Philip Guston - Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session New York Wednesday, May 15, 2024 | Phillips

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  • “There is something ridiculous and miserly in the myth we inherit from abstract art. That painting is autonomous, pure and for itself, therefore we habitually analyze its ingredients and define its limits.”
    —Philip Guston

    A patchwork of brilliantly colored forms with tangible brushwork, Philip Guston’s Untitled, 1958, is a stunning example of the abstraction that defined the artist’s mid-career works. Cycling through phases of figuration and abstraction for decades, Guston had a unique take on the abstract tradition, one which differed from his fellow artists defining the movement at the time, like Willem de Kooning. Created just five years before the artist’s retrospective at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (Guston was the first artist to have a solo retrospective at the museum), the present work is an exceptional example of the artist’s peak abstract period of the late 1950s. The work was formerly in the collection of film star Hedy Lamarr and has been in the same collection since the late 1970s. An avid collector of Abstract Expressionism, Lamarr was friends with artists and gallerists such as Guston, Franz Kline, and Irving Blum.

    “Guston’s brush, by contrast, patiently explored the canvas, establishing a network of short, discontinuous strokes that charted the exact dimensions of the painting’s format and located its center of gravity. His gesture was not that of the hand that grasps a tool while the arm sweeps but that of an arm that extends a groping hand.”
    —Robert Storr

    “Congealed and Clotted Masses”

     

    Unlike de Kooning, Guston developed a mode of abstraction in the 1950s which was characterized by “congealed and clotted masses, streaks and smears, thick glistening ridges.” As John Yau espoused on the occasion of an exhibition of Guston’s 1954-1958 works, “While Willem de Kooning believed that ‘flesh was the reason oil paint was invented,’ Guston might have countered that it was because of something much more elemental and dark. Guston, who had the ability to be every bit as seductive in paint as de Kooning (and who else among the Abstract Expressionists could you say this about?), eschews that route over and over. Instead of flesh, Guston took to oil paint like an earthworm slithering in dirt.”i Using expressive, gestural and short brushstrokes, the Guston forms amorphous blobs grouped around the center of the composition. Yau continues, “Nothing feels clean or pristine in a Guston painting. Everything feels like it has absorbed the smoke of a fire.”ii This feels like an even more apt description of Guston’s paintings on paper, like this work, where oil seeps into the sheet below, and pigments coalesce in visible layers.

     

    Soon, towards the end of the next decade, Guston would once again move from abstraction to figuration, this time in favor of a more dramatic and satirical approach to art making. A foreshadowing of this evolution can be seen in the lone black form at upper left, which seems to be moving away from the unoccupied space in the left towards the brightly colored forms. It is like a looming precursor to Guston’s later forthcoming practice works defined by his idiosyncratic, cartoonish pictorial vocabulary. In fact, upon close inspection this black blob forms a peak at the top, perhaps a reference to the artist’s hooded figures to come.

     

    A detail of the present work.

    Works from this turn-of-the-decade period are some of the artist’s most sought-after. Masterworks like To Fellini and Nile, which hold two of the top three prices at auction, were also painted in this pivotal year of 1958. Other small-scale abstractions are held in important museum collections, like Last Piece, 1958, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Untitled, 1958, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Intimately scaled, the present work offers a glimpse into Guston’s unique style which, as Robert Storr aptly puts, represents “one of the most poetic contributions to Abstract Expressionism.”iii

     

     Willem de Kooning, Interchange, 1955, Private Collection. Artwork: © 2024 The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 

     

    iJohn Yau, “Philip Guston 1954–1958,” The Brooklyn Rail, March 2009.

    iiIbid. 

    iii Robert Storr, Philip Guston, New York, 1983, p. 7.

    • Condition Report

    • Description

      View our Conditions of Sale.

    • Provenance

      Hedy Lamarr, Los Angeles (acquired directly from the artist in 1958)
      Paul Kantor, Los Angeles
      Nicholas Wilder, Los Angeles
      Acquired from the above by the present owner circa 1977–1980

Property from a Prestigious American Collection

127

Untitled

signed and dated "Philip Guston 58" lower right
gouache on paper
22 5/8 x 28 5/8 in. (57.5 x 72.7 cm)
Executed in 1958.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$350,000 - 500,000 

Place Advance Bid
Contact Specialist

Annie Dolan
NY Head of Auctions and Specialist, Head of Sale, Morning Session
212 940 1288
adolan@phillips.com

Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session

New York Auction 15 May 2024