concept:era contemporary
The Studio
Oil on canvas by Philip Guston, 1969. 121.9 × 175.9 cm. Art Institute of Chicago. Painted in the year Guston abandoned abstract painting for a return to figuration featuring cartoonish hooded figures (KKK-adjacent imagery), clocks, shoes, and smoking. Triggered fierce critical hostility in 1970.
Scholarly Significance
Late AbEx / Neo-Expressionism — The Studio marks Guston's 1969 turn from abstraction to figuration and triggered hostile critical reception that was later reversed.
Notes
- ·Guston spent the 1950s–1960s as a major Abstract Expressionist; his return to figuration in 1969–1970 was seen as a betrayal.
- ·The Studio shows a cartoonish hooded painter — evoking the KKK hood that recurs in Guston's work — painting a self-portrait; a clock, shoes, and a bare light bulb appear.
- ·Exhibited in the show 'Philip Guston: New Paintings' at Marlborough Gallery, New York, October 1970; the show was received with widespread critical hostility.
- ·Hilton Kramer (New York Times) described the show as 'a sharp and witless parody of late-Guston'; other critics were equally dismissive.
- ·By the late 1970s and after his death (1980), critical opinion reversed dramatically; Guston is now recognised as a founding figure of Neo-Expressionism.
- ·The hooded-figure motif draws directly on Guston's Jewish identity and childhood memories of KKK activity in Los Angeles.