How Philip Guston became a hero to a new generation of figurative painters

Plus: the crude, complex and ingenious sculpture of Georg Baselitz

From magazine issue: 21 October 2023

Ropes, legs and shoe soles haunt Philip Guston’s later canvases like recurring nightmares: ‘Painter’s Forms II’ (1978). Collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Museum Purchase, The Friends of Art Endowment © The Estate of Philip Guston

issue 21 October 2023

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Laura Gascoigne

How Philip Guston became a hero to a new generation of figurative painters
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Why do painters represent things? There was a time when the answers seemed obvious. Art glorified power, earthly and divine, and provided moral exemplars of how to behave – in the case of sacred paintings – or how not to in the case of profane ones. When modernism threw all that into doubt, the picture frame remained.