Couple in Bed
Philip Guston
PHILIP GUSTON, 1977. OIL ON CANVAS.
This remarkable double portrait of Guston and his wife Musa, who died the year this work was completed, shows the artist at his most vulnerable, personal, and revealing. Curled in the foetus position, his limbs emerging from crumpled covers, he holds with equal strength the two things that have kept him together in his turbulent life, love and art. The couples faces are pushed together in a kiss as they lie on the pillow, their forms merging together into a single, abstract block of flesh like a naive Klimpt. As the child of Jewish refugees in Canada, who witnessed the suicide of his father and death of his brother before he was 18, Guston began as an abstract expressionist until he moved into large scale, almost cartoonist works that addressed the contemporary injustices of the world and worked through his past trauma. Painted towards the end of his own life as well as his wife’s, the work is both ode and penance - after decades of strife and trouble, of personal trauma, financial hardship, ill health and plunges into darkness through his art and his mind, it is touching if not surprising that at the end of his career, Guston moves to the most simple and relatable imagery of his career. Gone are illusions to the Holocaust and the Klu Klax Klan, to violence and disharmony that featured in so much of his most celebrated work and instead, the artist becomes a child again, clinging on for dear life to to his dual salvations.