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Nile

Philip Guston

American artist (1913-1980)

Nile, 1977

Oil on canvas

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

The amorphous and atmospheric compositions Philip Guston (1913-1980) created in the 1950s and 1960s earned him recognition as one of the country's leading abstract expressionist painters. A subsequent period of experimentation led to a dramatic shift in his work, and by the late 1960s his nonobjective pictures had given way to dark and cartoonish forms. Guston did not hold these styles in opposition. As he remarked when still painting abstractly, "I think that every real painter wants to be, and his greatest desire is to be, a realist.... You have to be a realist in the sense that you want to make concrete, with your material, with your matter, with your form, how you feel."

This gallery focuses on the artist's mature figurative work, with Late Fall offering a singular example of the brooding, layered canvases that preceded his break from abstraction. Like many of Guston's later compositions, these paintings are based on tangible objects from his studio-including shoes, clocks, and paintbrushes-that are infused with imagination, emotion, and ruminations on his life as an artist.