Transition

Philip Guston, Transition, 1975, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of Musa Guston, 1992.89
Copied Philip Guston, Transition, 1975, oil on canvas, 66 x 80 1⁄2 in. (167.6 x 204.5 cm.), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of Musa Guston, 1992.89

Artwork Details

Title
Transition
Artist
Date
1975
Location
Not on view
Dimensions
66 x 80 1⁄2 in. (167.6 x 204.5 cm.)
Credit Line
Bequest of Musa Guston
Mediums
Mediums Description
oil on canvas
Classifications
Subjects
  • Abstract
  • Figure — fragment — hand
  • Dress — accessory — shoe
  • Object — furniture — clock
Object Number
1992.89
Linked Open Data
https://edan.si.edu/saam/id/object/1992.89

Artwork Description

Philip Guston made a name for himself as an abstract painter in the 1950s, but by the end of the 1960s he had grown weary of "all that purity." He began creating emotionally charged, cartoony works, many of which reprised subjects and themes he first explored in his realist paintings of the 1930s. 

Transition shows Guston's hand reaching over the edge of a stretched canvas. A tiny red doorway suggests movement from one place to another, while the hands of the clock point to the artist's canvas and, above, to a heap of shoes--a possible reference to the Nazi atrocities of the Holocaust. A mix of allegorical and personal references, the painting is at once comic and disturbing.