Philip Guston

Philip Guston — born Phillip Goldstein on June 27, 1913, in Montreal, Canada, and active until his death on June 7, 1980, in Woodstock, New York — was a painter, muralist, printmaker, and draftsman whose work traced one of the most dramatic and consequential arcs in twentieth-century American art. Over five decades, he moved from socially engaged figuration in the 1930s through the gestural abstraction of the Abstract Expressionist movement, before making a decisive and controversial return to figurative painting in his final years. That late turn, far from a retreat, proved to be among the most searching and politically charged work of his career.

Central to Guston's mature practice was a willingness to use image-making as a vehicle for moral and political reckoning. The Nixon drawings — produced primarily between 1971 and 1972 in ink, graphite, and related drawing media — stand as a defining example of this impulse. A body of work that deploys caricature and dark humor to dissect Richard Nixon and the machinery of American power, the complete series was entrusted to the Musée national Picasso-Paris for the exhibition Philip Guston: The Irony of History, which ran from October 14, 2025, through March 1, 2026, and also featured previously unseen works. The show was supported by the Philip Guston Foundation, the active foundation formed in 2013 that, under the stewardship of his daughter Musa Mayer, oversees the artist's legacy, maintains a digital catalogue raisonné spanning his five-decade career, and facilitates exhibitions and publications worldwide.

Guston's estate is represented by Hauser & Wirth, Zurich, in a relationship that has been in place since 2015, following earlier primary representation by McKee Gallery in New York. Recent solo exhibitions at Hauser & Wirth have included Philip Guston: Room, Sea & Sky and Philip Guston: Singularities, both in 2024, as well as Philip Guston: 1969–1979, each offering sustained attention to distinct periods and dimensions of his output. A major retrospective at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth is scheduled to run from October 31, 2026, through August 15, 2027, underscoring the sustained institutional commitment to his work. Critical engagement has remained vigorous, with substantial reviews and essays appearing in publications including The Art Newspaper, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and Flash Art. Musa Mayer's forthcoming memoir Life with P. Journals, 1966–1976, announced in connection with a 2026 reading, adds a significant personal dimension to the growing body of scholarship surrounding his life and practice. A bequest of Guston's work by Musa Guston to the Rose Art Museum further attests to the care with which his legacy has been placed in institutional hands.