Philip Guston (1913-1980)

The Guston Foundation confirms that this lot will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the paintings of Philip Guston.


An exceptional example of Philip Guston’s late-career turn from abstraction to figuration, Untitled, 1971, hails from the beginning of one of the great final acts in the history of painting. A hooded figure, half obscured by a pink wall covering the bottom fifth of the picture, looks toward an assembly of unknown objects. Both the wall and most of the objects behind it are rendered in shades of muscly pink that so define this body of work and Guston’s late-career reemergence.

As with most of Guston’s figurative painting, a narrative is sensed but never clear. Guston’s pictorial universe is surreal and distant, with characters often masked and object-like. The blue sky throws the scene below into high relief and gives it a lightness not always found in Guston’s paintings. The viewer is left wondering whether the hooded man is building the wall, with the objects as his construction materials, taking it down with those same tools or simply walking along it.

This jewel-like painting offers a glimpse into the vast world Guston created in the final decade of his life. An early example of that celebrated body of work, the present lot finds Guston rethinking and reworking the approaches that had brought him to the forefront of Abstract Expressionism. The varied tonality and subtly directional brushwork in the sky suggest that earlier period and indicate Guston’s continued interest in the physicality of paint and its material properties.