Talking.
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Title |
Talking. |
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Creator |
Guston, Philip (American painter, 1913-1980) |
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Date |
1979 |
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Cultural Context |
American
North American |
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Style/Period |
New Image
Contemporary
Postmodern |
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Subject |
Arms (Anatomy)
Fingers
Clocks & watches
Cigarettes
Smoking
Smoke
Worry |
|
Description |
"As in certain paintings by Francis Bacon, existential givens were made stubbornly palpable in Guston's pictures. Recurrent images such as a head with a single wide-open eye, wrist-watches, bare light-bulbs, or cigarette butts spoke of bouts of intense work, worry, and doubt." (Caption, p.204); "By the turn of the 1980s a full-scale revival of figuration, informed by lessons learned from abstraction, was underway. Not only was it promoted in large exhibitions, but its return coincided with a temporary shift in art-world domination from America to Europe. The defining exhibitions were 'A New Spirit in Painting' at London's Royal Academy in 1981 and 'Zeitgeist' in Berlin in 1982. Their European curators made passionate claims for a reaffirmation of humanist concerns, sensing that Conceptualism's ascetic intellectualism had signaled the end of a historical trajectory. In the catalogue for the London show one of its organizers asserted that 'the subjective view, the creative imagination, has come back into its own'. […] One of the early 'discoveries' of this revival was Philip Guston, whose work had already provided a catalyst for what critics in late 1970s New York dubbed 'New Image' painting. Guston had initially been linked to Abstract Expressionism, shifting dramatically to figuration in the mid-1960s. Deciding that his previous output had been dishonestly geared to specious notions of 'purity', Guston spent the 1970s setting down the insistent, graspable facts of his daily moods, obsessions, and insecurities. His lexicon of crude, idiosyncratic images borrowed their stylizations from 1940s American cartoonists such as Al Capp or Basil Wolverton (figures who also influenced the 1960s 'underground' comic-book artist Robert Crumb)." (Excerpt, pp.203-204) |
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Material |
Oil on canvas
Oil paint (pigmented coating)
Paint
Canvas |
|
Measurements |
174 x 198 cm |
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Technique |
Oil painting (technique)
Painting (image-making) |
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Work Type |
Paintings
Oil paintings |
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Source |
Hopkins, David. After Modern Art: 1945-2000. Oxford History of Art. Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 2000. (p.204, fig.103) |
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Digital Publisher |
University of Louisville Department of Fine Arts/Allen R. Hite Art Institute Visual Resources Center |
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Format |
image/jpeg |
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Digital File Name |
VRC 827-18.jpg |
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Rating |
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