photo: Alan Bernheimer

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Born in New York in 1939, Bill Berkson is a poet and critic who has lived in Northern California since the early ’70s. He is Professor Emeritus at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he taught art history and literature for many years. A corresponding editor for Art in America, he has contributed to such other journals as Artforum, Aperture and artcritical.com. His most recent books include Portrait and Dream: New & Selected Poems; BILL, a words-and-images collaboration with Colter Jacobsen; Lady Air; Not an Exit with drawings by Léonie Guyer; a new collection of his art writings, For the Ordinary Artist; and Parties du corps, a selection of his poetry in French translation. He was the 2006 Distinguished Mellon Fellow at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and received the 2008 Goldie for Literature from the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Portrait and Dream won the Balcones Prize for Best Poetry Book of 2010.

Poet Clark Coolidge is the editor of Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations (The Documents of Twentieth-Century Art). He has taught at the Naropa Institute and the American Academy in Rome (1985-85). He has read his work locally and internationally in France, London, Scandinavia, and Russia. In 1993, he co-founded the MIX poetry and jazz group with David and Tina Metzer. Among his other collaborations are Supernatural Overtones (1990) with Ron Padgett, On the Pumice of Morons (1993) with Larry Fagin, and other pieces with Philip Guston, Bernadette Mayer, and Keith Waldrop. He lives in Petaluma, California.

About the book...

This is the premier collection of dialogues, talks, and writings by Philip Guston (1913–1980), one of the most intellectually adventurous and poetically gifted of modern painters. Over the course of his life, Guston's wide reading in literature and philosophy deepened his commitment to his art—from his early Abstract Expressionist paintings to his later gritty, intense figurative works. This collection, with many pieces appearing in print for the first time, lets us hear Guston's voice—as the artist delivers a lecture on Renaissance painting, instructs students in a classroom setting, and discusses such artists and writers as Piero della Francesca, de Chirico, Picasso, Kafka, Beckett, and Gogol.