Gaston Philippe-Sleeping

Philip Guston (English Philip Guston), present. name Philip Goldstein (July 27, 1913, Montreal - June 7, 1980, Woodstock, New York) - American artist.

He was born in Canada, in the family of Jewish immigrants - immigrants from Russia, the artist's parents came to America from Odessa. Soon the family moved to Los Angeles. He started drawing already in his youth, at first comics. The training began at the School of Drawing in Cleveland. During his studies (30s of XX century) he paid attention first of all to the style of metaphysical realism created by Giorgio di Chirico, as well as the frescoes of old Italian masters - Andrea Mantegna, Masaccio, Paolo Uccello. In the late 30's, F. Guston worked as part of the state program of development in the field of propaganda, wall painting, but by the beginning of the 1940s he returned to easel painting.

A characteristic feature of the works of F. Huston was that when creating new paintings he often used fragments of previously created canvases. At the turn of 1947/1948, the artist wrote his first abstract picture of The Tormentors. In the late 40's and 50's of the XX century, the artist works in the style of abstract expressionism. At the same time, the appeal to the stories, inspired by the events of the two world wars, brings his paintings together with the expressionist painting of Max Beckmann. Since the early 60's, the artist returned to figurative art, at which time he often reproduces and recycles in new works the plot motifs of his early paintings from the 1930s (for example, the theme of crimes being committed by the Ku Klux Klan).