- Night Studio: A Memoir Of Philip GustonOur PickBy Musa Mayer
- Guston in Time: Remembering Philip GustonBy Ross Feld
Important Art by Philip Guston
Gladiators (1938)
Gladiators is an early example of Guston's social realist style, which he would maintain throughout his work as muralist with the WPA. It represents an attempt to capture something of the monumentality that he admired in Italian Renaissance art, though it is also one of the first pictures in which he explores the imagery of hooded figures, fists and shields, which would reappear in his late work.
Zone (1953-54)
Zone, a painting that reflects the focused concentration of Guston's mature work, suggests a warm calm, with its mist of red hatch-marks filling the painting's center. Here, Guston hones his mark-making, and builds layers of paint out of quick, small stokes that are quite distinct from the wilder gestures of some of his colleagues. "Look at any inspired painting," he once said, "it's like a gong sounding; it puts you in a state of reverberation."
Last Piece (1958)
Last Piece is not Guston's last Abstract Expressionist painting, but it represents a transition away from the shimmering forms of the early 1950s towards the recognizable motifs of his later, more figurative works. If Buddhism, and concepts of nothingness, had informed his earlier abstractions, this represents a move away from those inspirations.
Influences and Connections

- Max Beckmann
- Giorgio de Chirico
- Paolo Uccello
- Reuben Kadish
- Lorser Feitelson
- Jackson Pollock
- Willem de Kooning
- Arshile Gorky
- John Cage
- Morton Feldman
- Abstract Expressionism
- Pop Art
- New Image Painting