“To paint is always to start at the beginning again, yet being unable to avoid familiar arguments about what you see yourself painting. The canvas you are working on modifies all previous ones in an unending baffling chain which never seems to finish. For me the most relevant question and perhaps the only one is `When are you finished?' When do you stop? Or rather why stop at all.''
P
hilip Guston’s Fragments from 1961 is exemplary of the artist’s genre defining transition into abstraction. A high school classmate of Jackson Pollock, Guston trained for one year at the Otis Art Institute before moving to New York to pursue abstract painting. Like Pollock, Guston was interested in the expressive potential of paint, albeit to a much different effect. The present work illustrates a thick rendition of oil paint that achieves a compressed, patchwork-like composition alluding to forms without clearly defining them. An apparent shift in aesthetic, Fragments epitomizes Guston’s ability to not only be unbothered by the opinions of his contemporaries, but also to embrace change and subvert his own aesthetic assumptions as he evolved stylistically. Originally in the legendary Schulhof Collection alongside masterworks by Robert Ryman, Jasper Johns and Agnes Martin, Fragments has resided in the collection of the Brooklyn museum for 32 years. Now available for the first time in 59 years, the muscular brushstrokes and internal energy of Fragments are a testament to Guston’s refusal to accept predetermined truisms about the creative process and proof of the achievements that resulted from these aesthetic explorations.
THE EVOLUTION OF PHILIP GUSTON’S PRACTICE
