Premium pages left without account:

Auction archive: Lot number 30

Philip Guston

Estimate
US$1,500,000 - US$2,500,000
Price realised:
n. a.
Auction archive: Lot number 30

Philip Guston

Estimate
US$1,500,000 - US$2,500,000
Price realised:
n. a.
Beschreibung:

PROPERTY OF A NEW ORLEANS COLLECTION Philip Guston Path III 1960 oil on canvas 64 x 76 in. (162.6 x 193 cm) Signed “Philip Guston” lower right. Also signed, titled and dated “Philip Guston, ‘Path III’, 1960” on the reverse.
Provenance Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner Exhibited New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Philip Guston May 2 – July 1, 1962. This exhibition later traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum, May 15 – June 23, 1963 London, Tate Gallery, Painting and Sculpture of a Decade: 1954- 64, April 22 – June 28, 1964 California, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Philip Guston February 15 – March 26, 1967 Waterville Maine, Colby College Art Museum, Three Artists of Today: Philip Guston Conrad Marca-Relli James Rosati April 14 – May 14, 1967 New Orleans, New Orleans Museum of Art, May 2011 – August 2011 Literature H.H. Arnason, Philip Guston New York, 1962, p. 102, pl. 79 (illustrated) Catalogue Essay In my way of working, I work to eliminate the distance or the time between my thinking and doing. PHILIP GUSTON (Philip Guston taken from a dialogue with Harold Rosenberg, 1966, D. Ashton. A Critical Study of Philip Guston Los Angeles, 1976, p. 132). In 1962, the Guggenheim Museum held its very first one-artist retrospective exhibition. Philip Guston was the artist deemed worthy of such an honor, and the introduction to the exhibition identified a key trend in Guston’s work of the late 1950s: “In these paintings and those that immediately followed them the drama of conflict which for some years had existed in Guston’s use of color shapes, began to become explicit”(H. Arnason, Philip Guston New York, 1962, p.30). The conflict of philosophical anxiety had thrust its way into Guston’s abstractions, and nowhere does this conflict rear its head more than in Path III, 1960. Guston found himself heavily immersed in the philosophy of great minds during the late 1950s; from Einstein’s denial of density as a real concept to Kafka’s insistence that man is a slave to his materialism, Guston’s research had myriad artistic consequences in his work. Yet, when examining the extraordinary canvas of Path III, 1960, there is no clearer philosophy at work than that of Existentialism. Guston’s intimate study with these writers laid bare to him that life was a drama of choices—between religion and atheism, between greed and altruism, between self-abnegation and self-affirmation. The present lot is without both conventional figures and a conventional color scheme, and, ultimately, defies a label of abstract expressionism or figurative expressionism. It is, in the end, a holistic expression of Guston’s creative anxiety. Faced with “the ‘impossiblity’ of making art in the absence of a vital common language,” Guston opts not for the veneer of common shapes and landscapes, but chooses a language that is entirely his own (R. Storr. Modern Masters: Philip Guston New York, 1986, p. 30). In executing Path III, 1960, it was not the first time that Guston employed a deeply darkened color palette; one can see his use of heavy blacks and saturated hues dominating canvasses as early as Tormentors, 1947-1948. Yet, in his earlier canvasses, Guston laid out a semblance of order, as figures rendered in a quasi-Cubist approach conversed in his pictures. The present lot represents a major break from this order—Guston’s canvas lies untouched at its edges, giving the oil paint on unprimed surface sole dominion in the center of the picture. In beginning a painting, Guston often chose an environmental object for structural inspiration, then, having rendered it on the canvas, strove to obscure its representational elements. The result before us is a conflict of expression: several shapes, most notably the three egg-like figures lying parallel in the top center, take pictorial precedence in the foreground, as the viscous grays and brown fall behind them in clear submission. In addition, the conversation among these three ovular phantoms (a running motif in Guston’s contemporaneous work) is far from friendly. None has full command of the surface, but the enormous central disc certainly has the side figures at bay. Its dominance, rendered within an indifferent b

Auction archive: Lot number 30
Auction:
Datum:
7 Nov 2011
Auction house:
Phillips
New York
Beschreibung:

