Together Apart

Winslow Homer
American, 1836–1910
To the Rescue
1886
Oil paint on canvas
The Phillips Collection.
Acquired 1926

Winslow Homer settled in 1883 on the Maine coast at Prouts Neck, where he concentrated on capturing humanity’s continual struggle against the sea. To the Rescue typifies Homer’s obsession with the shipwreck theme as a progression from life to death. He avoids direct description of the shipwreck rescue mission that is the painting’s unseen subject, concentrating instead on three figures rushing to the scene of the disaster, isolated against a raging sea.

Marsden Hartley
American, 1877–1943
Wild Roses
1942
Oil paint on hardboard
The Phillips Collection.
Acquired 1943

Wild Roses probably refers to memorial services held annually in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, for fishermen lost at sea. During these services, wreaths of roses are thrown into the water. Images of these flowers became deeply personal and poignant to Marsden Hartley as symbols of death following the drowning of two close friends off the Nova Scotia coast in 1936.

Edward Hopper
American, 1882–1967
Sunday
1926
Oil paint on canvas
The Phillips Collection.
Acquired 1926
© 2023 Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Sunday is characteristic of Edward Hopper’s vision of life in the United States in the early 20th century Completed on the eve of the Great Depression, the painting reveals the essential isolation of people in the US in the 1920s. A depiction of an empty Hoboken, New Jersey, street except for a solitary, middle-age working class man, Sunday is ambiguous in its story but potent in its impression of inaction and desolation.

Philip Guston
American, born in Canada, 1913–1980
The Lesson
1975
Oil paint on canvas
The Phillips Collection
Gift of Musa Mayer and Musa Guston, 1984
© The Estate of Philip Guston, courtesy Hauser & Wirth

After more than a decade of painting dense, colorful abstractions, Philip Guston returned to depicting the figure in a cartoonish style in 1970. Seeking fresh possibilities for plumbing the depths of his psyche and interpreting his experience, Guston explained that he was searching for “the enigma of solid forms in an imagined space.” He considered many paintings such as this one to be self-portraits, commentaries on his life as an artist.

John Sloan
American, 1871–1951
Clown Making Up
1910
Oil paint on canvas
The Phillips Collection.
Acquired 1919
© 2023 Delaware Art Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

John Sloan painted many portraits of his family and friends. Clown Making Up is an early and rare example of a portrait of a professional model. Sloan chose to depict the clown just as he was starting to apply his makeup, thus concentrating on the human being behind the facade. Duncan Phillips, whose early taste in art included narratives and romantic subjects, was undoubtedly attracted to the intimate, emotional quality of this scene.

Aaron Maier-Carretero
American, born 1987
not in front of the kids
2020
Oil paint on canvas
The Phillips Collection
The Dreier Fund for Acquisitions, 2021
©Aaron Maier-Carretero. Courtesy of the artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles

Aaron Maier-Carretero imbues painting with tension and emotion. Brooding paintings, such as not in front of the kids, emerge from his own biography growing up biracial in a household filled both with love and domestic violence. His paintings lay bare the human condition. People and objects appear cartoonish, allowing Maier-Carretero to expose problems such as domestic violence, physical abuse, racism, and self-hatred, which proliferate unchecked for generations behind the carefully constructed facade of suburbia. As the artist notes, “[I use] painting as a psychological tool to create worlds and to create these inexplainable things that can exist.”