“It’s all so circular, isn’t it”: Sourcing Guston’s Late Creativity
In conjunction with SLOMA’s exhibition of Philip Guston’s Cigar (1969) in our McMeen Spotlight, this Museum Circle talk examines a key source for the artist’s late-in-life reversal of high art ambition, seemingly exemplified in its jokey subject matter and cartoon-like style. Rejecting the “purity” of his 1950s abstractions, Guston turned the following decade to a raw and vulgar comedic style connected intimately to the ethnicity repudiated long before when changing his last name. The older artist’s close belated friendship with his Woodstock neighbor, the unrepentantly indulgent young Jewish author, Philip Roth, and their shared fascination with the vulgarity, irreverence, and self-absorption of farce and slapstick, helped inspire Guston’s rejuvenation of earlier personal and social preoccupations, unexpectedly now combined in prescient ways.
Doors open at 5 PM. Talk begins at 5:30 PM.
Please submit your RSVP by July 18 via the form below. This event is exclusively for SLOMA’s Museum Circle members and their guests. Not a member yet? Join us!
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ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Ellen G. Landau, retired Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Case Western Reserve University, is an art historian and curator in Pasadena CA. She is a renowned expert on American Abstract Expressionism with many publications on its major figures. Her 2013 book, Mexico and American Modernism (Yale Press) includes a prize-winning study of The Struggle against Terrorism (1934-35), a mural in Morelia MX painted by Guston and Reuben Kadish, whose recent restoration was featured in the New York Times. Currently, Dr. Landau is guest curator for Abstract Expressionism: The Women, traveling in the U.S. under sponsorship of the American Federation of Arts.