Philip Guston - Early Career and Influences

Early Career and Influences

As an 18-year-old, politically aware painter, Guston made an indoor mural in L.A. - for the John Reed Club -, depicting the Scottsboro Boys. This mural was defaced by local police officers, which impacted Guston's political and social outlook.

In 1934, Guston, as Philip Goldstein, along with Reuben Kadish, joined the poet and friend Jules Langsner in a trip to Mexico where they were given a 1,000-square-foot (93 m2) wall in the former summer palace of the Emperor Maximilian in the state capital of Morelia, where they produced the impressive The Struggle Against Terror, an antifascist mural clearly influenced by the work of Siqueiros. A two-page review in Time magazine quoted Siqueiros describing them as ‘the most promising painters in either the US or Mexico’. While in Mexico he also met and spent time with Frieda Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera.

In 1934-35, Guston and Kadish completed another mural at City of Hope, at the time a tuberculosis hospital located in Duarte, California, that remains to this day. In September 1935 he moved to New York where he worked as an artist in the WPA program. During this period his work included strong references to Renaissance painters such as Paolo Uccello, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, and Giotto. He was also influenced by American Regionalists and Mexican mural painters.

A powerful and enduring influence, whom Guston was to acknowledge throughout his career, was Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico. Musa Mayer, Guston's daughter, recalled in her book Night Studio: A memoir of Philip Guston how the artist kept a De Chirico monograph in his studio, to which he would often refer.