Philip Guston

Known for his experimentation with and beyond abstraction, Guston’s broad body of work encompasses various styles from figurative to the abstract, to the humorous and personal, and the politically progressive. Smoker was created at a time in his career when Guston worked in lyrical and gestural abstraction inspired by Mark Rothko and Williem de Kooning. In Smoker, dark gray masses and black forms weigh upon blunt vertical and horizontal tones of pink and tan. While it is classified as a work of abstraction, Guston was a heavy smoker and the work inadvertently references a cloud of smoke.

Title: Smoker
Date: 1963
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 70.25 x 76 inches
Accession Number: P69.5.2
Location: North Concourse

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