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Lot Essay
“For Guston, the horizon is a tabletop…it is the top of a brick wall or a stage, a painter’s palette or a blanket; it is the ground; it is a sea. These lines can designate more than one such surface at the same time, confounding and coalescing the genres of still life and landscape.” - (K. Nesin, Philip Guston Now, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2020, p. 210).
Phillip Guston’s Pull is a powerful and poignant painting that belongs to a body of work that is widely regarded as being among the most important of his life. When, as a child, Guston had discovered his father’s suicide, he withdrew into his bedroom closet for solace. There in the darkness, he made endless drawings under the illumination of a simple overhead light bulb. Since then, the light bulb has remained an important recurring motif in the artist’s oeuvre. In Pull, lush passages of dark, velvety tones provide a dramatic milieu for the white bulb and its golden chain. Balanced on the knife’s edge between figuration and all-out abstraction, Pull can be seen as one of Guston’s most rigorous paintings. Here, the artist creates a poetic memento by cloaking the light bulb motif in darkness, which the esteemed curator Kirk Varnedoe referred to as “monumental” and “heart-breakingly direct” (K. Vardenoe, High & Low: Modern Art, Popular Culture, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1990, p. 226).
A massive, monumental portrayal that wholly engulfs the viewer in its eight-foot expanse, Pull is a stunning summation of Guston’s life’s work. As if recreating the dark black interior of his childhood closet, the artist surrounds the viewer on all sides by a velvety darkness. Guston has created a dense visual field made up of countless brushstrokes, where the dark black paint has been peppered here and there with brighter flecks of blue and red. The painting is presided over by a single white light bulb that hangs overhead, from which a delicate brass chain has been achingly rendered. In a testament to the artist’s visual inventiveness, the white bulb can also be read as a full moon that has been reflected in the crystal-green ocean below.
In 1978, Guston traveled to San Francisco to meet with the curator Harry Hopkins, who was eagerly planning the artist’s upcoming retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. This major traveling exhibition proved to be a profound summation of Guston’s career, where Pull was exhibited among many of his greatest paintings. In the present work, and other similar paintings executed in these final years, Guston limits the visual imagery to its barest essentials. This series of immense, almost entirely abstract paintings are austere in their imagery and elegiac in their tone. They are organized by horizontal lines, which might be read as a horizon line, as in the case of Pull, or simply an artist’s mark. The curator Kate Nesin has written: “Guston’s horizon-oriented compositions are late manifestations of questions of seeing and of making that had propelled his work for decades. For Guston, the horizon is a tabletop…it is the top of a brick wall or a stage, a painter’s palette or a blanket; it is the ground; it is a sea. These lines can designate more than one such surface at the same time, confounding and coalescing the genres of still life and landscape” (K. Nesin, “On Edge and At Sea,” Philip Guston Now, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2020, p. 210).
It is astonishing that Guston had created such a huge, definitive painting as Pull in 1979, because he had suffered a severe heart attack in March of that year, and spent much time recuperating in the hospital in Kingston, New York. A few years earlier, his wife, Musa, had suffered a stroke and Guston gradually nursed her back to health. All of these setbacks seemed only to spur him on, however, during his last years. It is during this late-in-life moment that the artist created some of his most meaningful work. “The profusion of images he produced late in life,” wrote the art critic Dore Ashton, “can be compared to Picasso’s last, immense cycle of drawings in which all the motifs of his lifetime parade in a grand finale and add up to one large allegory” (D. Ashton, A Critical Survey of Philip Guston, Berkeley, 1990, p. 178).
Guston held a far-reaching and immense range of influences seemingly at the tip of his brush, and in Pull, he veils the otherwise straightforward imagery in a cleverly concealed array of insider references. Notably, the tripartite division of the canvas may refer to the three-part arrangement of Mark Rothko’s hovering clouds of color. It also evokes Barnett Newman’s “zip” paintings—as if turned on their side and rotated 90 degrees. Guston also greatly admired Giorgio de Chirico, and in de Chirico’s Surrealist landscapes, the composition is often divided into a three-part visual register of foreground, middle ground and background. The light bulb hanging overhead is endlessly fascinating as well—a motif with personal and art historical meaning, that ranges from Picasso’s Guernica to Jasper Johns and even Robert Gober. Kirk Varnedoe claims that Guston found a way out of “the greatness of American abstract painting,” which he found both “liberating and imprisoning” in Pull and similar works. He explained, “It was Guston's conviction that the absurdity and shame of modern life obliged the artist to search for an authentic style in the refuse heaps of the old official culture. Truth in the twentieth century could only be made from spatter cloths and vaudeville skits and unposted letters. Guston, alone among his contemporaries, at the end chose the vaudeville skit rather than the spatter cloth—chose to express his faith in a cycle of muted and ambiguous parables rather than in a set of defiant painterly gestures” (K. Vardenoe, op. cit., p. 226).
In the last years of his life, Guston's paintings seemed to undergo an alchemical process in which the ordinary objects of his humble studio—clocks, books, shoes, lights—were transformed into extraordinary vessels of pathos, humor, hope and even love. As the artist John Cage once remarked, “When you start working, everybody is in your studio-the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas, all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave” (J. Cage, quoted in H. Cooper, “Guston, Then,” in Philip Guston Now, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2020, p. 128). Indeed, in Pull, it appears the actor has left the stage, but even in his absence, he's left the light on, just for us.
