I Paint What I Want to See

Philip Guston was born in Montreal, Quebec in 1913, the seventh child of Russian immigrants. Raised in Los Angeles and largely self-taught, he found inspiration for his early murals in the masters of the Italian Renaissance. Early acclaim as a figurative painter and years spent teaching in the mid-West were followed by a Prix de Rome in 1948-49, after which he moved permanently to New York and turned to abstraction, joining contemporaries Pollock, De Kooning, Kline and Rothko. In the mid-1960s, Guston withdrew from the New York art scene to work on his late figurative paintings in Woodstock until his death in 1980, weeks after the opening of a major retrospective. His work and writings continue to exert a powerful influence over contemporary artists, and he is widely acknowledged as one of the most important American painters of the past century.