Philip Guston

Estate of the Artist
McKee Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 2003

This work is in excellent condition. Please contact the Contemporary Art Department at 212-606-7254 for a condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. This work is framed in a thin wood strip frame.
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Philip Guston's Jail from 1969 represents an important cross-road of the two primary styles within the artist's oeuvre – a meeting place of abstraction and representation.  Guston shocked his Abstract Expressionist contemporaries in the mid 1960s when he abandoned his gestural abstract style, so beloved by critics and artists alike for its shimmering brushwork and delicate tonal refinement.  Guston's aesthetic shifted from such opposite poles as objective and non-objective painting more than once in his career, signaling the key issue for this artist: the on-going creative journey was the important element rather than any single act of choice that might settle one's artistic identity.  The quest was how to sustain his complex and organic artistic identity within the momentum of painting, in defiance of the human tendency to rely on formula or a fixed persona.

In Jail, the painterly abstract strokes that defined his early works are here most apparent in the bright red strokes in the upper left corner and in the treatment of the pink background.  The viewer can glimpse the pentimenti of a clock, one of Guston's regularly used symbols, veiled by white and pink brushstrokes of the figure on the left, as Guston consciously opted to maintain a level of painterly abstraction in the work.  Typical of his representational paintings, however, Jail depicts simple objects and forms singly against pink backgrounds.  By 1969, Guston had progressed to barren interiors with hooded figures, often as references to himself and the role of the painter.  Within this heightened, weighty atmosphere, the hooded Klansman reenters the artist's work, singly and in pairs, becoming one of his most important recurring themes. Guston had portrayed Klansmen in the 1930s as politically charged figures of oppression after his paintings were vandalized in an exhibition.  While these images are recycled subject matter, Guston now sought to explore himself and his relationship to the world around him.  Guston stated, "They are self-portraits.  I perceive myself as being behind the hood....The Idea of evil fascinated me... What would it be like to be evil?  To plan, to plot." (Robert Storr, Phillip Guston, New York, 1986, p.56)  The two figures, by a brick wall, in the present work could very well be the artist's struggle with both sides of painting - jailed in an intimate, almost conspiratorial inner dialogue and conveying a subtle sense of mystery.