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Philip Guston
The Sculptor, 1943
Today better known for his 1950s experiments with gestural abstraction and his 1970s cartoonish figuration, Philip Guston began his career as a mural painter. The Sculptor belongs to a series of transitional easel pictures he produced while on the faculty at the University of Iowa. Its matte surface, suggestive of the artist's fondness for fresco, is infused with a neo-romantic, moody sentiment echoed in the dusky palette and stoic figure.
The painting depicts Humbert Albrizio, a direct carver of wood and stone who, like Guston, moved to Iowa from New York to join the university's art department. Direct carving -- equated with a greater sense of immediacy and artistic "truth" than earlier traditions of modeling and casting -- was the most popular mode of modern sculptural production. The Sculptor was featured in VMFA's Fifth Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting, where it won for Guston the John Barton Payne Medal and was purchased for the museum's permanent collection. |