Musa Meyer, Philip Guston’s daughter, wrote an engrossing but brutal memoir about her experience growing up with an artist whose first priority was his work. The critic, novelist and poet Ross Feld wrote a beautiful book about his friendship with the artist and the art itself. Both of these both books brought more depth to the earthshaking experience of standing in front of his paintings.
So I snatched a few more books, “Philip Guston’s Late Work: A Memoir” by the poet William Corbett and “Telling Stories: Philip Guston’s Later Works” by David Kaufmann, the latter too dense in high brow criticism but the subject matter is thrilling.
Amazon thought I might like the recently released “Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations”. I do. It’s the Gutson mother load. Great artists (Rembrandt, Matisse, and Guston) get better with age, they certainly don’t retire. Just look at the amazing Guston trajectory. Guston was a painter first but also a teacher and somewhat of a philosophy nut so his lectures knock me out. His casual conversation, say hanging with Morton Feldman and a cassette recorder, knocks me out. It’s all here.
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