Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Untitled
Philip Guston American, born Canada
Not on view
"Pictures should tell stories," Guston wrote around 1970. This certainly holds true for the paintings he made in the final months of his life, but their stories are elliptical and their methods unconventional. These works both feature strange, disconcerting "pile-ups," to use the artist’s word, of disjointed part-objects. In this one a hastily constructed contraption whose identity and purpose are ambiguous appear. Inside it appears a secondary image—a painting within the painting—of a sunset or sunrise. In another, a pair of rubbery legs coils improbably around two ladders. Especially unsettling is the confusion between the organic and inorganic: what is human appears inhuman, while the mechanical looks all too bodily.
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