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Lot Essay
The complexity and sophisticated orchestration of Philip Guston’s personal iconography reaches a crescendo in Chair, an epic painting of 1976 that bristles with so much of the powerful imagery that it becomes one of his most intoxicating works. The tangled limbs, the wooden floor boards, leather shoes and the bricked-up window are some of Guston’s most iconic motifs. In Chair, these poetic harbingers of Guston’s inner world are tinged with a strange and melancholic beauty, painted with care and finesse, as if each fluid brushstroke were an act of love. Similar paintings from the same series can be found in prestigious museum collections, including Green Rug (1976, Museum of Modern Art, New York); Monument (1976, Tate, London); Red Cloth (1976, Brooklyn Museum); and Room (1976, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa).
In recognition of the importance of this significant painting, the renowned curator Kirk Varnedoe selected Chair for his watershed exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1990 called High & Low. In the exhibition catalogue, Varndeoe writes: “Two motifs in particular came to be of supreme importance for Guston: the naked light bulb, dangling from its segmented metal chain—a light and a noose at once—and the insect like assemblage of naked, hairy legs with oversized feet turned up to reveal the cobbled, nailed sole” (K. Vardenoe, High & Low: Modern Art, Popular Culture, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1990, p. 223). Indeed, the rope motif and the tangle of legs are both present in Chair, creating a Surrealist vision imbued with both pathos and horror.
In Chair, a jumbled stack of the pink, hairy limbs described above are depicted in a tangled disarray. The legs are bare save for their leather shoes, which have been overturned to reveal the pattern of metal nails lining their soles. (It is unclear if, on the other side of the chair, the bodies to which the legs belong are piled up as well). Another important motif can be found in the plain wood floorboards of this strange interior chamber, which reads almost like an existentialist stage set. In the upper left corner, a green window shade is pulled up to reveal a brick wall. The shade is conveyed by a long cord, which Guston has exaggerated, elongating the length of the cord and enlarging the proportions of the ring used to pull it up or down. Although it is comically oversized, this ring conjures up sinister allusions. It evokes the hangman’s noose, which is obliquely referenced by the Hood paintings, but also the rope that the artist’s father tragically used to commit suicide (Guston was the one who discovered his father’s body hanging from a rope in the family’s home, as a child of only 10 years old).
Thus, in Chair, Guston creates an emotional scene that is both tender and bleak. This feeling also extends to the painting’s background, which is rendered in wide, washy brushstrokes of soft rose and pale gray. The background could very well be an independent painting in and of itself, as it so closely evokes the subtle abstract techniques of Guston's earlier 1950s paintings. Again, this aspect is echoed by Varnedoe in High & Low, as he writes: “Guston never forsook his gift for pure painting, or his control over ‘epic’ size canvases. In fact, his late paintings, far from having the flat or impersonal surfaces of Pop, have an impassioned richness of surface, a mix of butter-cream and blood, as luxurious as anything in his delicate abstract pictures” (K. Vardenoe, Ibid., 1990, p. 225).
“The intensity of Guston's faith in the power of impurity produced paintings that have some of the concentration of great religious art.” - Kirk Vardenoe (High & Low: Modern Art, Popular Culture, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1990, p. 226).
Working in his secluded and peaceful retreat in Woodstock, New York, Guston embarked upon the most productive period of his career. “I am alone and at last ‘all together,’ he said. “I need to build more storage space...It feels strange to be completely cut off from the city. I feel like burrowing in again--to be a miner and not surface for a while” (P. Guston, quoted in D. Ashton, A Critical Survey of Philip Guston, Berkeley, 1990, p. 73). In October of 1972, Guston made the controversial decision to leave the Marlborough Gallery after many years of fruitful partnership. He transferred all his work to Woodstock at that time. In 1974, he joined David McKee’s new gallery, and thus embarked upon an incredibly fertile period in which he found himself painting day and night.
In this last great cycle of paintings, which he would paint from 1974 until his death in 1980, Guston finds beauty in humble objects. As in Vincent van Gogh’s paintings of shoes, Guston delights in the pathos evoked by these humble leather goods. "Shoes became yet a third alter ego,” the curator Edward Fry has written, calling them “displaced images of selfhood.” “They gather in strange clusters, legs, knees tangling together in silent hordes...Guston depicts them with a style that is not a style, a homely almost caricature-esque style that renders each image at once both clearly recognizable yet also clothed in a fresh and unforgettable strangeness, as though one were rediscovering one’s own world’’ (E. Fry, Philip Guston: The Late Works, exh. cat., National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1994, pp. 19-20).
