At Guston’s October 1970 exhibition at Marlborough Gallery, New York, many who admired his elegant abstractions were shocked to discover a return to the representational imagery he had abandoned two decades before. Bare light bulbs, trash cans, old shoes, and other detritus of a seemingly apocalyptic world—painted in a cartoonlike style on a grand scale—now populated his canvases. As Guston put it, "I got sick and tired of all that Purity! I wanted to tell stories." For the rest of the decade his works incorporated elusive narratives of a country embroiled in a devastating war abroad and painful struggles at home alternated with solitary figures like this one—an anxious smoker, often interpreted as a self-portrait, lying awake in a desolate room while the clock ticks away the small hours of the night.
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Artwork Details
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Title:Stationary Figure
Artist:Philip Guston (American (born Canada), Montreal 1913–1980 Woodstock, New York)
Date:1973
Medium:Oil on canvas
Dimensions:77 1/2 in. × 10 ft. 8 1/2 in. (196.9 × 326.4 cm)
Classification:Paintings
Credit Line:Bequest of Musa Guston, 1992
Accession Number:1992.321.2
Inscription: Signed (lower center): Philip Guston; signed, dated, and inscribed (verso): Philip Guston / "STATIONARY FIGURE"[underlined] 1973 / OIL - 77-1/4 x 128-1/4
the artist, Woodstock, N. Y. (1973–d. 1980); his widow, Musa Guston, Woodstock, N. Y. (1980–d. 1992; her bequest to MMA)
Boston University, School of Fine & Applied Arts Gallery. "Philip Guston: New Paintings," March 15–April 14, 1974, no. 13.
New York. David McKee Gallery. "Philip Guston," November 15–December 18, 1974, no. 14.
Dore Ashton. Philip Guston: New Paintings. Exh. cat., Boston University, School of Applied & Fine Arts Gallery. Boston, 1974, unpaginated, no. 13, ill.
Kenneth Baker. "Philip Guston at Boston University." Art in America 62 (May–June 1974), p. 115, ill. p. 114.
"From Abstraction to the Absurd: The Transformation of Philip Guston." Real Paper (April 3, 1974), pp. 20–21, ill.
"Portfolio and Documents: Philip Guston." TO: A Journal of Poetry, Prose, and the Visual Arts 2, no. 3–4 (1994), pp. 159–206, ill.
Roberta Smith. "Art: Time, the Infinite Storyteller." New York Times (January 1, 2010), p. C28.
Jerry Saltz. "A Grand Tour: My Favorite Paintings in New York." New York (August 9–16, 2010), ill. p. 64 (color).
Thaddeus Radell. "Philip Guston: A Problematic Centennial." paintingperceptions.com. April 2, 2013.
Joseph R. Wolin. "Painting the Town Rad." Time Out New York (March 5–11, 2015), p. 14, ill. (color).
John Baldessari. "Philip Guston's 'Stationary Figure'." The Artist Project: What Artists See When They Look at Art. Ed. Chris Noey. New York, 2017, pp. 28–29, ill. (color).
Philip Guston & The Poets. Exh. cat., Gallerie dell'Accademia di Venezia. New York, 2017, p. 78.
Jean-Marie Gallais inPeindre la nuit. Ed. Jean-Marie Gallais. Exh. cat., Centre Pompidou-Metz. Metz, 2018, p. 117, fig. 31 (color).
Max Hollein. Modern and Contemporary Art in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 2019, ill. p. 132 (color).
Robert Storr. Philip Guston: A Life Spent Painting. London, 2020, ill. pp. 323 and 324 (color).
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, ed. Art = Discovering Infinite Connections in Art History. New York, 2020, p. 39, ill. (color).
Harry Cooper et al. Philip Guston Now. Exh. cat., National Gallery of Art. Washington, D.C., 2020, p. 163, ill. (color).
Clark Coolidge. 16 Poems for Philip Guston. Portland, Ore., 2021, ill. opp. p. 13 (color).
Robin Pogrebin. "Met to Receive Trove of Philip Guston's Art." New York Times (December 15, 2022), p. C6.
The Guston Foundation, ed. Catalogue Raisonné. Online resource [gustoncrllc.org/home/catalogue_raisonne], 2024 (accessed), no. P73.029, ill. (color).
Philip Guston (American (born Canada), Montreal 1913–1980 Woodstock, New York)
1931
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