PROPERTY OF A NEW ORLEANS COLLECTION Philip Guston Path III 1960 oil on canvas 64 x 76 in. (162.6 x 193 cm) Signed “Philip Guston” lower right. Also signed, titled and dated “Philip Guston, ‘Path III’, 1960” on the reverse.
Provenance Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner Exhibited New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Philip Guston May 2 – July 1, 1962. This exhibition later traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum, May 15 – June 23, 1963 London, Tate Gallery, Painting and Sculpture of a Decade: 1954- 64, April 22 – June 28, 1964 California, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Philip Guston February 15 – March 26, 1967 Waterville Maine, Colby College Art Museum, Three Artists of Today: Philip Guston Conrad Marca-Relli James Rosati April 14 – May 14, 1967 New Orleans, New Orleans Museum of Art, May 2011 – August 2011 Literature H.H. Arnason, Philip Guston New York, 1962, p. 102, pl. 79 (illustrated) Catalogue Essay In my way of working, I work to eliminate the distance or the time between my thinking and doing. PHILIP GUSTON (Philip Guston taken from a dialogue with Harold Rosenberg, 1966, D. Ashton. A Critical Study of Philip Guston Los Angeles, 1976, p. 132). In 1962, the Guggenheim Museum held its very first one-artist retrospective exhibition. Philip Guston was the artist deemed worthy of such an honor, and the introduction to the exhibition identified a key trend in Guston’s work of the late 1950s: “In these paintings and those that immediately followed them the drama of conflict which for some years had existed in Guston’s use of color shapes, began to become explicit”(H. Arnason, Philip Guston New York, 1962, p.30). The conflict of philosophical anxiety had thrust its way into Guston’s abstractions, and nowhere does this conflict rear its head more than in Path III, 1960. Guston found himself heavily immersed in the philosophy of great minds during the late 1950s; from Einstein’s denial of density as a real concept to Kafka’s insistence that man is a slave to his materialism, Guston’s research had myriad artistic consequences in his work. Yet, when examining the extraordinary canvas of Path III, 1960, there is no clearer philosophy at work than that of Existentialism. Guston’s intimate study with these writers laid bare to him that life was a drama of choices—between religion and atheism, between greed and altruism, between self-abnegation and self-affirmation. The present lot is without both conventional figures and a conventional color scheme, and, ultimately, defies a label of abstract expressionism or figurative expressionism. It is, in the end, a holistic expression of Guston’s creative anxiety. Faced with “the ‘impossiblity’ of making art in the absence of a vital common language,” Guston opts not for the veneer of common shapes and landscapes, but chooses a language that is entirely his own (R. Storr. Modern Masters: Philip Guston New York, 1986, p. 30). In executing Path III, 1960, it was not the first time that Guston employed a deeply darkened color palette; one can see his use of heavy blacks and saturated hues dominating canvasses as early as Tormentors, 1947-1948. Yet, in his earlier canvasses, Guston laid out a semblance of order, as figures rendered in a quasi-Cubist approach conversed in his pictures. The present lot represents a major break from this order—Guston’s canvas lies untouched at its edges, giving the oil paint on unprimed surface sole dominion in the center of the picture. In beginning a painting, Guston often chose an environmental object for structural inspiration, then, having rendered it on the canvas, strove to obscure its representational elements. The result before us is a conflict of expression: several shapes, most notably the three egg-like figures lying parallel in the top center, take pictorial precedence in the foreground, as the viscous grays and brown fall behind them in clear submission. In addition, the conversation among these three ovular phantoms (a running motif in Guston’s contemporaneous work) is far from friendly. None has full command of the surface, but the enormous central disc certainly has the side figures at bay. Its dominance, rendered within an indifferent b

Auction archive: Lot number 30
Auction:
Datum:
7 Nov 2011
Auction house:
Phillips
New York
Try LotSearch

Try LotSearch and its premium features for 7 days - without any costs!

  • Search lots and bid
  • Price database and artist analysis
  • Alerts for your searches
Create an alert now!

Be notified automatically about new items in upcoming auctions.

Create an alert