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Lot Essay
The Guston Foundation confirms that this lot will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the paintings of Philip Guston.
Infused with art history and personal conviction, Philip Guston’s (1913-1980) Untitled (1971) marks the beginning of the period for which the artist is now known, his last prolific decade. Unbeholden to the Abstract Expressionist gestures of his peers and free of the burden of conforming to his own past style, Guston leapt into his “hoods” series with vigorous abandon and a history of political concern. The present work exemplifies Guston’s carefully considered understanding of compositional technique, while blending the everyday motifs and ambiguous creatures that characterize his most probing work.
Immersed in a color palette borrowed from earlier work, hues often associated with flesh, vulnerable humanity, blood, and wild passion merge with the white and black geometry of Piet Mondrian’s constructivist reign to render conflicting symbolism almost undecipherable. The window, a brash reference to the Renaissance ideal of a painting as a portal to another world, peeks out from behind the creature that inhabits this other world – yet, this is not the ideal pastoral of Raphael or the star-studded fantasy of the silver screen. Instead, the picture ventures into a universe of subterranean eeriness, in which hooded forms move about their daily routines, eating, drinking, painting, and convening. The present work is a phenomenal example of Guston’s reimagined world, unsullied by painterly refinement, raw in its liberation from familiarity. The figure itself appears immune to our staring, unashamed of its existence, blessedly ignorant of suffering and error, depicted in flat perspective, which renders the figure’s realm irresistible in its simplicity. “Before these paintings, at once classical and haywire, we find ourselves on trial, and it is not our ‘love of art’ that is on trial but our willingness to confront life and art, not to use one as a shield against the other” (N. Lynton, Philip Guston: Paintings 1969-1980, exh. cat., Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, October-December 1982, p. 15).
A fellow high school expellee of Jackson Pollock and occasional Hollywood movie extra, Guston matured in a rich creative environment, primed for inquiry into centuries-old themes via novel mechanisms of investigation. Early exposure to the old Italian masters began for Guston at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, where he soon gave up the institution in favor of self-study. At 18, Guston exhibited a series of paintings expressing his distress at the prevalence of the Ku Klux Klan in 1932 Los Angeles. Drawing on Giorgio de Chirico’s vacuous metaphysical spaces and Pablo Picasso’s blocky forms, Guston fashioned a language with which to confront hostile human impulses: “This was the beginning. They are self-portraits. I perceive myself as being behind a hood…What would it be like to be evil?” (P. Guston, quoted in Philip Guston: Paintings 1969-1980, exh. cat., Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1982, p. 52). Chewing on such a precarious idea led Guston away from figurative work into the realms of abstraction, where he worked not out of contemporary trends but from a deep-seated curiosity to discover what he would create when unfettered.
In 1970, with a ground-breaking show at Marlborough Gallery in New York, he discovered said creation by eschewing art world standards with a collection of pictures in the same series as the present work. Their endless configurations of hoods engaged in quotidian activities shocked all but Guston’s biggest supporter, Willem de Kooning, who saw in these new paintings “the only possession an artist has – freedom” (P. Guston, quoted in ibid., p. 53). In returning to figuration, especially iterations of the Klansmen so familiar from his adolescence, Guston revolted against “the alkalinity of contemporary art” (R. Feld, Philip Guston, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, May-June 1980, p. 23) in an increasingly acidic social milieu. Instead of esoteric stripes, Guston bravely constructed “storyboard images for an unwritten script, or rather for a script that is writing itself all the time. [The work] is very much about the world at large…It is also very much about himself. The motifs he presents to us, plain symbols of depravity and inhumanity out there, soon turn out to be images of himself and thus also, shockingly, of ourselves” (N. Lynton, Philip Guston: Paintings 1969-1980, exh. cat., Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, October-December 1982, p. 14).
Ever at the mercy of his own forms, the present work is a testament to Guston’s learning to trust himself and his instincts in oil. By exploring so freely the underlying notions of humanity as a whole, Guston courted an understanding of himself, as both artist and man. After a European sabbatical in 1971, he ceased painting hoods to make way for further exploration, including smoking eyes and tangled shoes derived from the hood form. Thus, Untitled perches upon the peak of Guston’s self-discovery slope–a vestige of early interrogations ensconced in the theoretical complexity of a lifetime of wondering.
