Philip Guston’s Teenage Drawings Reveal a Lost World of Funny Pages

Before Philip Guston developed the loud and plush figuration of his renown, before he Anglicized his surname in adulthood, the 12-year-old known as Philip Goldstein joined the art staff of the Los Angeles Times Junior Club.

The son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants in Toronto who had moved to Los Angeles, Philip was a student at Manual Arts High School, where he befriended a young Jackson Pollock and joined a youth organization that produced The Junior Times, a Sunday supplement in The Los Angeles Times for essays, poems, puzzles and illustrations by kids, for kids. From 1925 to 1929, in these pages, Guston honed his pen for an audience of the West Coast’s largest home delivery.

A few afternoons ago, I shook loose 20 of his drawings which — like “Steamboat Willie,” Winnie the Pooh and other classic characters — are now in the public domain. Could they add to our understanding of Guston and his art?

The Junior Club itself seemed the boy’s muse. In several panels from 1928, one of his characters, Kolly-Jit, an overeager schoolboy whose name puns on “collegiate,” welcomes new members of the Junior Club with a loud “Howdy!” In one strip, Kolly visits a Junior Times columnist, Tony Correra, who in real life lived blocks from Guston in South Los Angeles.

In a 1926 strip, we meet Skinny Slats, an ironically corpulent lad who squeezes out of an inkwell. Skinny is lonesome and confused until six Junior Club cartoonists — including Hardie Gramatky, who went on to become a watercolorist admired by Andrew Wyeth — walk into the frame and heartily welcome the boy.