Philip Guston: The Not For Sale Collection

foreign was there a moment when you realized oh my father kind of is someone different than somebody else's father the question would really be was there ever a moment that I didn't know I always knew that [Music] [Music] my father was the painter Philip Gustin now recognized as one of the great artists of the 20th century this is my father's studio built in 1967 after he pretty much withdrew from the art world this is where all the late figurative Works were created we've kept some of his materials here his charcoal pencils quill pens the Higgins ink that he used and over here you find huge quantities of his paint this is his signature color cadmium red medium and if you want to know where the Gustin pink comes from it's cadmium red medium and titanium white it goes on look at this [Music] his handling of paint was so masterful his line his touch his brush stroke are completely distinctive and not many people talk about that because the works themselves I think are much more challenging [Music] we've kept my father's painting wall just as it was including the drips of paint on the floor that accumulated over time he constantly questioned whether painting could be the legitimate response to human suffering and cruelty it was my mother who found this quote from Charles Dickens that expressed the intensity of my father's commitment and how difficult it was for my mother and me to not have more of his attention [Music] even in the years when I was growing up the studio was always off limits to me [Music] he needed to go to a place within his psyche that was fully authentic and to have an experience creating and to have someone in the studio interfered somehow with his engagement with the work that he was creating [Music] originally actually the idea of a not-for-sale collection came from my father these two drawings illustrate my father's Personal Collection and you'll see on the back in the original frame it says NFS that meant not for sale this was one of many works that he wanted for his personal collection as my mother and I examined all of his paintings and drawings after his death in 1980. we saw that a number of them had been marked NFS on the back these Works were some of the very best we decided my mother and I to continue this tradition eventually amassing a group of 220 works that represented the entire 50 years of his career and as I began to think about museums the Met was the location that met that need the Met was one of the very first museums I was taken to as a child maybe the first Museum and I'm very delighted to have it find a home at a museum that my father loved and that I love this collection begins in 1930 with his earliest Masterpiece mother and child at that point he was only 17 years old and he always kept it it was always hanging in our home then it goes to the 1940s where his painting remained figurative when he worked as an artist on the works progress administration when he moved to New York in the 1950s we go into his abstract period every artist was exploring themselves that began to change I think in the late 50s early 60s his work then became figurative again he wanted to respond to events and things in the world then this wonderful explosion of work from the last 12 years of his life when he was working up here in Woodstock foreign [Music] this cabinet here you'll find some really interesting objects railroad spikes and these appear in some of the work these are just objects he found in yard sales antique shops or whatever flat irons weights there's a whole pile of them probably the pride of this collection is the tea kettle which also appears in his work from the 40s actually in a painting called Marshall memory [Music] this Kettle appears again in one of the very last Works made in early 1980. he died in June of that year clearly the tea kettle had residents you know I can speculate that it may have something to do with home and his mother cooking and I don't know really but when you asked him what does this symbolize what does this mean he would often say that he was just as mystified to ask for meaning is to misunderstand his process these were images that came from his unconscious and he trusted himself to manifest them in his paintings [Music] after his death as his work became better known it was more widely sold and so I took that to mean that I owed him to make sure that his work was known to the world and accessible to the world and the promise gift to the Met is the final phase of that for me [Music] thank you foreign

Channel: The Met

Views: 30,825

Keywords: The Met, Art, Museum, History, New York, New York City, Education, Philip Guston, Musa Mayer, Musa Guston, Painting, Artist studio, Studio, Painter

Id: kdNHInly8zc

Length: 8min 37sec (517 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 16 2023