Philip Guston
Subtitle: The studio
By: Craig Burnett
Series: One work series; One work
Publisher: Afterall Books
Published: 2014
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 101
ISBN-13: 9781846381348; 9781846381331
Subjects: History and criticism
Description: Philip Guston's The Studio (1969) depicts a member of the Ku Klux Klan painting a self-portrait. Darkly comic, crude and complex, The Studio is a key work in Guston's shift from abstract expressionism to his late figurative style. In this generously illustrated book, Craig Burnett examines Guston's engagement with the history and limitations of painting during the last decade of his life. Burnett reflects that The Studio signals not only a broader historical moving away from the medium-centric claims of modernist abstraction but also a personal shift to subject matter that was discursive, playful and carnivalesque. He argues that The Studio's existential 'play of self' and 'Kierkegaardian despair' is counter-balanced by the lure of compositional coherence to be found within paintings by artists such as Piero della Francesca, among others. Finally Burnett focuses on 'a passage of supreme poetry', the column of smoke central to The Studio, its importanceas a compositional device and its presence as a ghost of abstraction."
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.