Philip Guston, Roma

The exhibition –a collaboration between the Museo Carlo Bilotti and the American Academy in Rome– will feature over 40 works, oils on paper, painted by Philip Guston between 1970 and 1971, when he was a Resident at the American Academy in Rome.

A notable painter and printmaker in the New York School, with Pollock, Rothko and De Kooning, Philip Guston was one of the founders of Abstract Expressionism. In the late 1960s, Guston became frustrated with abstraction and began painting representationally again, but in a rather cartoonish manner. In October 1970 an exhibition of these new figurative works at the Marlborough Gallery in New York received scathing reviews from most of the art establishment. As a result of the poor reception of his new figurative paintings, Guston decided to leave the United States. He chose Italy and moved to Rome, host of the American Academy of which he had been elected Fellow in 1948-1949. He had returned to Italy 1960, when he participated in the Venice Biennale.

In this troubled period of his artistic life, Guston painted the series Rome. From ancient ruins to Italian gardens, from Piero della Francesca’s frescoes to the films of Fellini, Guston developed an original repertoire, marked by satirical and symbolic elements. Typically Mediterranean landscapes are interwoven with the nightmares of the Marlborough Gallery, the hooded figures, staring with a fixed and absent stare, are an allegory of violence of the darkest moments of America’s sixties.

The exhibition is about this painful, but fruitful, transition, freed from the detached irony of Pop Art and from the iconoclastic austerity of Minimalism. A crucial figure for the latest developments in modern art.

Organizing Committee:
Comune di Roma, Assessorato alle Politiche Culturali e della Comunicazione - Sovraintendenza ai Beni Culturali in partnership with The American Academy in Rome

Under the patronage of the Embassy of the United States and with the generous support of Terra Foundation for American Art and Barclays Italia