Philip Guston

A special installation of the work of painter Philip Guston (American, born Canada, 1913–1980) showcases the recent promised gift from Emily Rauh Pulitzer to the Saint Louis Art Museum of Guston’s Dark Room (1978). This important painting features enigmatic imagery typical of the final years of Guston’s life, during which he explored questions around the passage of time and the artist’s quest for meaning. An arm wearing a wristwatch and holding a red paintbrush extends from the left side of the composition into empty darkness, while an oversize, bare bulb hangs over a tabletop, hardly illuminating an open but illegible book.

This special installation places Dark Room within the context of works by Guston in the  Museum’s collection from the mid-1950s to 1980. Guston taught at Washington University in St. Louis from 1945 to 1947 while working in a complex mode of Socialist Realism–influenced figuration. In the following decades he painted abstractions that vary from the colorful and layered Room 112 (1957) to the restrained Group I (1964), marked by subtle touches of rose and lavender under dense swaths of black and gray.

In 1970 Guston astonished the art world by transitioning from painterly abstraction to an irony-tinged, cartoonish style of figuration that complemented his critical stance on politics, art, and society. Like Dark Room, the late works Ancient Painter (1973) and Allegory (1975) interrogate the artist’s role and the act of painting—symbolized by the artist’s hand or brush. In the lithograph Room (1980), the recurring motif of a pile of detached limbs appears within a confined domestic space where a covered window closes off any visual outlet.

As a group, the works demonstrates Guston’s varied and prolific career, and his restless and frank investigation of the implications of painting across a changing social and political context.

Philip Guston is curated by Simon Kelly, curator of modern and contemporary art, and Molly Moog, research assistant.