Philip Guston

Philip Guston came to the United States from Canada as a young child in 1919 with his Russian émigré parents, who settled their family in California. In 1927 Guston enrolled in Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, where, together with his friend and classmate Jackson Pollock, he was soon expelled for producing satirical broadsides. Continuing his artistic and intellectual explorations largely on his own, he began his formal career making figurative art in styles he explored until the late 1940s, including murals made in the 1930s concerned with political and social issues. After his permanent move to New York in 1949, the figures in Guston’s work gradually disappeared; his canvases became increasingly textured and his color palette more refined until his signature Abstract Expressionist style emerged.

Dial displays Guston’s confident approach to pure abstraction, and the painting glimmers from the use of gestural yet tempered brushstrokes. It includes the artist’s characteristic pinks and reds, with the concentration of color and broader brushwork at the center of the canvas. The composition is structured loosely upon a grid inspired by Piet Mondrian. Guston wrote about the significance of Dial to him, “This picture has a special importance for me as it is a culminating point of a certain period of my painting.” In the late 1960s Guston would follow a path back to figuration, incorporating a cartoon-inflected iconography into his painting. This transformation, which shocked the art establishment at the time, landed him at the forefront of the Neo-Expressionist movement and a new, postmodern era.