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拍品专文
Two central forms hover over a shimmering field of pinks, blues, greens and greys in Philip Guston’s Late April II (1961). Long, thick brushstrokes push and pull the wet paint across the surface, coalescing into solid concentrations of shape. Orange underpainting glows beneath the surface; a flash of raw canvas illuminates the lower left corner. With a companion work of the same year held in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Late April II shows Guston at the midpoint of his abstract style. The diffuse, ‘lyrical’ fields of softer colour from the 1950s gave way to a denser and more viscous manipulation of paint in the early 1960s, applied directly on bare and unstretched paper or canvas pinned to the studio wall. Dark, head-like forms emerge from their tangles of colour, foreshadowing Guston’s return to figuration later in the decade. These abstractions formed the vanguard of Guston’s mid-career retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, New York in 1962. They represent a pivotal moment in Guston’s practice, and featured prominently in his most recent retrospective of 2022-2024 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Tate Modern, London).
Guston was at the forefront of Abstract Expressionism in New York during the 1950s and early 1960s: he exhibited with his peers in the seminal Ninth Street Show of 1951; featured prominently in the international touring exhibition Modern American Painting 1930-1958 in 1959-1960; and represented the United States at Venice Biennale of 1960. His crowning Guggenheim retrospective of 1962, however, also generated a great deal of anxiety. Guston was an intensely self-critical artist, and he remembered the exhibition’s hang as ‘traumatic’ (‘Interview with Karl Fortress’, 1966, in C. Coolidge, ed., Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Berkeley, 2011, p. 72). The tides in New York were also changing: Guston—along with Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb and Robert Motherwell—left the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1962 in protest at the gallery’s first Pop Art exhibition. At an inflection point both personally and stylistically, Guston produced some of his boldest paintings to date. Reviewing what would be his final solo exhibition with Sidney Janis, which closed in March 1961, art critic Irving Sandler noted the ‘recent works, [where] the past has become increasingly real; the present, more painful; the future more problematic. Guston’s painting is one of continual renewal; his latest canvases are his most naked, disquieting and daring’ (Artnews, March 1961, repr. in R. Storr, Philip Guston: A Life Spent Painting, London, 2020, p. 307).
Guston never viewed his works as fully abstract. In an interview with David Sylvester in 1960, he claimed that ‘I can’t find any freedom in abstract painting … I think of my pictures as a kind of figuration’ (‘Interview with David Sylvester’, 1960, in C. Coolidge, ed., op. cit., p. 25). The ultimate rupture with abstraction would come later, with the emergence in 1968 of the iconic, cartoonish figuration of Guston’s final decade. Yet many formal concerns in these later figurative paintings have their antecedents in earlier abstract compositions. The two central blocks of Late April II anchor the picture with a balanced yet uneven meeting: one shape emerging from another; or two ‘heads’ touching, as in his later Couple in Bed (1977, Art Institute of Chicago).
British artist Tacita Dean has celebrated the looming presence of Guston’s abstract ‘heads’. His ‘abstract painted fields’, she writes, ‘have never been entirely empty of the personages within. The agitatedness of his surfaces clearly suggests that there is company concealed there’ (‘Guston Head’, in Philip Guston, exh. cat. Tate, London, 2022, p. 81). The paintings of the early 1960s depict these amorphous yet densely concentrated shapes in increasingly monochrome tonalities. Late April II, however, retains the rich palette of earlier years. The bright tones jostle and spark beneath layers of darker paint: hints of summer colour, perhaps, behind the waning washes of the spring.
NEW HORIZONS: PROPERTY FROM A WEST COAST COLLECTION
Christie’s is delighted to present six outstanding works from a West Coast Collection: a vivid grouping assembled with discerning connoisseurship. From post-war existentialism to icons of Pop, these works are emblems of their time, capturing the zeitgeist of an era that posed profound questions about art-making. Together they offer a glimpse of new ideals, envisaging uncharted material and conceptual territories. Five are offered in the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale in October 2026, with a further work presented in the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale in New York in November.
Leading the selection is an extraordinary work on paper by Cy Twombly, dating from 1971. With a similar example held in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, it relates to the ground-breaking series of so-called ‘blackboard’ paintings that stand among the artist’s finest achievements. In these works, begun in 1966, Twombly dissolved the boundaries between drawing, painting and writing, visualising the energetic impulses that give form to knowledge and sensation. The collection places the work in erudite dialogue with Number 12-A by the Abstract Expressionist artist Bradley Walker Tomlin. Painted in 1947, it demonstrates the vocabulary of calligraphic mark-making that placed him within the ranks of the New York School during this period.
Much of Abstract Expressionism wrestled with the relationship between figure and ground. These concerns came to a head in the work of Philip Guston, who reached an important juncture in his paintings of the late 1950s and early 1960s. With a counterpart held in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Late April II (1961) captures this moment of reckoning. Loose figural forms seem to lurk within its depths, emerging from the mists of painterly gesture. In this, the work resonates with Alberto Giacometti’s Buste d’homme sur socle, conceived circa 1947. Two years earlier, Giacometti had experienced a powerful revelation during a trip to the cinema, when he suddenly became aware of the difference between images conveyed on a screen and those experienced in real life. His figural forms turned increasingly abstract, seeking to capture an impression of the split-second comprehension that takes place when a viewer sees a figure in passing or from afar. ‘It’s as if reality were continually behind curtains that one tears away,’ he explained, ‘… but there is always another … always one more’ (quoted in Giacometti: Pure Presence, exh. cat., National Portrait Gallery, London, 2015, p. 15).
This idea unfolds anew in works by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Mona Lisa (Reversal Series) (1979-1980) forms part of a series in which Warhol looked back to works made earlier in his career. He had first painted the Mona Lisa in 1963, when Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece made a rare visit to the United States. In his Reversals, he revisited some of his most beloved works using screens made from photographic negatives: here, his white-on-white palette seems to dematerialise the subject altogether, its gestural strokes receding into spectral abstraction. Lichtenstein’s Yellow Apple (1981), meanwhile, also performs an act of self-appropriation. It belongs to a series of sculptures based on motifs from his own paintings, translating his flat blocks of oil and magna into three dimensions. It is a work alive with playful whimsy: another from the edition resided in Leo Castelli’s Fifth Avenue apartment in New York.
The collection also demonstrates the complex intersection of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art during the post-war period. Warhol turned increasingly to gestural expression during his later years, using a sponge mop from 1976 to paint the backgrounds of his works. Lichtenstein, too, riffed upon the perceived aura of the artist’s hand: Yellow Apple harks back to his witty Brushstroke series of the 1960s. The dialogue between these works and those of Guston, Twombly and Tomlin is a testament to the collector’s fine eye, capturing the thorny entwinement of conceptual and painterly ideals during this period. So, too, is the revelatory marriage of Warhol and Giacometti, demonstrating how two seemingly disparate artists engaged with the ephemerality of visual representation. Seen as a whole, the collection offers a vital snapshot of a period that—more than any other—wrestled with the nature and purpose of art-making, opening up new horizons in the process.
Guston was at the forefront of Abstract Expressionism in New York during the 1950s and early 1960s: he exhibited with his peers in the seminal Ninth Street Show of 1951; featured prominently in the international touring exhibition Modern American Painting 1930-1958 in 1959-1960; and represented the United States at Venice Biennale of 1960. His crowning Guggenheim retrospective of 1962, however, also generated a great deal of anxiety. Guston was an intensely self-critical artist, and he remembered the exhibition’s hang as ‘traumatic’ (‘Interview with Karl Fortress’, 1966, in C. Coolidge, ed., Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Berkeley, 2011, p. 72). The tides in New York were also changing: Guston—along with Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb and Robert Motherwell—left the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1962 in protest at the gallery’s first Pop Art exhibition. At an inflection point both personally and stylistically, Guston produced some of his boldest paintings to date. Reviewing what would be his final solo exhibition with Sidney Janis, which closed in March 1961, art critic Irving Sandler noted the ‘recent works, [where] the past has become increasingly real; the present, more painful; the future more problematic. Guston’s painting is one of continual renewal; his latest canvases are his most naked, disquieting and daring’ (Artnews, March 1961, repr. in R. Storr, Philip Guston: A Life Spent Painting, London, 2020, p. 307).
Guston never viewed his works as fully abstract. In an interview with David Sylvester in 1960, he claimed that ‘I can’t find any freedom in abstract painting … I think of my pictures as a kind of figuration’ (‘Interview with David Sylvester’, 1960, in C. Coolidge, ed., op. cit., p. 25). The ultimate rupture with abstraction would come later, with the emergence in 1968 of the iconic, cartoonish figuration of Guston’s final decade. Yet many formal concerns in these later figurative paintings have their antecedents in earlier abstract compositions. The two central blocks of Late April II anchor the picture with a balanced yet uneven meeting: one shape emerging from another; or two ‘heads’ touching, as in his later Couple in Bed (1977, Art Institute of Chicago).
British artist Tacita Dean has celebrated the looming presence of Guston’s abstract ‘heads’. His ‘abstract painted fields’, she writes, ‘have never been entirely empty of the personages within. The agitatedness of his surfaces clearly suggests that there is company concealed there’ (‘Guston Head’, in Philip Guston, exh. cat. Tate, London, 2022, p. 81). The paintings of the early 1960s depict these amorphous yet densely concentrated shapes in increasingly monochrome tonalities. Late April II, however, retains the rich palette of earlier years. The bright tones jostle and spark beneath layers of darker paint: hints of summer colour, perhaps, behind the waning washes of the spring.
NEW HORIZONS: PROPERTY FROM A WEST COAST COLLECTION
Christie’s is delighted to present six outstanding works from a West Coast Collection: a vivid grouping assembled with discerning connoisseurship. From post-war existentialism to icons of Pop, these works are emblems of their time, capturing the zeitgeist of an era that posed profound questions about art-making. Together they offer a glimpse of new ideals, envisaging uncharted material and conceptual territories. Five are offered in the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale in October 2026, with a further work presented in the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale in New York in November.
Leading the selection is an extraordinary work on paper by Cy Twombly, dating from 1971. With a similar example held in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, it relates to the ground-breaking series of so-called ‘blackboard’ paintings that stand among the artist’s finest achievements. In these works, begun in 1966, Twombly dissolved the boundaries between drawing, painting and writing, visualising the energetic impulses that give form to knowledge and sensation. The collection places the work in erudite dialogue with Number 12-A by the Abstract Expressionist artist Bradley Walker Tomlin. Painted in 1947, it demonstrates the vocabulary of calligraphic mark-making that placed him within the ranks of the New York School during this period.
Much of Abstract Expressionism wrestled with the relationship between figure and ground. These concerns came to a head in the work of Philip Guston, who reached an important juncture in his paintings of the late 1950s and early 1960s. With a counterpart held in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Late April II (1961) captures this moment of reckoning. Loose figural forms seem to lurk within its depths, emerging from the mists of painterly gesture. In this, the work resonates with Alberto Giacometti’s Buste d’homme sur socle, conceived circa 1947. Two years earlier, Giacometti had experienced a powerful revelation during a trip to the cinema, when he suddenly became aware of the difference between images conveyed on a screen and those experienced in real life. His figural forms turned increasingly abstract, seeking to capture an impression of the split-second comprehension that takes place when a viewer sees a figure in passing or from afar. ‘It’s as if reality were continually behind curtains that one tears away,’ he explained, ‘… but there is always another … always one more’ (quoted in Giacometti: Pure Presence, exh. cat., National Portrait Gallery, London, 2015, p. 15).
This idea unfolds anew in works by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Mona Lisa (Reversal Series) (1979-1980) forms part of a series in which Warhol looked back to works made earlier in his career. He had first painted the Mona Lisa in 1963, when Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece made a rare visit to the United States. In his Reversals, he revisited some of his most beloved works using screens made from photographic negatives: here, his white-on-white palette seems to dematerialise the subject altogether, its gestural strokes receding into spectral abstraction. Lichtenstein’s Yellow Apple (1981), meanwhile, also performs an act of self-appropriation. It belongs to a series of sculptures based on motifs from his own paintings, translating his flat blocks of oil and magna into three dimensions. It is a work alive with playful whimsy: another from the edition resided in Leo Castelli’s Fifth Avenue apartment in New York.
The collection also demonstrates the complex intersection of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art during the post-war period. Warhol turned increasingly to gestural expression during his later years, using a sponge mop from 1976 to paint the backgrounds of his works. Lichtenstein, too, riffed upon the perceived aura of the artist’s hand: Yellow Apple harks back to his witty Brushstroke series of the 1960s. The dialogue between these works and those of Guston, Twombly and Tomlin is a testament to the collector’s fine eye, capturing the thorny entwinement of conceptual and painterly ideals during this period. So, too, is the revelatory marriage of Warhol and Giacometti, demonstrating how two seemingly disparate artists engaged with the ephemerality of visual representation. Seen as a whole, the collection offers a vital snapshot of a period that—more than any other—wrestled with the nature and purpose of art-making, opening up new horizons in the process.