Met Receives Donation of 200 Philip Guston Paintings from the Artist’s Daughter

By Jake Erlewine

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is set to house the world’s most extensive collection of works by Philip Guston after receiving over 200 paintings and drawings from the personal collection of Musa Mayer, the artist’s daughter. Guston, who was active from 1930 up until his death in 1980, is regarded as a seminal figure in the history of American art, lauded for his early pittura metafisica - inspired figurative works, as well as his abstract period and his later return to figuration. The gift from Mayer reportedly spans his entire working life and includes earlier works such as Mother and Child (1930) coupled with pieces from his controversial later period.

Mother and Child (1930), oil on canvas. Credit: Estate of Philip Guston via the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Interestingly, the gift contains a condition stipulating that the Met’s Modern department must maintain about a dozen works on view at any given time, which could become optically problematic for the museum’s presentation of American postwar art. However, the museum’s director, Max Hollein, says that the department is eager to embrace this commitment, as the donated paintings are “the very best of Guston there is,” and uniquely positions the Met as the “main, not only custodian of Philip Guston’s work.” The addition of a lead donation of $125 million to jumpstart the construction of its new modern art wing will only ease curatorial concerns about space and coherence, allowing Guston’s art to engage with the 20th-century cultural landscape without overshadowing that of his contemporaries.

The Studio, oil on canvas. Credit: Estate of Philip Guston via the Metropolitan Museum of Art

One of the donated paintings, The Studio (1969), recently sparked controversy within the art world due to its self-referential Klansman imagery, depicting the artist in a Ku Klux Klan hood painting a self-portrait. In 2020, this led to the postponement of his retrospective Philip Guston Now, drawing widespread criticism from the art industry. The existential and accusatory message of the work, conveying Guston himself as a bystander in the widespread social complacency of the 1960s, was disregarded due to the idea that the use of Klansmen in the highly personal lexicon of Guston’s late figurative works could inflame the social tensions present in the wake of George Floyd’s death. It is ironic, then, that Guston’s enticing brushstrokes and choice of subject matter - both of which accuse the viewer of a lack of direct action to combat societal evils - are only being exhibited now instead of in the face of the social upheaval on which it was meant to comment.

The contemporary relevance of The Studio will pose a provocative curatorial juxtaposition with Guston’s aforementioned painting, Mother and Child, emblematic of the artist’s earlier period. Worlds away from the carnivalesque symbolism of his late figurative works, the painting, described by Ralph Toulcatt as “WPA art mixed with Salvador Dali,” depicts the two figures of a mother and her infant in a setting strongly resembling de Chirico’s bleak cityscapes. However, unlike the earlier artist’s work, there is a sense of ugliness in the monumental physical presence of the mother. The bodies, unnaturally constrained by their urban surroundings, are bloated and their shadows are hidden from view. Put simply, Guston’s earlier work, in the context of the WPA, can be understood as a parody of humanist art and intentions, invoking a satirising view of its political era. To conclude, the increased presence of Guston within the Met’s galleries will benefit both the institution and the artist: the Met now has the powerful magnifying glass of Guston at its disposal to examine past and current sociopolitical trends, and the artist now has a permanent home in a museum which he loved.

Bibliography

Pogrebin, Robin. “More than 200 Philip Guston Works Are Headed to the Met.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 14 Dec. 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/14/arts/design/philip-guston-met-museum-gift.html. 

Pogrebin, Robin. “With $125 Million Gift, Met Museum Jump-Starts New Modern Wing.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 30 Nov. 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/30/arts/design/met-museum-modern-wing-gift.html. 

Slifkin, Robert. “Philip Guston’s Return to Figuration and the ‘1930s Renaissance’ of the 1960s.” The Art Bulletin 93, no. 2 (2011): 220–42. 

Ralph Toucatt. “Metamorphosis: The Art of Philip Guston.” The Threepenny Review, no. 3 (1980): 24–24. 

“New Acquisitions: Philip Guston.” MoMA, no. 12 (1992): 22–22.