Philip Guston was a Canadian-American painter and printmaker in the New York School, an art movement that included many abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. In the late 1960s Guston helped to lead a transition from abstract expressionism to neo-expressionism in painting, abandoning so-called "pure abstraction" in favor of more representational, simplified renderings of personal symbols and objects. His existential, lugubrious images after 1968 employed a limited palette. [Wikipedia]