Philip Guston
Abandoned admired abstraction in 1970 for hoods, shoes and cigarettes, and was pilloried for it.
Philip Guston was born Phillip Goldstein in Montreal in 1913 to Ukrainian Jewish emigrants and grew up in Los Angeles, where he was at school with Jackson Pollock. He painted murals in the 1930s, then became one of the more lyrical Abstract Expressionists, with shimmering clusters of pink and grey brushmarks that were widely admired. In 1970 he showed a body of cartoon-like figurative paintings at Marlborough in New York — hooded Klansmen driving around smoking, piles of legs, light bulbs, the bottom of a shoe — and the reception was brutal. It is now the work he is principally valued for. He died in 1980.
Paintings are unique and the division between the abstract 1950s and 60s and the late figurative work is the first thing any valuation establishes, since they are effectively two markets under one name. Drawings are numerous and important in their own right, including the very reduced pure drawings of the late 1960s. The prints are few. Late canvases were often painted with commercial oil on cotton duck and the surfaces are matte and unforgiving of retouching. The Guston Foundation holds the archive and the catalogue raisonne work.
If you own a work by Philip Guston
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.