Infused with art history and personal conviction, Philip Guston’s (1913-1980) Untitled (1971) marks the beginning of the period for which the artist is now known, his last prolific decade. Unbeholden to the Abstract Expressionist gestures of his peers and free of the burden of conforming to his own past style, Guston leapt into his “hoods” series with vigorous abandon and a history of political concern. The present work exemplifies Guston’s carefully considered understanding of compositional technique, while blending the everyday motifs and ambiguous creatures that characterize his most probing work.
Immersed in a color palette borrowed from earlier work, hues often associated with flesh, vulnerable humanity, blood, and wild passion merge with the white and black geometry of Piet Mondrian’s constructivist reign to render conflicting symbolism almost undecipherable. The window, a brash reference to the Renaissance ideal of a painting as a portal to another world, peeks out from behind the creature that inhabits this other world – yet, this is not the ideal pastoral of Raphael or the star-studded fantasy of the silver screen. Instead, the picture ventures into a universe of subterranean eeriness, in which hooded forms move about their daily routines, eating, drinking, painting, and convening. The present work is a phenomenal example of Guston’s reimagined world, unsullied by painterly refinement, raw in its liberation from familiarity. The figure itself appears immune to our staring, unashamed of its existence, blessedly ignorant of suffering and error, depicted in flat perspective, which renders the figure’s realm irresistible in its simplicity. “Before these paintings, at once classical and haywire, we find ourselves on trial, and it is not our ‘love of art’ that is on trial but our willingness to confront life and art, not to use one as a shield against the other” (N. Lynton, Philip Guston: Paintings 1969-1980, exh. cat., Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, October-December 1982, p. 15).
A fellow high school expellee of Jackson Pollock and occasional Hollywood movie extra, Guston matured in a rich creative environment, primed for inquiry into centuries-old themes via novel mechanisms of investigation. Early exposure to the old Italian masters began for Guston at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, where he soon gave up the institution in favor of self-study. At 18, Guston exhibited a series of paintings expressing his distress at the prevalence of the Ku Klux Klan in 1932 Los Angeles. Drawing on Giorgio de Chirico’s vacuous metaphysical spaces and Pablo Picasso’s blocky forms, Guston fashioned a language with which to confront hostile human impulses: “This was the beginning. They are self-portraits. I perceive myself as being behind a hood…What would it be like to be evil?” (P. Guston, quoted in Philip Guston: Paintings 1969-1980, exh. cat., Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1982, p. 52). Chewing on such a precarious idea led Guston away from figurative work into the realms of abstraction, where he worked not out of contemporary trends but from a deep-seated curiosity to discover what he would create when unfettered.
In 1970, with a ground-breaking show at Marlborough Gallery in New York, he discovered said creation by eschewing art world standards with a collection of pictures in the same series as the present work. Their endless configurations of hoods engaged in quotidian activities shocked all but Guston’s biggest supporter, Willem de Kooning, who saw in these new paintings “the only possession an artist has – freedom” (P. Guston, quoted in ibid., p. 53). In returning to figuration, especially iterations of the Klansmen so familiar from his adolescence, Guston revolted against “the alkalinity of contemporary art” (R. Feld, Philip Guston, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, May-June 1980, p. 23) in an increasingly acidic social milieu. Instead of esoteric stripes, Guston bravely constructed “storyboard images for an unwritten script, or rather for a script that is writing itself all the time. [The work] is very much about the world at large…It is also very much about himself. The motifs he presents to us, plain symbols of depravity and inhumanity out there, soon turn out to be images of himself and thus also, shockingly, of ourselves” (N. Lynton, Philip Guston: Paintings 1969-1980, exh. cat., Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, October-December 1982, p. 14).
Ever at the mercy of his own forms, the present work is a testament to Guston’s learning to trust himself and his instincts in oil. By exploring so freely the underlying notions of humanity as a whole, Guston courted an understanding of himself, as both artist and man. After a European sabbatical in 1971, he ceased painting hoods to make way for further exploration, including smoking eyes and tangled shoes derived from the hood form. Thus, Untitled perches upon the peak of Guston’s self-discovery slope–a vestige of early interrogations ensconced in the theoretical complexity of a lifetime of wondering.