Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.

Pittore

Philip Guston American, born Canada

1973

Not on view

Titled after the Italian word for "painter," Pittore belongs to a series of works depicting recumbent figures that Guston began in the early 1970s. He described them as "paintings about the painter" and, by extension, as paintings "about painting." Guston’s artists are shown lying in bed, neither sleeping nor working. Simultaneously inert and alert, the one depicted here is clearly thinking— pondering his next canvas or contemplating society’s ills, perhaps. Next to him, on an economically rendered side table, are the tools of his craft: a single paintbrush and four dollops of color applied directly to the support, where they serve as both independent marks and representations of paint. The clock above him, a symbol of time’s passage, heightens the work’s melancholic air.