Irving Guyer (1916-2012) was an American painter. While successful in New York through the 1960’s, Guyer chose to work away from the New York gallery scene for much of his career. In the last decades of his life, he developed increasingly innovative, formally sophisticated work, combining masterful landscape and color field painting with geometric abstraction. Recently, his late work has been discovered and acquired by such distinguished collections as the Berkeley Art Museum and Reed College Art Collection.

The son of Jewish immigrants, Guyer grew up in New York City and studied at the Arts Students League (1934-1937), the National Academy of Design (1933-1934) and the City College of New York (1932-1933). At 23, he was awarded the first prize for painting at the 1939 World's Fair. In 1938 and 1939, he was employed by the Works Project Administration / Federal Art Project as a painter and printmaker. Guyer’s WPA prints are held in a number of public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the New York Public Library Print Collection, the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, and the Indiana State University Permanent Art Collection. In 1942, Guyer married Betty Rubinstein. After being discharged from the Army in 1944, he chose to pursue a career in commercial art to support his growing family, which in time included four children. For the next thirty years or so, he worked in New York City for a number of advertising studios, including his own (with partners), while continuing to paint.

In the 1960s Guyer was represented by the Paula Insel Gallery. His paintings of this period employed both abstraction and figuration, often in combination. While this work was clearly part of the New York School, he resisted the call to adhere to a singular style in order to pursue his interest in artistic experimentation, a pursuit that lasted the rest of his life. Thus, after three successful solo shows, Guyer left the Insel Gallery to work on his painting free from the pressure of the art market. During this time, he continued to make his living as a commercial artist and designer, and stayed engaged with the art world by reading voluminously, experimenting in the studio, and keeping abreast of major exhibitions and movements. In 1975, Guyer and his wife Betty moved to San Francisco. While on a trip to the east coast in 1977, he was profoundly affected by a major exhibition of Matisse cut-outs at the National Gallery of Art. For the next several years his paintings juxtaposed simplified opaque shapes in a series of dynamic abstracted Pacific Coast landscapes, which were shown in a number of venues in the Bay Area, including Stanford University.

In 1985, after retiring from the practice of commercial art, Guyer and his wife moved to Nevada City, in the Sierra Foothills of California, where he continued to paint in a small studio. His primary subject matter became the immediate Northern California landscape and light. His late work is increasingly abstract and simplified – a distillation of a lifetime of seeing, thinking, and painting. By the mid-2000s, he was making bold multi-canvas works, juxtaposing rectangular monochromatic painting with abstracted landscape forms. His late works, including the Cloud and Pinetum series, are the strongest of his career. He showed the Pinetum series in the B. Sakato Garo Gallery in Sacramento in 2008. Although his eyesight was compromised by macular degeneration in his late eighties, Guyer continued painting with great energy until just a few days before his death at age 95. The simplified compositions of Guyer's late paintings, with their stark contrasts of light and dark, extreme close-up and distance views, texture and ground, may have been influenced by his increasing visual impairment, but also complete a trajectory discernible from his earliest works. His final, unfinished work was a portrait of Betty, who had died two years earlier. It was on the easel in his studio when he died.

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The site is maintained for by Leonie Guyer. She manages the Irving Guyer Collection along with her three brothers.