Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
The Palette
Philip Guston American, born Canada
Not on view
Guston grappled with the best way to describe the work he was making in the 1970s. In place of "figurative," a term then being attached to paintings like the ones in this gallery, he preferred "clear enigma." For Guston, "figurative" suggested the mere reproduction of "visual data." To paint a "clear enigma," on the other hand, involved conjuring an image that seems simultaneously recognizable and strange, one that offers a sense of seeing something familiar, something tangible, as if for the first time. The artist achieves just such a delicate balance in The Palette, in which he renders ambiguous and abstract an otherwise ordinary artist’s worktable—specifically, his own, given the presence of his wife’s name, "Musa."
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