Gouache on paper mounted on card stock, 1963. 553x758 mm; 21 3/4x29 1/2 inches. Signed in gouache, lower center. Titled, dated and inscribed " 21 3/4x29 1/2 inches" in ink on the brown masonite frame back.
Ex-collection the artist, thence to current owner, acquired directly from the artist in 1966.
This work marks Guston at the height of Abstract Expressionism and, simultaneously, at the very beginning of his transition to representational art. During the early to mid-1960s, Guston enjoyed great critical success with a large showing at the Venice Biennale in 1960, and a retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1962 and the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in 1966, both of which traveled extensively. During this period he also received numerous awards, including two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Ford Foundation grant, and the Prix de Rome of the American Academy of Arts.
The exhibition "Recent Paintings" at the Jewish Museum is noted as the watershed point in his career in 1966. However, Guston himself states how his shift to representation started earlier,"I think that probably the most potent desire for a painter, an image-maker, is to see it. To see what the mind can think and imagine, to realize it for oneself, through oneself, as concretely as possible. I think that's the most powerful and at the same time the most archaic urge that has endured for about 25,000 years. In about 1961 or 1962, the urge for images became so powerful that I started a whole series of dark pictures, mostly just black and white. They were conceived as heads and objects . . . after the show at the Jewish Museum in 1966, I knew I wanted to go on and to deal with concrete objects." From "Philip Guston Talking" (lecture at the University of Minnesota, March 1978), in Renee McKee, ed., Philip Guston, London, Whitechapel Gallery, 1982.
