Lot Essay
Beggar's Joys represents the apex of Philip Guston's extraordinary achievement as a first-generation Abstract Expressionist painter. It is one of a small series of mostly square-shaped paintings made between 1951-1956, which includes White Painting, 1951 (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), Painting, 1954 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York); and The Room, 1954-55 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art). Characterized by sensitive paint handling, subtle layering effects and exquisitely nuanced passages of color, Guston's paintings of this period secured his reputation as an influential mentor of the New York School of painting.
Guston had first come to the attention of the critics and his peers with a group of paintings in the late 1940s that had fragments of figurative elements buried in their highly structured compositions. But, like so many of his contemporaries, he found himself compelled to eliminate any reference to the figure and turned to abstraction.
In Beggar's Joys, one sees Guston at his finest. The lush, sensuous brushstrokes shimmer on the surface of the painting. The richly impastoed reds, pinks and steely grays emerge from the atmosphere of the gray ground, with its subtle hints of lavender and green. 'Everything here is hushed and softened, the tender strokes of the brush are barely afloat; color is weightless, like odor; the picture is an after-image of a flower garden fading on the inside of closed lids' (L. Steinberg, Other Criteria, New York 1972, pp. 282-283). While paintings by Kline or de Kooning seem to come into existence all at once, in a white-hot burst of creative energy, Guston's paintings seem to evolve slowly, with deliberate overlapping of strokes, a slight quiver on the edge, and the beautiful intermingling of their color. Beggar's Joys, titled when the artist could ill afford paints and canvas, shows the impoverished artist reveling in a hedonistic pleasure of his own creation.
Guston was often characterized as the premier practitioner of an extension of Abstract Expressionism called Abstract Impressionism--so-named for the obvious affinities with the paintings of their 19th century forbearers such as Monet and Pissaro. With their subtlety of coloration and their gradations of texture, Guston's paintings of the early 1950s have the same dramatic power as Monet's views of London in the fog, or Pissaro's paintings en plein air. But Guston himself had little affinity for the Impressionists. He was concerned with the process, with the drama of an unfolding image--not with recording the atmospheric effects of landscape but rather with creating a reality of his own from paint and gesture. An allusion to landscape was a byproduct of the result of his explorations within the medium of paint and canvas, not his intention.
The lightness and sensuality of this period of Guston's painting gives way by the end of 1956, after which his brushstrokes congealed into heavier masses and his pallette returned to the darker, more somber grays of his brooding figurative work of the 1940s. It was not until the return of overt figuration after 1970 that Guston's paintings would be as influential as the abstractions of the early-to-mid-1950s.
Guston had first come to the attention of the critics and his peers with a group of paintings in the late 1940s that had fragments of figurative elements buried in their highly structured compositions. But, like so many of his contemporaries, he found himself compelled to eliminate any reference to the figure and turned to abstraction.
In Beggar's Joys, one sees Guston at his finest. The lush, sensuous brushstrokes shimmer on the surface of the painting. The richly impastoed reds, pinks and steely grays emerge from the atmosphere of the gray ground, with its subtle hints of lavender and green. 'Everything here is hushed and softened, the tender strokes of the brush are barely afloat; color is weightless, like odor; the picture is an after-image of a flower garden fading on the inside of closed lids' (L. Steinberg, Other Criteria, New York 1972, pp. 282-283). While paintings by Kline or de Kooning seem to come into existence all at once, in a white-hot burst of creative energy, Guston's paintings seem to evolve slowly, with deliberate overlapping of strokes, a slight quiver on the edge, and the beautiful intermingling of their color. Beggar's Joys, titled when the artist could ill afford paints and canvas, shows the impoverished artist reveling in a hedonistic pleasure of his own creation.
Guston was often characterized as the premier practitioner of an extension of Abstract Expressionism called Abstract Impressionism--so-named for the obvious affinities with the paintings of their 19th century forbearers such as Monet and Pissaro. With their subtlety of coloration and their gradations of texture, Guston's paintings of the early 1950s have the same dramatic power as Monet's views of London in the fog, or Pissaro's paintings en plein air. But Guston himself had little affinity for the Impressionists. He was concerned with the process, with the drama of an unfolding image--not with recording the atmospheric effects of landscape but rather with creating a reality of his own from paint and gesture. An allusion to landscape was a byproduct of the result of his explorations within the medium of paint and canvas, not his intention.
The lightness and sensuality of this period of Guston's painting gives way by the end of 1956, after which his brushstrokes congealed into heavier masses and his pallette returned to the darker, more somber grays of his brooding figurative work of the 1940s. It was not until the return of overt figuration after 1970 that Guston's paintings would be as influential as the abstractions of the early-to-mid-1950s.