Letters, notes, and interviews with people who knew Philip Guston are the sources used by Musa Mayer to get to know her father, who for her was an artistic genius without a past. It was only after his death in 1980 that she began to delve into his life and childhood to deal with the loss of her father. Night Studio is the moving and very personal story of her attempt to get to know her father both as a person and as an artist. First published in 1988, this beautifully designed new edition is richly illustrated with a new selection of photographs and paintings, many in color.

Philip Guston (1913–1980) is one of the most outstanding and influential figures in twentieth-century American art. The many phases of his career attest to an incredible diversity of expression and great creative changeability. He was an existential workaholic who was fueled by restlessness and self-doubt. Beginning as a muralist in the thirties, after his move to New York Guston embraced the lyrical vocabulary of abstract Expressionism that brought him international recognition in the course of the fifties. In the mid-sixties he returned to figuration—focusing first on simple things of ordinary life, and later evolving to an increasingly radical iconic language of forms that starting in 1970 shook the art world and continues to provoke today.