Guston, Philip, 1913-1980

Philip Guston, born Phillip Goldstein (June 27, 1913 – June 7, 1980), was a painter and printmaker in the New York School, an art movement that included many abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. In the late 1960s Guston helped to lead a transition from abstract expressionism to neo-expressionism in painting, abandoning so-called "pure abstraction" in favor of more representational, cartoonish renderings of various personal situations, symbols and objects.

He is known for his cartoonish paintings of an existential, lugubrious nature that employed a limited palette and were created in the period after 1968. Moreover, he was a lecturer and teacher at a number of universities.