modern & contemporary art

Blue Water, Philip Guston

Critically acclaimed as an abstract expressionist painter, Philip Guston shocked the art world in 1968 when he shifted to a figurative, “cartoonlike” style. Blue Water—which, at ten feet across, is one of his largest paintings—is a masterpiece of his later years. It contains some of the images that Guston referred to as his “new alphabet”: shoe soles, hooded figures, cigarettes, buildings, books, and a head with a single eye. These images recur in Guston’s work, but Guston refused to assign them any specific meaning.

European & American Art