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
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.