The question would really be, was there ever a moment that I didn't know?
I always knew that.
My father was the painter Philip Guston,
now recognized as one of the great artists
of the 20th century.
This is my father's studio, built in 1967,
after he pretty much withdrew from the art world.
This is where all the late figurative works were created.
We've kept some of his materials here:
his charcoal pencils,
quill pens, the Higgins ink that he used.
And over here,
you'll find huge quantities of his paint.
This is his signature color,
cadmium red medium.
And if you want to know where the Guston pink comes from,
it's cadmium red medium and titanium white.
It goes on,
look at this.
His handling of paint was so masterful.
His line, his touch, his brushstroke
are completely distinctive.
And not many people talk about that
because the works themselves, I think, are much more challenging.
We've kept my father's painting wall just as it was,
including the drips of paint on the floor
that accumulated over time.
He constantly questioned whether a painting
could be a legitimate response to human suffering
and cruelty.
It was my mother who found this quote from Charles Dickens
that expressed the intensity of my father's commitment
and how difficult it was for my mother and me
to not have more of his attention.
Even in the years when I was growing up,
the studio was always off limits to me.
He needed to go to a place within his psyche that was fully authentic
and to have an experience creating,
and to have someone in the studio
interfered somehow with his engagement with the work
that he was creating.
Originally actually, the idea of a Not For Sale Collection came from my father.
These two drawings illustrate
my father's personal collection, and you'll see on the back
in the original frame it says NFS, that meant not for sale.
This was one of many works
that he wanted for his personal collection.
As my mother and I examined all of his paintings
and drawings after his death in 1980,
we saw that a number of them had been marked
NFS on the back.
These works were some of the very best.
We decided, my mother and I, to continue this
tradition, eventually amassing
a group of 220 works
that represented the entire 50 years of his career.
And as I began to think about museums,
the Met was the location that met that need.
The Met was one of the very first museums I was taken to as a child,
maybe the first museum.
And I'm very delighted to have it find a home
at a museum that my father loved
and that I love.
This collection begins in 1930
with his earliest masterpiece, Mother and Child.
At that point, he was only 17 years old.
And he always kept it.
It was always hanging in our home.
Then it goes to the 1940s,
where his painting remained figurative,
when he worked as an artist on the Works Progress Administration.
When he moved to New York in the 1950s,
we go into his abstract period.
Every artist was exploring themselves.
That began to change,
I think, in the late fifties or early sixties.
His work then became figurative again.
He wanted to respond to events
and things in the world.
Then this wonderful explosion
of work from the last 12 years of his life
when he was working up here in Woodstock.
This cabinet, here you'll find some really interesting objects.
Railroad spikes.
And these appear in some of the work.
These are just objects he found in yard sales, antique shops or whatever.
Flat irons, weights.
There's a whole pile of them.
Probably the pride of this collection is the tea kettle,
which also appears in his work
from the forties actually, in a painting called
Martial Memory.
This kettle appears again in one of the very last works made in early 1980.
And he died in June of that year.
Clearly, the tea kettle had resonance.
You know, I can speculate that it may have something
to do with home and his mother cooking, and...
I don't know, really.
But when you asked him, what does this symbolize,
what does this mean, he would often say that he was just as mystified.
To ask for meaning is
to misunderstand his process.
These were images that came from his unconscious,
and he trusted himself to manifest them
in his paintings.
After his death, as his work
became better known, it was more widely sold.
And so I took that to mean that I owed him to make sure that his work
was known to the world and accessible to the world.
And the promised gift to the Met is the final phase
of that for me.