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Lot Essay
Spanning almost three metres across, Mirror Head (1977) is a powerful, panoramic example of Philip Guston’s late figurative works. The subject is the artist’s wife, Musa McKim, who became central to his paintings of this period. Guston depicts the rear view of her dark red head before a painterly expanse of pale blue. Shining highlights and deep shadows texture her hair, which is boldly worked in strokes of red, mauve and black. The blue field is marbled with shimmering silver-pink brushwork that echoes her silhouette, as if she is facing her hazy reflection in a mirror. Such is the painting’s scale, and so massive are its forms, that this intimate scene becomes a sublime vista. The red strip in the foreground might be the low horizon of a landscape, and the head a monument before a vast sky. Mirror Head has been included in prominent exhibitions across its lifetime, appearing in a travelling Australian survey of Guston’s late works (1984-1985) and two major retrospectives that toured Madrid, Barcelona, St. Louis and Dallas (1989-1990), and Bonn, Stuttgart, Ottawa and Paris (1999-2000).
Guston’s large-scale late paintings, which occupied him from 1976 until his death in 1980, were the climax of an extraordinary and protean career. After a spell as a political muralist and a painter of dreamlike, theatrical figurative scenes, Guston had made his name in the 1950s with iridescent abstract paintings that placed him at the vanguard of the second-generation New York School. His close friends included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning. In 1968, living away from the city in upstate Woodstock, he made a dramatic shift. He had come to see abstraction as escapist, falsely estranging art from the world. He started first to draw and then to paint the things that surrounded him in his studio—books, clocks, canvases and easels, shoes, bottles and cigarettes—building a symbolic language of objects that tracked his shifting moods, dreams and anxieties. Hooded figures related to the Ku Klux Klan, with whom he had had violent encounters during his youth in Los Angeles, returned to his works in cartoonish form as he bore witness to the psychic unrest of late-1960s America.
Guston debuted his new figuration in a 1970 exhibition at Marlborough Gallery, where he was met with dismay by those who had championed his abstract work. He retreated to Rome for several months, drawing solace from the Italian Old Masters he had admired since his student days, before returning to Woodstock. As his vocabulary evolved over the following years, the ‘hoods’ gave way to a bean-shaped artist-avatar with a single cyclopean eye, and, during the late 1970s, visions of himself and Musa. Ever more richly rendered, these paintings swelled in scale and became metaphysical worlds, with bedsheets appearing like oceans or plains, bodies landscapes and heads topological forms. The emblem of Musa—with large eyes, high forehead and parted hair—continually morphed, appearing variously like a life preserver, an open book, an island or a sun. Today, these works are regarded as among the towering achievements of figurative art in the twentieth century.
Musa suffered several strokes in 1977, and Guston acknowledged the autobiographical impetus for his works from this time. He was devoted to his wife, who had endured episodes of infidelity and the difficulties of his uncompromising work ethic, and she had been his most valued critic since they met in 1930. ‘With Musa’s failing health, the eye must have been dimming, and that was a crisis’, writes Harry Cooper. ‘In some sense, then, the Musaform was all about him. But of course it was also his gift to her: his expression, manic and multiform and visually voluble, of love for her’ (H. Cooper, ‘Guston, Then: Telling Tales’, in Philip Guston Now, exh. cat. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 2020, p. 127). This emotive depth is palpable in the present work, which combines its intimations of mortality—the head turned away, the reflection dissolving from view—with a poignant tenderness as his brushstrokes caress the back of her head.
