2-NEW Philip Guston and Twentieth-Century American Art

Course 2 – Summer School Online

Monday 1- Friday 5 June 2026

Dr Ben Street

£395

Course Description:

This course takes the career of Philip Guston (1913-1980) as a lens through which to examine the shifting styles, subjects and priorities of American art over the course of the artist’s life. Taking a chronological approach, the course will address the artist in full, contextualising him among his artistic, literary and critical peers, as well as the often violent political backdrop of American life. With Guston’s work as a guide, the course will travel from his earliest productions as a young man in Los Angeles in equal thrall to European modernism and American cartooning, to his work in collaboration with Mexican mural painters in the 1930s, both in the States and in Mexico. It will trace his turn to figurative easel painting in the 1940s, and its gradual dissolution in his abstract work towards the turn of the 50s, where he belatedly joined the group of artists known as the Abstract Expressionists. It will then explore his increasing dissatisfaction with abstract art, and gradual embrace of – or return to – representational imagery, culminating in his wildly prolific final decade of cartoonish, socially-engaged paintings. Along the way, Guston’s work will be woven into the context of muralists of the 30s, realist painters of the 40s, abstract painters of the 50s, pop-adjacent artists of the 60s, and figurative painters of the 70s – as well as the Old Masters with whom he had a lifelong fascination.