‘My father saw family as an interference’

‘My father was never overtly cruel,” says Musa Mayer, the only daughter of the American artist Philip Guston. “He was just largely absent, working. From an early age, I was given to understand that I was not to disturb his important work.”

Along w with Jackson Pollock, whom he met at high school in Los Angeles aftera moving from Canada as a youn young child, Guston was a principal figure in the abstract expressio expressionist movement that revolutio revolutionised American art after the Secon Second World War. Unlike Polloc Pollock, though, Guston never

quit quite made his peace with abstraction. In the late Sixties, amid much controversy, he renounced “pure” abstract painting, and started showing figurative canvases, rendered in a deliberately cartoonish, almost brutish style. Since his death in 1980, at the age of 66, Guston’s raw pictures have proved immensely influential. But his single-minded pursuit of art came at a cost.

“He saw family as interfering,” continues Mayer, 74, sitting in Hauser & Wirth, the London branch of the international gallery that represents her father’s estate. “Yes, it’s sad. In some ways, it’s tragic. But that’s the price of art. I always understood that we were sharing him with the world – we would only get a little piece.”

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised by her honesty. After all, Mayer has flown in from New York, where she lives on the Upper West Side with her neuropsychologist husband of 41 years, to give a reading from Night Studio, her memoir about her father. Begun when she was on a writing course at Columbia University, first published in 1988, and recently reissued in an attractive new edition, it is an extraordinarily candid book.

Mayer writes frankly, for instance, about Guston’s propensity for melancholy as well as his alcoholism. She records the strain that his selfishness placed upon her mother, Musa McKim, a painter and poet whom he married in 1937. “My father was a very charismatic man,” Mayer tells me, “and there were many affairs.”

Philip Guston’s daughter tells Alastair Sooke about growing up with a giant of American rican art – and ‘sharing sharing him with the world’

Early promise: Philip Guston’s Mother and Child (1930), now on show in Venice