Abstract painting, Guston had come to believe, not only retreated from reality but also failed to be totally autonomous. Even at its most rarefied it was ‘impure’, stirring with images and imprinted with subjectivity. At the start of the 1960s, looming head-like forms had emerged in his transitional abstracts such as Mirror – to S.K. (1960, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk). The work was dedicated to the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who had written of self-recognition as a ‘mirror of possibility’. In 1972, Guston described his return to figuration as going ‘through the mirror’: an ecstatic leap into a realm where his own self, in all its complications, contradictions and uncertainty, could be laid bare. Picturing a threshold between image and its absence, Mirror Head exemplifies the raw grandeur and honesty of Guston’s final phase. It had taken him years, he reflected, to realise that ‘the only thing one can really learn, the only technique to learn, is the capacity to be able to change’ (P. Guston, Talk at Yale Summer School of Music and Art, August 1972, in C. Coolidge, ed., Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures and Conversations Writings, Berkeley 2010, pp. 156, 150).
Guston’s large-scale late paintings, which occupied him from 1976 until his death in 1980, were the climax of an extraordinary and protean career. After a spell as a political muralist and a painter of dreamlike, theatrical figurative scenes, Guston had made his name in the 1950s with iridescent abstract paintings that placed him at the vanguard of the second-generation New York School. His close friends included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning. In 1968, living away from the city in upstate Woodstock, he made a dramatic shift. He had come to see abstraction as escapist, falsely estranging art from the world. He started first to draw and then to paint the things that surrounded him in his studio—books, clocks, canvases and easels, shoes, bottles and cigarettes—building a symbolic language of objects that tracked his shifting moods, dreams and anxieties. Hooded figures related to the Ku Klux Klan, with whom he had had violent encounters during his youth in Los Angeles, returned to his works in cartoonish form as he bore witness to the psychic unrest of late-1960s America.
Guston debuted his new figuration in a 1970 exhibition at Marlborough Gallery, where he was met with dismay by those who had championed his abstract work. He retreated to Rome for several months, drawing solace from the Italian Old Masters he had admired since his student days, before returning to Woodstock. As his vocabulary evolved over the following years, the ‘hoods’ gave way to a bean-shaped artist-avatar with a single cyclopean eye, and, during the late 1970s, visions of himself and Musa. Ever more richly rendered, these paintings swelled in scale and became metaphysical worlds, with bedsheets appearing like oceans or plains, bodies landscapes and heads topological forms. The emblem of Musa—with large eyes, high forehead and parted hair—continually morphed, appearing variously like a life preserver, an open book, an island or a sun. Today, these works are regarded as among the towering achievements of figurative art in the twentieth century.
Musa suffered several strokes in 1977, and Guston acknowledged the autobiographical impetus for his works from this time. He was devoted to his wife, who had endured episodes of infidelity and the difficulties of his uncompromising work ethic, and she had been his most valued critic since they met in 1930. ‘With Musa’s failing health, the eye must have been dimming, and that was a crisis’, writes Harry Cooper. ‘In some sense, then, the Musaform was all about him. But of course it was also his gift to her: his expression, manic and multiform and visually voluble, of love for her’ (H. Cooper, ‘Guston, Then: Telling Tales’, in Philip Guston Now, exh. cat. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 2020, p. 127). This emotive depth is palpable in the present work, which combines its intimations of mortality—the head turned away, the reflection dissolving from view—with a poignant tenderness as his brushstrokes caress the back of her head.
Abstract painting, Guston had come to believe, not only retreated from reality but also failed to be totally autonomous. Even at its most rarefied it was ‘impure’, stirring with images and imprinted with subjectivity. At the start of the 1960s, looming head-like forms had emerged in his transitional abstracts such as Mirror – to S.K. (1960, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk). The work was dedicated to the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who had written of self-recognition as a ‘mirror of possibility’. In 1972, Guston described his return to figuration as going ‘through the mirror’: an ecstatic leap into a realm where his own self, in all its complications, contradictions and uncertainty, could be laid bare. Picturing a threshold between image and its absence, Mirror Head exemplifies the raw grandeur and honesty of Guston’s final phase. It had taken him years, he reflected, to realise that ‘the only thing one can really learn, the only technique to learn, is the capacity to be able to change’ (P. Guston, Talk at Yale Summer School of Music and Art, August 1972, in C. Coolidge, ed., Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures and Conversations Writings, Berkeley 2010, pp. 156, 150).