Over the next several years, Guston lectures on his own creative process as his work continues to evolve at Boston University, pictured above, and at New York Studio School, where art students can still learn the practices Guston has embraced from his early days of drawing from and studying the Old Masters.

After quitting the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1962, Guston, and the other Janis artists who also left in protest of the gallery’s new focus on Pop Art, decide to join the newly opened Marlborough-Gerson Gallery in 1964.

It is there, in 1967, that Guston first meets David McKee, then working for Marlborough, who begins to visit Guston’s studio regularly and is an essential and primary witness to Guston’s transition to figuration. With his wife Renee, David McKee was to become Guston’s exclusive dealer until the McKee Gallery closes in 2015, a span of 41 years.

With the financial support of a second Guggenheim fellowship, and the moral support of poet friends like Bill Berkson and Clark Coolidge, who begin to visit him in Woodstock, Guston throws himself into the new imagery in the isolation of his new studio with renewed freedom and excitement. “The feeling of going out of my house, practically naked in just a pajama top, to look at the work of the night before,” he explains to a journalist. “No taxis, no trucks, no buses, no openings, no parties. I found my productivity practically quadrupled.”

1968–1971

Return To Figuration