Floor 4: Philip Guston (exiting Polke)
Overview
Gallery Wayfinding
You are in the Phillip Guston Gallery. Four of the paintings in this gallery feature an abundance of warm colors, such as deeply saturated hues of reds and pinks.
You've entered from the back right corner of this small square gallery, facing the far, front wall. There are five paintings installed around the walls, and an artist panel with a video about the artist. To access the audio, use the handheld listening device attached to the panel.
There is a circular seating area in the center of the gallery.
The exit to the Elizabeth Murray & Joan Mitchell Gallery is in the back left corner of the gallery. The QR code is at the threshold on the right wall, marked with a perpendicular tactile floor strip.
Label
"This serious play, which we call art, can't be static...You have to learn how to play in new ways, all the time."
—Philip Guston, 1972
Philip Guston
Born 1913, Montreal; died 1980, Woodstock, New York
Philip Guston began his career as a politically engaged muralist during the Great Depression. By the early 1950s, while working in New York alongside his former high school friend Jackson Pollock and other painters, he turned to abstraction, producing atmospheric compositions of shimmering fields of brushstrokes that earned him recognition as one of the leading Abstract Expressionists. In the late 1960s, amid mounting social unrest and personal introspection, he began repopulating his canvases with figures and objects, painted in a deliberately crude, cartoonlike style. During his highly productive final decade, Guston created increasingly autobiographical paintings of raw emotional intensity.
Related Media
Transcript
Phillip Guston:
There's some mysterious process at work here, which I don't even want to understand. I know that if I stopped painting and became a psychologist of the process of making, I would probably understand it more. But it wouldn't do me any good. I don't want to understand it like that, analytically; but I know that there's some working out that takes place in time, and it's not given to me to completely understand it. It's illegal.
The first thing always looks good, and then you start doubting it, you know?
Objects
5 objects in the order you'll encounter them from this entrance. Select an object to view details.
Artwork Label Text
1976
Oil on canvas
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1992
Rug III is part of a series of works Guston began in 1976 featuring piles of shoes and disembodied legs. They are possibly autobiographical: When the artist was seventeen, his older brother’s legs were crushed between two cars and he died of gangrene as a result. There are also unmistakable historical echoes. Guston's parents were Jewish immigrants who had fled persecution in Odessa, Ukraine, in the early 1900s, and the mass of shoes and tangled limbs call to mind photographs and newsreels documenting the Holocaust. In Guston's hands, these mysterious, isolated forms become universal symbols of inhumanity.
Visual Description
A horizontal, oil-on-canvas painting—about as tall as an average adult, but a few feet wider than their outstretched arms—shows a dense, sculptural mass of multiple sets of forms that resemble thin, overlapping legs bent at the knee and ending in shoed feet. The shoes, which are painted in various shades of red, pink, and brown, are gathered in a pile on the left side of the painting and are laid in such a way that only their bottom soles are revealed. The soles are distinguishable due to the circle of black dots tracing the outline of each sole, intended to represent shoe nails. The legs ending in shoe soles are piled on a red rug, with a pale, pink field filling most of the background.
The accumulated mass of legs resembles a basket-like weave made of thin, rounded bands outlined in black and shaded with evenly spaced dark hash marks indicating a roundness of form. The colors alternate among brick red, dusty gray, black, beige, and muted pink. Several vertical red bands rise at the back of the pile, while flatter segments stack and overlap in front, forming the soles of shoes. One sole near the center is a prominent ochre-orange oval. There are darker black-and-gray semicircles along the left and right edges of the mass.
The rug beneath is painted deep red with small black and white linear accents. On the far right, a narrow section of brown wooden floor appears, its planks indicated by long strokes and darker grain lines. The background is a wash of pinks and off-whites with faint gray-lavender smears that contrast with the heavily outlined woven form. A small cursive signature reads "Philip Guston" and sits near the lower right on the red rug. The painting is in a light brown wood frame.
Artwork Label Text
1956
Oil on canvas
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 2005
Guston built up his abstract paintings of the 1950s with short, parallel brushstrokes clustered toward the center of the composition, resulting in hovering forms that seem to emerge from an atmospheric background. In the second half of the decade, in works such as The Street, he began to introduce larger areas of more intense color. Here, patches of red, dark gray, and orange crackle and play off against one another. Though the painting remains fully abstract, its vivid colors and contrasting forms evoke the bristling energy of a city.
Visual Description
An oil-on-canvas painting—higher than a tall adult and about as wide as their outstretched arms—presents a composition with a background of pale gray, dusty lavender, and off-white, over which a concentrated mass of darker color gathers in the center.
The central area is dominated by saturated reds—notably crimson, scarlet, and brick—applied in thick, jagged brushstrokes and scraped patches. Interspersed within the red cluster are blocky passages of charcoal black and deep maroon, forming several vertical and horizontal shapes. To the left of center, a muted orange shape breaks through the cooler gray surroundings, while scattered slate-blue and blue-gray strokes appear near the lower center and left, partially buried under red smears.