“The intensity of Guston's faith in the power of impurity produced paintings that have some of the concentration of great religious art,” the Museum of Modern Art curator Kirk Varnedoe declares in High & Low. “We confront them now with the same puzzlement that Guston himself felt each morning, looking at the accomplishment of the night before, seeing both an image of the familiar, and a vision of the unknown" (K. Vardenoe, op. cit., p. 226). Indeed, the imagery that emerged during this last great cycle of paintings is haunting in its strangeness, yet painted with such affection and care. Chair is evocative of all these things. A lingering relic from a profound moment in the artist’s career, Chair embodies the best of Philip Guston’s late, great work.
In recognition of the importance of this significant painting, the renowned curator Kirk Varnedoe selected Chair for his watershed exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1990 called High & Low. In the exhibition catalogue, Varndeoe writes: “Two motifs in particular came to be of supreme importance for Guston: the naked light bulb, dangling from its segmented metal chain—a light and a noose at once—and the insect like assemblage of naked, hairy legs with oversized feet turned up to reveal the cobbled, nailed sole” (K. Vardenoe, High & Low: Modern Art, Popular Culture, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1990, p. 223). Indeed, the rope motif and the tangle of legs are both present in Chair, creating a Surrealist vision imbued with both pathos and horror.
In Chair, a jumbled stack of the pink, hairy limbs described above are depicted in a tangled disarray. The legs are bare save for their leather shoes, which have been overturned to reveal the pattern of metal nails lining their soles. (It is unclear if, on the other side of the chair, the bodies to which the legs belong are piled up as well). Another important motif can be found in the plain wood floorboards of this strange interior chamber, which reads almost like an existentialist stage set. In the upper left corner, a green window shade is pulled up to reveal a brick wall. The shade is conveyed by a long cord, which Guston has exaggerated, elongating the length of the cord and enlarging the proportions of the ring used to pull it up or down. Although it is comically oversized, this ring conjures up sinister allusions. It evokes the hangman’s noose, which is obliquely referenced by the Hood paintings, but also the rope that the artist’s father tragically used to commit suicide (Guston was the one who discovered his father’s body hanging from a rope in the family’s home, as a child of only 10 years old).
Thus, in Chair, Guston creates an emotional scene that is both tender and bleak. This feeling also extends to the painting’s background, which is rendered in wide, washy brushstrokes of soft rose and pale gray. The background could very well be an independent painting in and of itself, as it so closely evokes the subtle abstract techniques of Guston's earlier 1950s paintings. Again, this aspect is echoed by Varnedoe in High & Low, as he writes: “Guston never forsook his gift for pure painting, or his control over ‘epic’ size canvases. In fact, his late paintings, far from having the flat or impersonal surfaces of Pop, have an impassioned richness of surface, a mix of butter-cream and blood, as luxurious as anything in his delicate abstract pictures” (K. Vardenoe, Ibid., 1990, p. 225).
“The intensity of Guston's faith in the power of impurity produced paintings that have some of the concentration of great religious art.” - Kirk Vardenoe (High & Low: Modern Art, Popular Culture, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1990, p. 226).
Working in his secluded and peaceful retreat in Woodstock, New York, Guston embarked upon the most productive period of his career. “I am alone and at last ‘all together,’ he said. “I need to build more storage space...It feels strange to be completely cut off from the city. I feel like burrowing in again--to be a miner and not surface for a while” (P. Guston, quoted in D. Ashton, A Critical Survey of Philip Guston, Berkeley, 1990, p. 73). In October of 1972, Guston made the controversial decision to leave the Marlborough Gallery after many years of fruitful partnership. He transferred all his work to Woodstock at that time. In 1974, he joined David McKee’s new gallery, and thus embarked upon an incredibly fertile period in which he found himself painting day and night.
In this last great cycle of paintings, which he would paint from 1974 until his death in 1980, Guston finds beauty in humble objects. As in Vincent van Gogh’s paintings of shoes, Guston delights in the pathos evoked by these humble leather goods. "Shoes became yet a third alter ego,” the curator Edward Fry has written, calling them “displaced images of selfhood.” “They gather in strange clusters, legs, knees tangling together in silent hordes...Guston depicts them with a style that is not a style, a homely almost caricature-esque style that renders each image at once both clearly recognizable yet also clothed in a fresh and unforgettable strangeness, as though one were rediscovering one’s own world’’ (E. Fry, Philip Guston: The Late Works, exh. cat., National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1994, pp. 19-20).
“The intensity of Guston's faith in the power of impurity produced paintings that have some of the concentration of great religious art,” the Museum of Modern Art curator Kirk Varnedoe declares in High & Low. “We confront them now with the same puzzlement that Guston himself felt each morning, looking at the accomplishment of the night before, seeing both an image of the familiar, and a vision of the unknown" (K. Vardenoe, op. cit., p. 226). Indeed, the imagery that emerged during this last great cycle of paintings is haunting in its strangeness, yet painted with such affection and care. Chair is evocative of all these things. A lingering relic from a profound moment in the artist’s career, Chair embodies the best of Philip Guston’s late, great work.