Philip Guston's Poem-Pictures

The Philip Guston's Poem-Pictures exhibition sought to highlight a lesser-known series of Guston's drawings, which combined poetry and imagery and reflected Guston's response to the late twentieth century. These drawings revealed the development of the distinctive imagery characteristic of Guston's paintings in the 1970s, when he abandoned Abstract Expressionism and returned to figurative representation. The exhibition explored how the artist collaborated with writers and poets, integrating fragments of their literary works into a highly personal graphic imagery. The resulting interplay between image and text reflected the sense of disunity, disintegration, and disorder which Guston felt permeated life at the turn of the century. The exhibition comprised works loaned from eighteen public and private collections.

Philip Guston's Poem-Pictures was accompanied by an eighty-page, fully-illustrated exhibition catalogue featuring an introductory essay by Addison director Jock Reynolds, an explanatory essay written by Guston scholar and guest curator Debra Bricker Balken, and statements from Guston collaborators Bill Berkson, Stanley Kunitz, Clark Coolidge, and William Corbett.