In Conversation: Robert Storr’s ‘Philip Guston: A Life Spent Painting’

  • 15 September 2020

Celebrating the release of the new publication from Laurence King, ‘Philip Guston: A Life Spent Painting,’ Hauser & Wirth hosted a live conversation with the monograph’s author, Robert Storr, and celebrated artists Carroll Dunham, Mark Thomas Gibson, Amy Sillman, and moderated by Alexi Worth.

This new survey of  Philip Guston’s pivotal and evermore widely recognized career takes full advantage of biographical details that have recently come to light, and ongoing debates about key dimensions of the artist’s oeuvre and the context in which it emerged.

Most notable among them are the much vexed questions of the politics of New York School paintings in the aftermath of World War II, the gendered myths of Abstract Expressionism, and the hotly contested relation of ‘High Art’ to ‘Popular Culture’ for which Guston became a lightning rod after he abandoned his elegant, often elegiac gestural improvisations of the 1950s and 1960s for raucous cartoon-based symbolism of the 1970s featuring iconic, anti-heroic images of the artist as a beleaguered and bewildered brute.

Learn more about ‘Philip Guston: A Life Spent Painting,’ and explore the online exhibition ‘Philip Guston. What Endures.’