By Sam Bates
Since the touring retrospective “Philip Guston: Now,” which has been traveling between major museums since 2022, finally came to a close in London last Sunday, I thought it would be fitting to read and review a biography of the artist to commemorate the show’s run. “Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston” is a recounting of the life and times of one of the greatest American painters of the 20th century, and is like no other biography. Why? Because unlike most books you read about artists, musicians, and other famous people, “Night Studio” is written by Guston’s daughter, Musa Mayer.
Off the bat you might think this would lend itself towards an overly positive and loving look at Guston and his work, the same way autobiographies often do. However, Mayer proves herself to be an expert at keeping our sense of her father constantly nuanced and complex. We see him as she did: in a complicated way. It is clear Mayer loves her father, yet it is also very clear how she felt oftentimes neglected and insecure about him. We are never told to love or hate Guston; we are simply made to understand him. By the end of the book, he is not a myth to us. He is as real as any family member any of us have ever known.
The biography recollects Guston’s whole life and career, but the most in-depth section is certainly the chapters that focus on his 1968-1980 late period. This is apt, as Guston’s career is truly defined by these iconoclastic years in which he abandoned abstraction and New York City for an ever-controversial cartoonish and figurative style. But these were also the same years in which Mayer moved away from home, and wasn’t fully around her parents in their Woodstock home. As a result, we see his drastic stylistic change both from afar and up close.
“Night Studio” is biography without mythology, and is as multi-layered as Philip Guston was himself.
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