Phillip Guston’s Pull is a powerful and poignant painting that belongs to a body of work that is widely regarded as being among the most important of his life. When, as a child, Guston had discovered his father’s suicide, he withdrew into his bedroom closet for solace. There in the darkness, he made endless drawings under the illumination of a simple overhead light bulb. Since then, the light bulb has remained an important recurring motif in the artist’s oeuvre. In Pull, lush passages of dark, velvety tones provide a dramatic milieu for the white bulb and its golden chain. Balanced on the knife’s edge between figuration and all-out abstraction, Pull can be seen as one of Guston’s most rigorous paintings. Here, the artist creates a poetic memento by cloaking the light bulb motif in darkness, which the esteemed curator Kirk Varnedoe referred to as “monumental” and “heart-breakingly direct” (K. Vardenoe, High & Low: Modern Art, Popular Culture, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1990, p. 226).
A massive, monumental portrayal that wholly engulfs the viewer in its eight-foot expanse, Pull is a stunning summation of Guston’s life’s work. As if recreating the dark black interior of his childhood closet, the artist surrounds the viewer on all sides by a velvety darkness. Guston has created a dense visual field made up of countless brushstrokes, where the dark black paint has been peppered here and there with brighter flecks of blue and red. The painting is presided over by a single white light bulb that hangs overhead, from which a delicate brass chain has been achingly rendered. In a testament to the artist’s visual inventiveness, the white bulb can also be read as a full moon that has been reflected in the crystal-green ocean below.
In 1978, Guston traveled to San Francisco to meet with the curator Harry Hopkins, who was eagerly planning the artist’s upcoming retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. This major traveling exhibition proved to be a profound summation of Guston’s career, where Pull was exhibited among many of his greatest paintings. In the present work, and other similar paintings executed in these final years, Guston limits the visual imagery to its barest essentials. This series of immense, almost entirely abstract paintings are austere in their imagery and elegiac in their tone. They are organized by horizontal lines, which might be read as a horizon line, as in the case of Pull, or simply an artist’s mark. The curator Kate Nesin has written: “Guston’s horizon-oriented compositions are late manifestations of questions of seeing and of making that had propelled his work for decades. For Guston, the horizon is a tabletop…it is the top of a brick wall or a stage, a painter’s palette or a blanket; it is the ground; it is a sea. These lines can designate more than one such surface at the same time, confounding and coalescing the genres of still life and landscape” (K. Nesin, “On Edge and At Sea,” Philip Guston Now, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2020, p. 210).
It is astonishing that Guston had created such a huge, definitive painting as Pull in 1979, because he had suffered a severe heart attack in March of that year, and spent much time recuperating in the hospital in Kingston, New York. A few years earlier, his wife, Musa, had suffered a stroke and Guston gradually nursed her back to health. All of these setbacks seemed only to spur him on, however, during his last years. It is during this late-in-life moment that the artist created some of his most meaningful work. “The profusion of images he produced late in life,” wrote the art critic Dore Ashton, “can be compared to Picasso’s last, immense cycle of drawings in which all the motifs of his lifetime parade in a grand finale and add up to one large allegory” (D. Ashton, A Critical Survey of Philip Guston, Berkeley, 1990, p. 178).
Guston held a far-reaching and immense range of influences seemingly at the tip of his brush, and in Pull, he veils the otherwise straightforward imagery in a cleverly concealed array of insider references. Notably, the tripartite division of the canvas may refer to the three-part arrangement of Mark Rothko’s hovering clouds of color. It also evokes Barnett Newman’s “zip” paintings—as if turned on their side and rotated 90 degrees. Guston also greatly admired Giorgio de Chirico, and in de Chirico’s Surrealist landscapes, the composition is often divided into a three-part visual register of foreground, middle ground and background. The light bulb hanging overhead is endlessly fascinating as well—a motif with personal and art historical meaning, that ranges from Picasso’s Guernica to Jasper Johns and even Robert Gober. Kirk Varnedoe claims that Guston found a way out of “the greatness of American abstract painting,” which he found both “liberating and imprisoning” in Pull and similar works. He explained, “It was Guston's conviction that the absurdity and shame of modern life obliged the artist to search for an authentic style in the refuse heaps of the old official culture. Truth in the twentieth century could only be made from spatter cloths and vaudeville skits and unposted letters. Guston, alone among his contemporaries, at the end chose the vaudeville skit rather than the spatter cloth—chose to express his faith in a cycle of muted and ambiguous parables rather than in a set of defiant painterly gestures” (K. Vardenoe, op. cit., p. 226).
In the last years of his life, Guston's paintings seemed to undergo an alchemical process in which the ordinary objects of his humble studio—clocks, books, shoes, lights—were transformed into extraordinary vessels of pathos, humor, hope and even love. As the artist John Cage once remarked, “When you start working, everybody is in your studio-the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas, all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave” (J. Cage, quoted in H. Cooper, “Guston, Then,” in Philip Guston Now, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2020, p. 128). Indeed, in Pull, it appears the actor has left the stage, but even in his absence, he's left the light on, just for us.