The Easel

How Philip Guston, America’s Great Painter of the Night, Completely Reinvented the Sublime

Philip Guston was slow to join abstract expressionism and, by the late 1950’s, desperate to leave. “A battle of wills with his art” over the next decade saw him emerge as a figurative painter. He was now all set for “what is perhaps the greatest last-act in 20th-century American art history: Guston’s all-hell-broken-loose id-under-pressure late figurative paintings.“ Images are here.