Apocalyptic vision

The Royal Academy’s retrospective exhibition The Art of Philip Guston: 1913–1980 (until 12 April) comprises some 80 paintings and drawings dating from 1930 to 1980, by one of America’s most original 20th-century painters. It’s not easy to look at, being in turn demanding, forbidding, horrific and beautiful, but it’s certainly real, and as an intensely moving human document it deserves to be seen.

Guston was born of Russian-Jewish parents in Canada, and moved to America in 1919. When he began to paint in 1927, he was largely self-taught. He worked on government-funded mural projects and absorbed the drawing techniques of the Old Masters. The early work in this exhibition portrays war or social issues through an uneasy blending of Renaissance and Surrealist styles. But whatever the distortions, there’s no doubt that young Guston could draw, and that he felt deeply about his subjects. And it was this fluency of drawing that led him to further experiment.