Philip Guston

David McKee Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1986

Madrid, Centro de Arte Reina Sofía; Barcelona, Palau de la Virreina; St. Louis, The Saint Louis Art Museum; Dallas, Dallas Museum of Art, Philip Guston: Retrospectiva de Pintura (Philip Guston: Fifty Years of Painting), March 1989 - January 1990, cat. no. 51, p. 127, illustrated in color

This painting is in excellent condition. Please contact the Contemporary Art department at 212-606-7254 for the condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. The canvas is framed in a dark wood frame with a small float.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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Light on Green Sea is an eloquently pivotal summation of Philip Guston’s core identity as a painter; namely, the emotional and psychic struggle to realize and reinvent one’s personal artistic vision. The span and scope of Guston’s career is breathtaking in its range and influence, and only his friend Willem de Kooning can share the unique position as a pioneer of the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1950s and as contemporaneous inspiration to young painters of the 1970s. In the 1950s, Guston was beloved by fellow painters and critics for the brilliance and delicacy of his expressionistic brushwork, yet by the end of the 1960s Guston had the courage to break with the prevailing aesthetic of gestural abstraction and champion the return of the figure within the tradition of narrative painting. The inaugural exhibition of his radical paintings of figures and objects at the Marlborough Gallery in 1970 met with negative reviews, with only a few favorable notes sounded by critic Harold Rosenberg and Willem de Kooning. Guston’s break with abstraction was more decided and abrupt than de Kooning’s frequent oscillations between figuration and abstraction, and he adopted a style of clarity and apparent realism that was wholly counter-intuitive to prevalent aesthetic thought. In response to the vehement controversy, Guston withdrew to his home and studio in Woodstock, New York where he was free to create extraordinary and monumental paintings, such as Light on Green Sea, which are remarkably prescient of the celebrated return to figuration in the 1980s with the New Image Painting and Neo-Expressionism of a younger generation.

Light on Green Sea exhibits the highly expressive content and subject matter of Guston’s monumental paintings of the 1970s, which are on the grand scale of 19^th century narrative painting but are metaphorical and allegorical rather than historical. The light, feathery touch that was so apparent in the paint strokes of Guston’s abstract paintings of the 1950s is now broader in application, but no less nuanced or sensual.  In the paintings of the late 1960s and 1970s, Guston populated his canvases with objects such as clocks, books and shoes, as well as hooded figures and disembodied heads that represented the artist’s presence, recurring throughout a myriad of paintings like a revolving cast on a stage. In a lecture given by the artist in 1978, Guston spoke of his intuitive faith in the aesthetic potential of his new paintings:  “I knew I wanted to go on and to deal with concrete objects. …and the more I did the more mysterious these objects became. The visible world is abstract and mysterious enough. I don’t think one needs to depart from it in order to make art.” (Exh. Cat., Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria, Philip Guston: The Late Works, 1994, pp. 54-55)

Certain iconic images held the most potent import in the paintings and were transformed into lone actors of the artist’s internal drama, as presented in an expansively broad but restrictively shallow picture plane. In the frontally compacted world of Guston’s compositions, the light bulb is an ideal existential embodiment of so many aspects of Guston’s aesthetic and personal journey: it is a symbol of inspiration and enlightenment yet its isolation is evocative of Guston’s solitary working life in his famous “Night Studio” in Woodstock. As a source of illumination, it is a symbol of discovery which Guston presents in the wry tones of a vaguely cartoonish style. Art historian Edward Fry noted Guston’s distinctive treatment of his signifying symbols: “Guston depicts them with a style that is not a style, a homey almost caricatural style that renders each image at once both clearly recognizable yet also clothed in an unforgettable strangeness, as though one were rediscovering one’s own world.” (Ibid., pp. 19-20)  In the late 1960s, the light bulb existed in early depictions of the artist (portrayed as his signature hooded figure) in the bright pink interior of The Studio (1969), and in 1978, Guston wrote of the early connotations of this ordinary object when he retreated to a closet at 12 years old for privacy: “I felt safe …I felt my remoteness in the closet with the single bulb. I read and drew in this private box …It is true that I paint now in a larger closet; ..Yet nothing has changed in all this time. It is still a struggle to be hidden and feel strange.” (as quoted in Musa Mayer, Night Studio, New York, 1988, p. 24) In Light on Green Sea, the light bulb takes on an elegiac character often witnessed in the late careers of great artists. The immense orb, hovering almost like a moon shining above a roiling sea, commands center stage in Light on Green Sea amid a tripartite background that evokes the emotive color abstractions of Rothko. As an evocation of the artist’s studio as isolated landscape, this bold composition also embodies an interior state of mind; one of introspection, anxiety and foreboding, which in the end is ultimately trumped by illumination with the hint of the pink dawn on the horizon.