Philip Guston ─ Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations

With his gift for stories and wordplay, Philip Guston (1913-1980) left many recorded talks, conversations, and notes written to himself in his studio. Over the course of his life, Guston's wide reading in literature and philosophy deepened his commitment to his artufrom his early abstract expressionist paintings to his later gritty, intense figurative works. This collection of dialogues, talks, and writings lets us hear the voice of one of the most intellectually adventurous and poetically gifted of modern painters as he delivers a lecture on Renaissance painting, instructs students in a classroom setting, and discusses artists and writers such as Piero della Francesca, Chirico, Picasso, Kafka, Beckett, and Gogol. Introduced with an overview of Guston's life and work by Dore Ashton, these commentaries demonstrate why his words matter and at the same time provide a compelling perspective on art itself.

Clark Coolidge's many volumes of poetry and prose include Counting on Planet Zero, Now It's Jazz, and Space. His collaboration with Philip Guston, Baffling Means: Writings/Drawings, was published in 1991.

Dore Ashton is Professor of Art History at the Cooper Union.