14 Facts About Philip Guston

In 2013, Philip Guston's painting To Fellini set an auction record at Christie's when it sold for $25.8 million.

The child of Jewish parents who escaped persecution by immigrating to Canada from Odessa, Philip Guston was born in Montreal in 1913, and moved to Los Angeles in 1919.

In 1927, at the age of 14, Philip Guston began painting, and enrolled in the Los Angeles Manual Arts High School where he met Jackson Pollock, who became a life-long friend.

Apart from his high school education and a one-year scholarship at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, which left him dissatisfied, Philip Guston remained a largely self-taught artist, influenced, among others by Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico, whom Philip Guston repeatedly acknowledged throughout his career.

Philip Guston died in 1980 at the age of 66, of a heart attack, in Woodstock, New York.

Philip Guston was influenced by American Regionalists and Mexican mural painters.

Philip Guston used a relatively limited palette favoring black and white, grays, blues and reds.

Philip Guston was increasingly frustrated with abstraction and began painting representationally again, but in a personal, cartoonish manner.

Philip Guston called the act of changing styles an "illusion" and an "artifice".

Philip Guston was a lecturer and teacher at a number of universities, and served as an artist-in-residence at the School of Art and Art History at the University of Iowa from 1941 to 1945.

Philip Guston then served an artist-in-residence at the St Louis School of Fine Arts at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri until 1947.

Philip Guston continued with his teaching at New York University and at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and, from 1973 to 1978, he conducted a monthly graduate seminar at Boston University.

Philip Guston was posthumously elected to the National Academy of Design as an Associate Academician.

Philip Guston Now opened at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston on May 1,2022.