped up in a matter of minutes. Even the earliest talk included here, his interview with David Sylvester from 1960, which took place during Guston’s abstract phase, seems to tee up his later practice. It felt weird hearing him describe the speed he could churn them out although that’s also part of why I chose it for the project, lol.

Dialogues – with interlocutors like his friends Harold Rosenberg or Clark Coolidge, or with his students at Boston University or the Yale Summer School of Music and Art – allowed Guston to play out in a public forum the equivocations that informed the paintings made in the privacy of the studio.

Guston is again someone you would like to invite for dinner and who would entertain and light up the evening with endless reflections and digressions about art. Philip Guston (June 27, 1913 – June 7, 1980) was a painter and printmaker in the New York School, which included many of the abstract expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.