Around 1970, Philip Guston, a first-generation Abstract Expressionist, began painting darkly comic figurative canvases that captured the existential angst of the Vietnam era and influenced countless later artists. That legendary transformation makes it impossible to see this impressive exhibition of transitional, nominally abstract paintings—created between 1957 and 1965—without thinking about what came next.
Guston’s customary interlocking multi hued forms in the 1959 Painter coalesce into an awkward bipedal scaffolding topped with a peaked scarlet cap that extends toward a crescent swath of sky blue—uncannily presaging his cartoonish self-portraits as a hooded Klansman, smoking and painting. In Garden of M (1960), overlapping ovoids in black and kidney-bean red foreshadow his testicular cyclopean heads of the mid-1970s.
Merging the gestural agitation propounded by Willem de Kooning with the enveloping moody color of Mark Rothko, these paintings embody a kind of oceanic alienation. But they also appear to mark a wiping of the slate for Guston, clearing the way for his emergence as a paladin of anxious representation.