So here we are, I am not the biggest fan of his work but there is something about artists, people who produce art, breath art, live art, and of course always think about art, that makes their discussions, thoughts and writings about art, absolutely fascinating. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. To read this book front-to-back is to witness his paintings gradually outpace Guston’s ability to describe them.

Usually I don’t mind reading things like this even if I’m not familiar with the artist but I genuinely felt like I was retaining zero information from this. No reader could finish the book with a sense of Guston as a painter with a singular and unwavering vision of his work and its place in the world. If his paintings are always saying ‘Yes, but…’ (to quote the title of Dore Ashton’s essential 1976 book about the artist), so too is Guston. Remember that when Guston had his first 'stumble-bum' exhibition there was lots of exciting figurative painting and image-making happening.

Guston, one of the most influential and provocative American artists of the 20th century, had turned his back on the hip New York scene. Faith, Hope, and Impossibility and On Morton Feldman are two essays I think every artist should read. Whether the Guston myth (that he was quite so singular and in opposition to the art of his times) is entirely true, he definitely seems super-relevant to today. The wealth of information on the creative process, metaphysics, philosophy, art, painting, and anything similar is honestly unreal.

Touching on work from across his career as well as that of his fellow artists and Renaissance heroes, this selection of his writings, talks and interviews draws together some of his most incisive reflections on iconography and abstraction, metaphysics and mysticism, and, above all, the nature of painting and drawing. His repeated (and perhaps willed) endorsement of ‘frustration’ as a crucial artistic ingredient in the mid-1960s gives way, by the end of the decade, to an outpouring of large-scale paintings he repeatedly admitted to being baffled by.

We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. This expertly curated selection of Guston's writings, talks and interviews draws together the artist's most incisive reflections on iconography and abstraction, metaphysics and mysticism, and the nature of painting and drawing. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Guston is again someone you would like to invite for dinner and who would entertain and light up the evening with endless reflections and digressions about art.