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Lot Essay
It is the bareness of drawing that I like. The act of drawing is what locates, suggests, discovers. At times it seems enough to draw, without the distractions of color and mass. Yet, it is an old ambition to make drawing and painting one.
—Philip Guston
Set against a luminous backdrop, Untitled (Roma) offers a snapshot of the imagination and musings of Philip Guston. Included in the seminal Museum of Modern Art’s worldwide 1988 traveling exhibition, The Drawings of Philip Guston, this work from 1971 exemplifies the artist’s inimitable figurative idiom that would become his most celebrated approach to self-expression. A surreal and inexplicable scene of severed legs wearing work boots, indicative of fallen soldiers on the ground, is framed by a pile of ruins. Conjuring the all-over bravura of his celebrated abstract corpus of the fifties, there is no central figure leading the narrative, but rather Guston dizzies and diverts the eye from one corner to the next. The refined geometry of forms recedes into the distance, personifying the inanimate objects as characters in their own right. Executed in oil on paper mounted onto canvas, Untitled (Roma) acts as a hybrid between painting and drawing that relishes in the luscious texture lent by oil paint while reveling in the paper support that facilitates a more liberal and immediate working method. Reflecting on his practice, Guston acknowledges, “[i]t is the bareness of drawing that I like. The act of drawing is what locates, suggests, discovers. At times it seems enough to draw, without the distractions of color and mass. Yet, it is an old ambition to make drawing and painting one" (P. Guston, quoted in M. Dabrowski, The Drawings of Philip Guston, New York, 1988, p. 9).
Following the political and cultural turmoil of the 1960s, Guston dramatically turned away from pure abstraction in objection to self-referential subject matter that, to the artist, felt too shallow. The all-over approach of Abstract Expressionism encumbered him, as the only challenge when starting a new composition was to elaborate the picture plane. Guston abandoned the gestural embellishments of abstracted color and interpretive liberty in favor of bold, outlandish and symbolically-charged portrayals of an imagined world that was more genuinely representative of his inner psyche. His return to representational painting enhanced his pictorial investigation exponentially, and his figurative work saw the homecoming of earlier leading characters and symbols, such as his hooded figures, books, clocks, limbs and cigarettes.
By 1967, he had closed the book on abstraction entirely in search of a completely new, signature style, and spent the next three years devoted to developing his new visual lexicon characterized by rosy shades of pink, red and white in boldly outlined forms among large swaths of brushstrokes. In 1970, he unveiled his latest series of thirty-three innovative and radical paintings at Marlborough Gallery in New York City. The new work, including sardonic and absurd cartoon Klansmen, some making their way down modern cityscapes, others caught in a moment of repose with a cigarette, scandalized the art world, which labeled it a disgraceful flop. To escape the burden of the widespread criticism, Guston retreated to Rome at the invitation of the artist-in-residence program at the American Academy. What resulted was a series of works in oil and acrylic on paper depicting the ruins and terrain seen on his travels through Italy.
The works in the Roma series, while executed in a painterly medium, exude a sense of immediacy and reflect a contemplative and observant Guston. In a letter to his dealer, David McKee, he explains, “Modern art—Roman style—is remote for me, like some kind of sentimental Victorian oddity. Etruscan and early Roman painting, Piero, Giotto, Lippi, Baroque architecture, facades, formal gardens, all so exciting and complex, so plastic, so alive and complex, so much to think about, so truly contemporary that I am really unable to see the modern display of a few flat, simple planes of color spaces” (P. Guston, quoted in M. Dabrowski, The Drawings of Philip Guston, New York, 1988, p. 36). The radiance of color with shimmering yet economical hues instantly recalls the kaleidoscopic tableaux of the early fifties, yet the purity within the matter-of-fact renderings summons an entirely fresh ethos. In the span of a few months, the Roma pictures pulled Guston out of a creative block that ensued after his critical failure the year prior and led him towards the dawn of a new era in his oeuvre.
The groundbreaking candor of Guston’s work from the early 1970s threatened not only the legacy of Abstract Expressionism, but also the decree that figuration had no place in the future of American art, according to the governing critic, Clement Greenberg. Following Guston’s brave Marlborough show, when the resounding sentiment was negative, one artist who admired this daring revelation was Willem de Kooning, who was moved by the profound “freedom” in the florid and sanguine figurative paintings (A. Graham-Dixon, exh. cat., Philip Guston: A Retrospective, London, 2004, p. 55). In Untitled (Roma), Guston brilliantly layers harmonious and refined shades of blush, rose and carnation pink within an audacious and vivid picture plane, resulting in the exemplification of an artist with a purely autonomous and singular visual identity.
