Philip Guston

Philip Guston ('ust' pronounced like "rust"), born Phillip Goldstein (June 27, 1913 – June 7, 1980), was a Canadian American 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, simplified renderings of personal symbols and objects. His existential, lugubrious paintings after 1968, employing a limited palette, are some of his most well known.

Guston was a lecturer and teacher at a number of universities. He is well regarded for his words and teachings, collected in the 2011 book Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations (Documents of Twentieth-Century Art).