Philip Guston’s Lines of Poetry

A Hauser & Wirth exhibition titled “Life With P. - Philip Guston: Paintings and Drawings 1964–1978” examines Philip Guston’s shift from abstraction to a cartoon-like figurative language after moving in 1968 to Woodstock, New York, with his wife, artist and poet Musa McKim, and their teenage daughter. The show emphasizes Guston’s close collaborations with poets—especially Clark Coolidge, as well as Bill Berkson and William Corbett—for whom he made drawings and illustrated covers for mimeographed little magazines and poetry books, and it highlights McKim as a key supporter and source of inspiration. It includes major paintings such as “Untitled” (1976), “Blue Cover” (1977), and “Two Hearts” (1978), which depict intimate motifs involving the couple and themes of mortality and emotional injury. The article notes that while Guston’s late stylistic turn was often scorned by critics and parts of the art world, poets championed it, echoing Robert Kelly’s circa-1968 line “Style is death.”

Read the full article at Hyperallergic