—Philip Guston
Set against a luminous backdrop, Untitled (Roma) offers a snapshot of the imagination and musings of Philip Guston. Included in the seminal Museum of Modern Art’s worldwide 1988 traveling exhibition, The Drawings of Philip Guston, this work from 1971 exemplifies the artist’s inimitable figurative idiom that would become his most celebrated approach to self-expression. A surreal and inexplicable scene of severed legs wearing work boots, indicative of fallen soldiers on the ground, is framed by a pile of ruins. Conjuring the all-over bravura of his celebrated abstract corpus of the fifties, there is no central figure leading the narrative, but rather Guston dizzies and diverts the eye from one corner to the next. The refined geometry of forms recedes into the distance, personifying the inanimate objects as characters in their own right. Executed in oil on paper mounted onto canvas, Untitled (Roma) acts as a hybrid between painting and drawing that relishes in the luscious texture lent by oil paint while reveling in the paper support that facilitates a more liberal and immediate working method. Reflecting on his practice, Guston acknowledges, “[i]t is the bareness of drawing that I like. The act of drawing is what locates, suggests, discovers. At times it seems enough to draw, without the distractions of color and mass. Yet, it is an old ambition to make drawing and painting one" (P. Guston, quoted in M. Dabrowski, The Drawings of Philip Guston, New York, 1988, p. 9).
Following the political and cultural turmoil of the 1960s, Guston dramatically turned away from pure abstraction in objection to self-referential subject matter that, to the artist, felt too shallow. The all-over approach of Abstract Expressionism encumbered him, as the only challenge when starting a new composition was to elaborate the picture plane. Guston abandoned the gestural embellishments of abstracted color and interpretive liberty in favor of bold, outlandish and symbolically-charged portrayals of an imagined world that was more genuinely representative of his inner psyche. His return to representational painting enhanced his pictorial investigation exponentially, and his figurative work saw the homecoming of earlier leading characters and symbols, such as his hooded figures, books, clocks, limbs and cigarettes.
By 1967, he had closed the book on abstraction entirely in search of a completely new, signature style, and spent the next three years devoted to developing his new visual lexicon characterized by rosy shades of pink, red and white in boldly outlined forms among large swaths of brushstrokes. In 1970, he unveiled his latest series of thirty-three innovative and radical paintings at Marlborough Gallery in New York City. The new work, including sardonic and absurd cartoon Klansmen, some making their way down modern cityscapes, others caught in a moment of repose with a cigarette, scandalized the art world, which labeled it a disgraceful flop. To escape the burden of the widespread criticism, Guston retreated to Rome at the invitation of the artist-in-residence program at the American Academy. What resulted was a series of works in oil and acrylic on paper depicting the ruins and terrain seen on his travels through Italy.
The works in the Roma series, while executed in a painterly medium, exude a sense of immediacy and reflect a contemplative and observant Guston. In a letter to his dealer, David McKee, he explains, “Modern art—Roman style—is remote for me, like some kind of sentimental Victorian oddity. Etruscan and early Roman painting, Piero, Giotto, Lippi, Baroque architecture, facades, formal gardens, all so exciting and complex, so plastic, so alive and complex, so much to think about, so truly contemporary that I am really unable to see the modern display of a few flat, simple planes of color spaces” (P. Guston, quoted in M. Dabrowski, The Drawings of Philip Guston, New York, 1988, p. 36). The radiance of color with shimmering yet economical hues instantly recalls the kaleidoscopic tableaux of the early fifties, yet the purity within the matter-of-fact renderings summons an entirely fresh ethos. In the span of a few months, the Roma pictures pulled Guston out of a creative block that ensued after his critical failure the year prior and led him towards the dawn of a new era in his oeuvre.
The groundbreaking candor of Guston’s work from the early 1970s threatened not only the legacy of Abstract Expressionism, but also the decree that figuration had no place in the future of American art, according to the governing critic, Clement Greenberg. Following Guston’s brave Marlborough show, when the resounding sentiment was negative, one artist who admired this daring revelation was Willem de Kooning, who was moved by the profound “freedom” in the florid and sanguine figurative paintings (A. Graham-Dixon, exh. cat., Philip Guston: A Retrospective, London, 2004, p. 55). In Untitled (Roma), Guston brilliantly layers harmonious and refined shades of blush, rose and carnation pink within an audacious and vivid picture plane, resulting in the exemplification of an artist with a purely autonomous and singular visual identity.