CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/13/2017

How we love 'Philip Guston & the Poets'

Published to accompany the acclaimed exhibition currently on view in Venice, this superb new monograph from Hauser & Wirth draws connections between Philip Guston's work and the writing of D.H. Lawrence, W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Eugenio Montale and T.S. Eliot—five literary giants whom the artist admired. “The infinite loveliness of tones, certain signs, certain objects, carried in secret but still radiant with feeling, is what incarnates the poetry of Guston’s last paintings,” curator and editor Kosme de Barañano writes. “Their strange iconography is like a secular reliquary of his emotional life. His pictures, like poems, manage to extract a tempting lyricism from the catalogues of undefined objects, as if charged from within by a powerful underlying vital force waiting to be seen and set free.”