Life with P.

Life with P.: Journals, 1966–1976 presents the previously unpublished journals of poet and painter Musa McKim Guston, an intimate decade-long record of daily life with her husband Philip Guston ("P." in her private shorthand), kept during the most consequential turn of his career.

Spanning 1966 to 1976, the entries move between the couple's home in Woodstock, visits to New York, artist residencies and travels to Mexico and Italy, tracing the years in which Guston abandoned abstraction for the cartoon-inflected figuration of his late work. Edited by Sara Harrison and Musa Mayer, the 432-page hardback interleaves McKim's journals and poems with 230 color illustrations of artworks and archival photographs, framed by an introduction and contextual notes by Mayer.

McKim (1908–1992) was an artist in her own right: a painting student at the Otis Art Institute when she met Guston, a collaborator on his WPA-era murals, and later a poet whose verses he embellished in their joint "Poem Pictures." Mayer, the couple's daughter and president of The Guston Foundation, extends the account begun in her 1988 memoir Night Studio. The book appeared alongside the Hauser & Wirth New York exhibition "Life With P. – Philip Guston: Paintings and Drawings 1964–1978."