“I’ve always had the feeling that art is nourished by the common and ordinary,” said Philip Guston. Although Guston often painted everyday objects, his art was far from ordinary. Alongside items like light bulbs and cigarettes, he depicted mysterious figures, unblinking eyes, and disembodied hands that inhabit cramped interiors and uneasy landscapes. He drew his subjects from observation, memory, and a dreamlike imagination, rendering them in a painterly vocabulary of light and shadow while grappling deeply with their meanings. Guston was acutely attuned to the forces shaping the world around him, and brought the anxieties of history into the studio: “I prefer a more critical art,” he declared. His gaze extended not only to the perpetrators of violence but also to the conditions that allowed violence to persist.
Born in Canada to Ukrainian immigrants, Guston moved to the United States in 1919. In the 1930s and ’40s, he documented the era’s political turmoil and racist brutality in murals. He began making abstract compositions in the 1950s before returning to figuration at the end of his career. He increasingly withdrew from the art world, spending long, uninterrupted sessions in his Woodstock, New York studio. His paintings from the 1970s, the last decade of his life—a selection of which are featured in this exhibition—depict familiar objects and severed body parts in nightmarish settings. Eyes and hands are recurring motifs, reflecting Guston’s conviction that painting was an act of creation in which familiar things could be seen anew. These paintings record the artist’s searching process: looking, remembering, doubting, and making.
Organized by Lydia Mullin, Manager of Collection Galleries, Department of Curatorial Affairs, with Elizabeth Wickham, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture.