Philip Guston

A leading figure of twentieth-century American painting, Philip Guston was a prolific draftsman, and it was through drawing that he negotiated the most dramatic changes of his career. In the late 1960s, after he had established his reputation as an abstract painter, Guston returned to figuration in works that express the tensions and conflicts of his time, as well as the artistʼs own feelings of doubt and anxiety, in a style indebted to comic books. Untitled, 1975 is an important drawing from this late phase. It features one of Gustonʼs iconic images: a bald, one-eyed head smoking a cigarette, often identified as the artistʼs alter ego.