I Paint What I Want to See: Philip Guston (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Philip Guston, one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, spoke about art with unparalleled candour and commitment. During his lifetime he seemed an outsider, but now the world of painting seems to have regrouped around him. If you love art, or if you are an artist, if you love Guston’s work or even if you don’t like it so much, you will enjoy this book. Philip Guston (June 27, 1913 – June 7, 1980) was a painter and printmaker in the New York School, which included many of the abstract expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Abstract at times, there were moments when I had no idea what he was on about, but others where he was irresistibly captivating.

Faith, Hope, and Impossibility and On Morton Feldman are two essays I think every artist should read. The wealth of information on the creative process, metaphysics, philosophy, art, painting, and anything similar is honestly unreal. Whereas the UCal book was a labor of love, some years in the making—the cassette and reel-to-reel recordings were transcribed, and the book edited, by Guston’s close friend, the poet Clark Coolidge—one suspects that I Paint was whipped up in a matter of minutes. And I suppose in the Collected Writings there's a lot of repetition and this smaller Penguin edition has the important stuff; the interview with Rosenberg, and the Studio Notes. If you are not really into art, perhaps you will enjoy it less, but I firmly believe that reading and, in this case, almost listening, to someone who discusses the subject he is the most passionate about can not fail to captivate the reader.

Get the Coolidge/U Cal edition instead, which is properly edited and includes so many great pieces that don't appear in this throwaway rip-off, like Guston's panel talk in Philadelphia and his conversation with Bill Berkson. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.

Its lack of introduction or contextual detail, aside from Coolidge’s brief notes carried over from the previous publication, isolates Guston’s statements as aphorisms or nuggets of adaptable wisdom. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.Usually I don’t mind reading things like this even if I’m not familiar with the artist but I genuinely felt like I was retaining zero information from this. Or, was the whole world and everything in it set into an us-or-them binary arrangement because of the Cold War? Whether the Guston myth (that he was quite so singular and in opposition to the art of his times) is entirely true, he definitely seems super-relevant to today. Philip Guston, one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century, spoke about art with unparalleled candour and commitment.

The latest edition of the Yogyakarta biennial explores ‘Titen’, a Javanese word for the art (or science? Dialogues – with interlocutors like his friends Harold Rosenberg or Clark Coolidge, or with his students at Boston University or the Yale Summer School of Music and Art – allowed Guston to play out in a public forum the equivocations that informed the paintings made in the privacy of the studio.

Dialogues were Guston’s chosen form of public speech, several of which, along with other published pieces and talks, are collected in this book, published to coincide with the opening of his rescheduled retrospective in May this year. If his paintings are always saying ‘Yes, but…’ (to quote the title of Dore Ashton’s essential 1976 book about the artist), so too is Guston.