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.
Read more about this topic: Philip Guston
Famous quotes containing the words early, career and/or influences:
“The science, the art, the jurisprudence, the chief political and social theories, of the modern world have grown out of Greece and Rome—not by favor of, but in the teeth of, the fundamental teachings of early Christianity, to which science, art, and any serious occupation with the things of this world were alike despicable.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“I don’t believe in villains or heroes, only in right or wrong ways that individuals are taken, not by choice, but by necessity or by certain still uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances and their antecedents.”
—Tennessee Williams (1914–1983)