Philip
Guston

Philip Guston’s multifaceted oeuvre is inspired by Mexican revolutionary murals and work by German painter Max Beckmann and Pablo Picasso. Alongside Pollock and De Kooning, in the 1930s he was making abstract paintings with broad strokes on large-format canvases. He returned to figurative art in the late 1960s.

A painter and illustrator, Guston is considered a founder of Abstract Expressionism. His politically committed work includes denunciations of the Ku Klux Klan and political cartoons (targeting President Richard Nixon in particular).

Philip Guston’s first retrospective was held in 1962 at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. The second, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1980, travelled to Washington, Chicago, Denver and New York. His work is being shown for the first time by the Pinault Collection at the “Untitled, 2020” exhibition at the Punta della Dogana, Venice (2020).