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Lot Essay
While Philip Guston’s career spanned over four decades and multiples modes of artistic expression—from the murals of his early days, to his oscillating embrace of full abstraction versus politically-charged figuration—it is his late works, including his drawings from the mid-to late-1970s, that truly encapsulate his mindset in its purest form: a combination of his traumatic, violent childhood memories that drove him to create his earliest drawings, and a quest to capture his creative process without what he viewed as the façade of Abstract Expressionism.
Head and Smoke, drawn in 1974, is a prime example of Guston’s radical rejection of the abstract and his late-in-life personal reformation: strikingly representational, the drawing is an acutely objective rendering of Guston himself as a weathered, wrinkled, rotund head, placed in a sparse landscape, accompanied by nothing but a large, smoking cigar. In a period where the works of the abstract expressionists were still very much sought after, Guston emotes with an entirely unique vocabulary. Head and Smoke allows the viewer to come head-to-literal-head with the way Guston sees himself within hauntingly empty environments, environments that reflect his upbringing and the darkening of his world upon his father’s suicide. In the aftermath of losing his father, Guston would often find solace in copying the figures from comic strips by George Herriman. These moments of great loss and early artistic inspiration from his childhood serve as the basis for Guston’s late work, making it his most visceral and honest yet.
Head and Smoke, drawn in 1974, is a prime example of Guston’s radical rejection of the abstract and his late-in-life personal reformation: strikingly representational, the drawing is an acutely objective rendering of Guston himself as a weathered, wrinkled, rotund head, placed in a sparse landscape, accompanied by nothing but a large, smoking cigar. In a period where the works of the abstract expressionists were still very much sought after, Guston emotes with an entirely unique vocabulary. Head and Smoke allows the viewer to come head-to-literal-head with the way Guston sees himself within hauntingly empty environments, environments that reflect his upbringing and the darkening of his world upon his father’s suicide. In the aftermath of losing his father, Guston would often find solace in copying the figures from comic strips by George Herriman. These moments of great loss and early artistic inspiration from his childhood serve as the basis for Guston’s late work, making it his most visceral and honest yet.