I Paint What I Want to See: Philip Guston (Penguin Modern Classics)

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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. Get the Coolidge/U Cal edition instead, which is properly edited and includes so many great pieces that don't appear in this throwaway rip-off, like Guston's panel talk in Philadelphia and his conversation with Bill Berkson. So here we are, I am not the biggest fan of his work but there is something about artists, people who produce art, breath art, live art, and of course always think about art, that makes their discussions, thoughts and writings about art, absolutely fascinating. I am not crazy about Philip Guston's work (Philip Guston says that of Ronald Kitaj's work on page 211, Kitaj, whose work I am crazy about), I am not crazy about Guston's work, I mean, who am I to say this, but it is just that I find it crude (to use the words of Harold Rosenberg in this very book), and I generally struggle to connect with his paintings. If you love art, or if you are an artist, if you love Guston’s work or even if you don’t like it so much, you will enjoy this book.

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. Philip Guston, one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century, spoke about art with unparalleled candour and commitment.

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. 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. If his paintings are always saying ‘Yes, but…’ (to quote the title of Dore Ashton’s essential 1976 book about the artist), so too is Guston.

The latest edition of the Yogyakarta biennial explores ‘Titen’, a Javanese word for the art (or science? Got about halfway before losing interest due to it feeling repetitive caused by it being a collection of his interviews and talks.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Remember that when Guston had his first 'stumble-bum' exhibition there was lots of exciting figurative painting and image-making happening. Or, was the whole world and everything in it set into an us-or-them binary arrangement because of the Cold War? 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.

During his lifetime he seemed an outsider, but now the world of painting seems to have regrouped around him. Philip Guston, one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, spoke about art with unparalleled candour and commitment. Abstract at times, there were moments when I had no idea what he was on about, but others where he was irresistibly captivating. 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. Not a review—Guston’s writings and talks are wonderful—but a note to alert the interested reader to the fact that everything in I Paint What I Want to See can be found in Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations, published by the University of California Press in 2010 (this latter book also includes additional material, the editor’s selection of accompanying images, and an Introduction by Dore Ashton).No criptic arty language but relatable and approachable writing about making a painting, this proves to me that's mostly art critics that makes art a difficult subject, for artist it all more simple. 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? To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. When asked about the subjects of these late paintings, he’s as confounded as anyone – ‘I don’t know what the hell it looks like’, he says, of a painting of a shoe – but that’s just what he loved about making them.