Philip Guston

Marlborough Galerie A.G., Zürich
Mackler Gallery, Philadelphia
David McKee Gallery, New York
Private Collection, Lausanne
Sotheby's, New York, May 19, 1999, Lot 244
Acquired by the present owner from the above sale

New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Philip Guston, May 1962 - June 1963, cat. no. 75

In the 1960s, Guston was at a philosophical turning point in his artistic career.  Precipitated by a trip to Europe to study the frescoes of Piero della Francesca at length, the artist became dissatisfied with the atavistic immediacy and narrative emptiness of abstract expressionism.  Conceiving of painting in innovative ways, the artist noted that, “the canvas is a court where the artist is prosecutor, defendant, jury and judge.  Art without a trial disappears at a glance.  It is too primitive or hopeful, or mere notions, or simply startling, or just another means to make life bearable.” (“Faith, Hope and Impossibilty,” Art News Annual XXXI, October 1966, pp. 101-103). Consequently, these years witnessed the coalescing of his previous abstractions into rudimentary colorful forms, predicting his later departure into figurative painting.

The present painting is an important work from this key period of wrestling with the implications of figuration. As H.H. Arnason noted in his introduction to the 1962 Guggenheim show, “the sense of the canvas as a place, a stage on which dramas are enacted by living forms becomes strongest in the most recent painting [from the early 1960s]. Titles suggesting actual places…(Room III)… have reference to periods when the artist was living in his studio, working around the clock, catching fragments of sleep when he was exhausted” (Exh. Cat., New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1962, pp. 35-36).  As such, Room III becomes an intimate portrait of Guston’s emotional and physical state at this time.

Though the theme of “The Room” was especially important to the artist, (versions exist from 1954-55, in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and 1970, in The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), the present work is perhaps the most powerful in its expressionist potency and figurative suggestion. It's presence elucidates the artist’s assertion that, “a thing is recognized only as it comes into existence… To will a new form is inacceptable, because will builds distortion. Desire, too, is incomplete and arbitrary.” (“Faith, Hope and Impossibilty,” Art News Annual XXXI, October 1966, pp. 101-103).

Comp:
The artist in his studio.