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

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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. The postponement of Guston’s 2020 retrospective, the arguments around which need no further reheating here, cast the artist as a less nuanced protagonist than either his works or his words suggest, in part thanks to the social media context in which those arguments played out.Even the earliest talk included here, his interview with David Sylvester from 1960, which took place during Guston’s abstract phase, seems to tee up his later practice.

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.Guston, one of the most influential and provocative American artists of the 20th century, had turned his back on the hip New York scene. The wealth of information on the creative process, metaphysics, philosophy, art, painting, and anything similar is honestly unreal. 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. Faith, Hope, and Impossibility and On Morton Feldman are two essays I think every artist should read. His repeated (and perhaps willed) endorsement of ‘frustration’ as a crucial artistic ingredient in the mid-1960s gives way, by the end of the decade, to an outpouring of large-scale paintings he repeatedly admitted to being baffled by.