Philip Guston created this work, titled "Riding Around," in 1969 during his transitional period.

Art gallery exhibit explores artist's dramatic style change

In his early career, Canadian-born artist Philip Guston (1913-80) was often compared with Claude Monet, and his work was so popular that it was featured almost constantly in solo and group shows. At the height of international acclaim, however, Guston moved away from his "signature" style of abstract expressionism and turned to figurative painting. His dramatic transition, which shocked and even angered some in the art world at the time, is the focus of the Yale University Art Gallery's newest exhibit, "Philip Guston: A New Alphabet," which opens on Tuesday, April 25. The exhibit, organized by Joanna Weber, acting curator of European and contemporary art, highlights the artist's four-year transitional period, from 1968 to 1972. Weber was inspired to create the exhibition by a 1968 photograph of an installation on Guston's studio wall of his paintings of individual objects. Weber terms these images of cups, backs of heads, Klansmen, cars, watches, light bulbs and clocks, among other items, Guston's "visual alphabet" for composing later, larger compositions. This specific configuration of the 27 small paintings, which have been lent by Guston's daughter Musa Mayer and her husband Tom, are being shown publicly at the Yale University Art Gallery for the first time and are the centerpiece of the exhibition. Also on display will be 14 additional canvases painted by Guston over an 18-year period. These works, which show his style before, during and after the transition, range from his 1961 work "Hill," which Guston gave to the Yale Art Gallery, and "Table and Stretchers," a 1978 painting bequeathed to Yale by the artist's wife, Musa Guston. Philip Guston was born with the name Philip Goldstein in Montreal. He moved with his family to California in 1919 and began painting public murals dealing with social and political issues while living in Los Angeles in the early 1930s. He soon followed his friend, artist Jackson Pollock, to New York City, where Guston continued working on large-scale Works Progress Administration (WPA) projects and began exploring abstraction as a new way of painting. He married the poet and artist Musa McKim in 1937 and in the same year changed his name to Guston. By the mid-1940s Guston had moved away from WPA social realism and was a recognized member of the group of New York School abstract expressionists that included Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell. Major retrospectives of his work were shown at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1962 and the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in 1966, both of which traveled extensively. During the same period, Guston received numerous prestigious awards, including two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Ford Foundation grant, and the Prix de Rome of the American Academy of Arts. Guston once described his abandonment of the style that had made him famous by saying, "I got sick and tired of that purity, want to tell stories." Using his new figurative style Guston created what Weber describes as "a new world of stories that are raunchy, grotesque and often violent, yet are almost gentrified by sensuous painting and luscious color." Guston's new figurative work received "a critical trashing" when it was unveiled in New York's Marlborough Gallery in 1970, Weber says. Yet, the artist continued to exhibit, and, as he had throughout his career, to teach in universities and art schools throughout the country. In 1975 he was awarded the Distinguished Teaching of Art Award of the College Art Association of America. A large retrospective of his work was mounted by the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1980, the same year Guston died. "Philip Guston: A New Alphabet" will be on view through July 30 before traveling to the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University. A fully illustrated catalog accompanies the exhibit. Its content includes an essay by Weber and an afterword by Laura Greengold, a recent graduate of the Yale School of Art who worked with Weber on the exhibit. A number of programs related to the new exhibit will be offered. These include a talk titled "Philip Guston: A Road to Nowhere" by artist Christopher Mir, which will be given at 2 p.m. on Tuesday, April 25, and again at noon on Thursday, April 27. The opening lecture, "Philip Guston," will be presented by author, teacher and critic Dore Ashton at 5:30 p.m. on Friday, April 28. Ashton, a leading authority on Guston and on the New York School, is professor of art history at Cooper Union School for the Advancement of Arts and Sciences and adjunct professor of art history at the New School in New York City. She is the author of "Yes, But ... A Critical Study of Philip Guston." Other events include a symposium on the artist in early May. Check future issues of the Yale Bulletin & Calendar for further information. Works in the exhibit have been lent by Ann and Graham Gund, Renée and David McKee, the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover Academy, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Harvard University Art Museums and the McKee Gallery. Presented in collaboration with the Harvard University Art Museums, the exhibit's showing at Yale was made possible through the generosity of Lyn and Jerry Grinstein and Robert and Anna Marie Shapiro. The Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel St., is open Tuesday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m., and Sunday, 1-6 p.m. For further information, call (203) 432-0600. 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