The upper portion of the canvas is open, with thin paint and fewer faint pale gray-pink marks. Along the right side, a small, pale greenish patch emerges from the otherwise gray-pink field. Across the surface, the paint marks alternate between opaque ridges of thick impasto, a painting technique where paint is applied thickly on a surface, and thinner, scraped areas where underlayers show through. Near the bottom edge, a small cursive signature reads "Philip Guston 56." The painting is in a gold-colored metal frame.
Artwork Label Text
1978
Oil on canvas
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 2000
Visual Description
A horizontally oriented, oil-on-canvas painting—one that is about the size of the average wall poster—is dominated by two tightly-packed masses of tall, rounded, vertical forms that resemble the handles of paint brushes. The forms are various shades of reds, pinks, browns, and blacks. They sprout from two separate and abutting cylindrical containers positioned along the bottom edge of the canvas and set against a light, mottled blue background.
The upright forms vary in height and thickness and are outlined with dark, heavy contours; their interiors are brushed with streaks and smears of color with occasional shading hashmarks, pale highlights and small patches of white. Near the upper center, a darker cluster includes a prominent brush handle form painted in warm orange and black, while the surrounding forms shift between dusty pinks, deep maroons, and charcoal grays.
At bottom left, the reddish, cylindrical container has a curved handle and circular metal-like attachments. It is painted with scratchy hash marks; to its right, the second cylindrical container is darker with brownish-black and darker maroon tones. It is also crosshatched with shading and streaked with light blue highlights.
At left, toward the bottom of the painting, the containers appear to sit on a flat red plane or table surface outlined with a thick black line that looks somewhat like a horizon line. However, toward the right side, this shape is absent, giving the impression that the container on the right could be floating in space.
There are visible brush strokes and blended edges, and the composition fills nearly the entire frame with only a narrow margin of blue sky-like space around the clustered shapes. In the lower left corner, a small, dark, cursive signature appears. The painting is in a wood frame.
Artwork Label Text
1963
Oil on canvas
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 2006
Late Fall is characteristic of the brooding, layered canvases that preceded Guston's break from abstraction in the late 1960s. The palette here is mostly grays and blacks, with glimpses of red, pink, and blue emerging from below. The central elements we saw in The Street of 1956 (on view nearby) have now congealed into dark shapes that suggest figures or heads. "There is something ridiculous and miserly in the myth we inherit from abstract art," Guston said in 1960, "that painting is autonomous, pure and for itself. . . . Painting is 'impure.' . . . We are image-makers and image-ridden."
Visual Description
A large, oil-on-canvas painting—about as tall as an average adult and wider than their outstretched arms—presents a field of heavy brushwork dominated by smoky grays and deep black tones, with scattered accents of red.
The central area is packed with broad, opaque strokes that overlap in a block-like mass, leaving a pale ground around the edges. Near the upper and center portions, two large rounded forms appear in deep black paint, their contours reinforced by overlapping curved strokes. Across the middle and lower half, shorter, choppier strokes interlock like a rough lattice, alternately dragging and depositing paint so that underlayers of gray show through. Small, sharp passages of red appear intermittently—especially toward the right side and lower right—where red paint peeks between gray sweeps or sits as smeared highlights along the edges of darker marks. The paint marks vary from thick and glossy in the darkest passages to thinner, streaked applications where the brush bristles leave visible striations. The painting is in a wood frame.
Artwork Label Text
1978
Oil on canvas
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1993
This painting, created just two years before Guston's death, is composed of motifs that recur throughout his late work, including paintbrushes, reading glasses, disembodied arms with clenched fists, and strange, cartoonish renditions of shoe soles. Together, this collection of the artist’s tools and personal items forms a mysterious self-portrait. The brushes suggest a face, while the wristwatch at the center evokes Guston’s restless urge to create despite his own looming mortality.
Visual Description
This oil-on-canvas painting—spanning higher than a tall adult and a few feet wider than their outstretched arms—shows an arrangement of circular discs and personal objects stacked on a flat surface, as well as protruding arms with tight fists, against a pale, blue-gray background.
Across the upper half, a pile of ringed forms overlap in blacks, whites, maroons, and dusty pinks, each outlined with dark, sketched contours. At the top center sits a concentric circle motif in beige and brown. Nearby, other spiraled circles in pink and gray repeat the same concentric-circle-like pattern. From the left edge, a short gray cylindrical bar juts into the cluster—an abstracted arm and fist—while from the right, another long, pale-pink, abstracted arm and fist projects horizontally toward the center. On the far right, a large gray circular form frames a pale interior with small dark marks, and another thick, pink, abstracted arm and fist protrudes toward it from the right side.
Near the center, to the left of the large gray circular form, there is a clock lying on its back with both the hour and minute hands visible. There are no numbers on the clock. Near the lower center, two upright, brush-like forms stand in front of the circular mass: one painted in muted gray with a small green patch at its base, the other with red vertical stripes suggesting bristles and a handle.
The bottom third is a reddish tabletop or surface with dark smears and patches; resting on it at left is a pocket watch-like oval with a black strap and simple black hands, and to its right lies a pair of round spectacles with orange crosshatched lenses and thin, curving arms. The painting is in a gold-colored metal frame.