.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Executed in 1975 as the front cover for an edition of the literary journal Fire Exit, the present drawing offers a richly illustrated frieze of Philip Guston’s most iconic motifs. In the upper right corner, a lit cigarette produces a thick stream of smoke, like that which trails behind a steam train in the far reaches of a painting by Giorgio de Chirico. The cigarette is perched atop a rudimentary sunrise, a motif which functions within the artist’s oeuvre as an allusion to his wife, the poet Musa McKim. The sun rises from a pile of shoes affixed to disembodied legs, pointed towards by a thickly veined hand which emerges, index finger outstretched, from the far left of the page. Filling the lower portion of the composition is a strained, bulbous head: brow furrowed, puffing on a cigarette and singular engorged eye held agape. Untitled captures the imaginative semiotic play that drove Guston’s five-decade-long career, and established him as one of the twentieth century’s most influential image-makers.
Fire Exit, the journal of the New Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, took its name from a play by New York School poet V. R. Lang, founding member of the original Poets’ Theatre in the 1950s. The magazine was edited by William Corbett, a friend of Guston whose memoir of the artist’s final decade took as its frontispiece the present work. Indeed, in his later years, Guston enjoyed and sought out above all the company of writers. Upon reams of paper he illustrated lines of poetry by friends such as Clarke Coolidge, and those of his wife, McKim. These works, a selection of which were exhibited in the recent major retrospective of the artist staged at Tate Modern in London (2023), speak to Guston’s impulse towards storytelling, which emerged with such force in his figurative work of the late sixties and seventies.
In Guston’s final years a postcard-sized reproduction of an archetypal de Chirico arcade scene would adorn the kitchen at the home in Woodstock, New York, which he shared with McKim. He had first encountered the melancholic urban poetry of de Chirico in 1930, at the age of seventeen. Working at the time as a movie extra in Hollywood, Guston was gripped by the hazy, shifting narratives that so abound in works by the Italian modernist. In the same decade de Chirico also enchanted the Surrealists of André Breton’s Paris, who identified the fecund potential of the oneiric state in works such as The Child’s Brain (1930). Yet where the Surrealists sought to dwell only in the realm of the unconscious, Guston invoked the pictorial language of the dream while remaining firmly, even if reluctantly, in the tangible world. In Guston’s late body of figurative work, the eye looms large and awake.
Across the substantial body of drawings produced in Guston’s final decade, the repeated detail is rendered intimately familiar. There is a tactility to the artist’s works on paper: a kind of thought exercised through action, a sense of something moulded and remoulded by knowing hands. At the core of these works is the painter himself: his head and his hand. So often disembodied, the latter motif takes on a creative autonomy. The hand held outstretched in Untitled is the same infallible mark-maker of Guston’s late masterpiece The Line (1978). The head swelling with images is the artist’s own, reeling with a lifelong tug-of-war between figuration and abstraction, artistic expression and its sociopolitical function. For two decades, from 1947 to 1967, Guston had turned his back on representation, and his return was premised on a desire to tell stories. Drawing from a vocabulary of known and common forms, his works can be read almost syntactically, though they elude any fixed or dictated narrative. Within its riddle of signs and symbols, Untitled speaks to the rich poetic possibilities Guston found in image-making.
Fire Exit, the journal of the New Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, took its name from a play by New York School poet V. R. Lang, founding member of the original Poets’ Theatre in the 1950s. The magazine was edited by William Corbett, a friend of Guston whose memoir of the artist’s final decade took as its frontispiece the present work. Indeed, in his later years, Guston enjoyed and sought out above all the company of writers. Upon reams of paper he illustrated lines of poetry by friends such as Clarke Coolidge, and those of his wife, McKim. These works, a selection of which were exhibited in the recent major retrospective of the artist staged at Tate Modern in London (2023), speak to Guston’s impulse towards storytelling, which emerged with such force in his figurative work of the late sixties and seventies.
In Guston’s final years a postcard-sized reproduction of an archetypal de Chirico arcade scene would adorn the kitchen at the home in Woodstock, New York, which he shared with McKim. He had first encountered the melancholic urban poetry of de Chirico in 1930, at the age of seventeen. Working at the time as a movie extra in Hollywood, Guston was gripped by the hazy, shifting narratives that so abound in works by the Italian modernist. In the same decade de Chirico also enchanted the Surrealists of André Breton’s Paris, who identified the fecund potential of the oneiric state in works such as The Child’s Brain (1930). Yet where the Surrealists sought to dwell only in the realm of the unconscious, Guston invoked the pictorial language of the dream while remaining firmly, even if reluctantly, in the tangible world. In Guston’s late body of figurative work, the eye looms large and awake.
Across the substantial body of drawings produced in Guston’s final decade, the repeated detail is rendered intimately familiar. There is a tactility to the artist’s works on paper: a kind of thought exercised through action, a sense of something moulded and remoulded by knowing hands. At the core of these works is the painter himself: his head and his hand. So often disembodied, the latter motif takes on a creative autonomy. The hand held outstretched in Untitled is the same infallible mark-maker of Guston’s late masterpiece The Line (1978). The head swelling with images is the artist’s own, reeling with a lifelong tug-of-war between figuration and abstraction, artistic expression and its sociopolitical function. For two decades, from 1947 to 1967, Guston had turned his back on representation, and his return was premised on a desire to tell stories. Drawing from a vocabulary of known and common forms, his works can be read almost syntactically, though they elude any fixed or dictated narrative. Within its riddle of signs and symbols, Untitled speaks to the rich poetic possibilities Guston found in image-making.