98. 'Monument' - Philip Guston
© The Estate of Philip Guston WHEN? 1976
WHERE CAN I SEE IT? This painting is part of the Tate collection but currently not on display. Check
Tate Modern or
Tate Britain to see when it will next be on show.
I LIKE IT See also '
The Visit'
The American painter Philip Guston developed his lexicon of hoods, hands and trashcan shields in the 1930s during a trip to Mexico, where he met and spent time with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera and studied the social-realist paintings of David Alfaro Siqueiros. The motifs disappeared (back in New York, Guston became one of the most ravishingly seductive abstract-expressionists on the block), but they weren’t forgotten. Tired of the endless rehearsals of abstract painting, Guston unleashed a renewed, crudely cartoonish figuration on a scathing New York art world in 1967. Critics were appalled. For some, Guston was a traitor to the ab-ex cause. Yet, his fleshy, lumbering compositions strike a chord today because they are saturated with flawed humanity. A wall of disembodied limbs perhaps indicative of a mass grave, ‘Monument’ is among his most moving.