Allegory

In this painting Philip Guston examined the dilemma of an artist: What is an artist’s role in society? Guston presented himself here as an abstract blue head in profile. He looks downward into the bespectacled eyes of composer Morton Feldman while sculptor Raoul Hague beats a jumble of shoes. The brow rising over the horizon belongs to Musa Guston, a poet and the painter’s wife. The veiled symbolism of this composition suggests that the artist faces ambiguity in the search for artistic truth, rather than the objectivity of science—represented by geometric shapes, numbers, and rulers.