February 2026

(Irving’s son Mark Guyer shown above)

     Irving Guyer was a painter whose work spans eight decades, evolving from 1930’s figuration, to the New York School, to landscape-based abstraction. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on April 24, 1916. A son of Jewish immigrants from Poland and Russia, Guyer grew up in New York City.
    Guyer studied at the City College of New York (1932–1933), the National Academy of Design (1933–1934) and the Art Students League (1934-1937). As a young artist of 23, his work Moshulu Parkway was included in the “Exhibition of American Art” at the 1939 World’s Fair and awarded the first prize for painting. From 1938-1939, he was employed by the Works Project Administration / Federal Art Project as a painter and printmaker. The WPA gave him the opportunity to leave New York for the first time and travel to Wilmington, North Carolina to direct a community art center. As director, he organized traveling exhibitions of WPA art, hosted a radio program on modern and historic art, taught classes and hired local artists to teach, while continuing to paint and make etchings and woodcuts. The prints he made as a WPA artist were shown in group exhibitions and later entered major museum collections. After leaving the WPA / FAP, Guyer was employed in in a fine art frame shop where he learned gold leafing and other artisan skills used in museum quality custom frames, and also worked as a designer of neon signs, a relatively new technology at the time. During WWII, Guyer served in the United States Army Signal Corps where he provided illustrations for technical manuals.
     Guyer married Betty Rubenstein in 1942. She was a high school English teacher and he worked as an art director, graphic designer and illustrator in midtown Manhattan. They moved from the Bronx to Long Island and raised four children. Throughout the 1950s, Guyer focused on earning a living and the responsibilities of fatherhood and family life. He kept current with contemporary art by visiting galleries and museums on his lunch hour and weekends. Having been aware of Jackson Pollock since they were students at the Art Students League at the same time, he followed his career with great interest, along with the work of artists such as Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning, and others associated with the New York School.
  In the 1960s, Guyer was represented by the Paula Insel Gallery in New York City, where he had three solo exhibitions. His paintings of this period were related to the New York School. Many of these gestural abstract paintings integrate figurative elements within their overall compositions. Other abstract works of this period evoke nature through color, form, and referential titles.
     Guyer and his wife moved to San Francisco in 1975, and his work changed significantly in response to a new context—the Pacific Coast landscape. During this period, Guyer’s paintings are characterized by simplified, abstract shapes in dynamic compositions, and a deep engagement with color and light. Many of these paintings and works on paper were shown in two solo exhibitions at Stanford University, a solo exhibition at the First Unitarian Church in San Francisco, and in numerous group exhibitions in the Bay Area.
      In 1985, the couple moved to Nevada City in the Sierra foothills where Guyer continued his exploration of landscape and abstraction. Informed by the geology, forests, and skies he observed daily, his work progressed through a range of formal approaches. By the mid-2000s, he was making multi-canvas works—juxtapositions of rectangular monochromatic fields and landscape elements. These late works are increasingly abstract and simplified—a distillation of a lifetime of seeing, thinking and painting. In his nineties, with eyesight compromised by macular degeneration, Guyer continued his daily practice of painting with great energy, realizing several bodies of formally and conceptually innovative work. He considered these late works, including the Cloud Series and the Pinetum Series, to be the strongest of his long career.
       Throughout his life Guyer regularly visited museum and gallery exhibitions, was a voracious reader of literature and non-fiction, and a devoted listener to classical music, opera and jazz. Among key sources of inspiration were the late works of Paul Cezanne, the cut-outs of Henri Matisse, Japanese prints and Chinese painting.
      In 2004, Guyer’s paintings were exhibited at Danette Koke Fine Arts, New York, NY. In 2008 he had a solo exhibition at b. Sakata Garo in Sacramento, CA, accompanied by a catalog. In 2011 and 2012, Guyer exhibited in several group shows. He continued painting up until a few days before his death on February 14, 2012 in Nevada City, California. In 2017, the exhibition “Irving Guyer: Selected Works 2007-2011” was presented by North Berkeley Investment Partners in collaboration with KunstWorks. Guyer’s work is held in numerous public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum; National Gallery of Art; Brooklyn Museum; Baltimore Museum of Art; UC Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive; New York Public Library Print Collection; Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas; Indiana State University Permanent Art Collection; Reed College Art Collection.