Philip Guston and Milton Avery are perhaps the two most famous artists to live and work in Woodstock in the second half of the twentieth century. Unlike Avery, Guston made Woodstock his primary residence, first from 1947 to 1950 then from 1967 until his death. Guston found in Woodstock a kind of seclusion but also camaraderie among artist friends, neighbors, and workmen. Importantly he wished to stay away from the debate and pressures of the New York art world. Philip Guston was on a singular journey to find a new language for painting. He explored expressionistic abstraction in various forms and famously settled into a cartoon like style of heavily applied paint in high key color and strong black outlining. Art scholar Dore Ashton described his work as “comic strip cave man style”.
The artist also maintained a focus on objects, objects arranged informally in a still life format (see works in WAA permanent collection). This exhibit contains one of Guston’s early gouache still lifes done in the mid to late 1930’s. Musa Mayer, the artist’s daughter, in her book Nigth Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston about her father, describes these “water color” still lifes containing fruit, hanging in her grandmother’s home in Los Angels. It is a rare early Guston and contains the hint of black outlining also practiced by artist Paul Burlin whom Guston encountered during his stint in Saint Louis a decade later.
Both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Royal Academy of Art, London hosted a major show of Philip Gustons work during this past year. The importance of this artist and acclaim of his work reaffirm the vitality of Woodstock as a spawning ground of creativity in late twentieth century American art.
Additional note: Paul Burlin exhibited in the 1913 Armory show and spent summers in Woodstock during the 1940’s –JC