The Sculptor (Primary Title)
Philip Guston, American, born Canada, 1913 - 1980 (Artist)
Today better known for his 1950s experiments with gestural abstraction and his 1970s cartoonish figuration, Philip Guston began his career as a mural painter. The Sculptor belongs to a series of transnational easel pictures he produced while on the faculty at the University of Iowa. Its matte surface, suggestive of the artist’s fondness for fresco, is infused with a neo-romantic, moody sentiment echoed in the dusky palette and stoic figure.
The painting depicts Humbert Albrizio, a direct carver of wood and stone who, like Guston, moved to Iowa from New York to join the university’s art department. Direct carving – equated with a greater sense of immediacy and artistic “truth” than earlier traditions of modeling or casting – was the most popular mode of modern sculptural production. The Sculptor was featured in VMFA’s Fifth Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting, where it won for Guston the John Barton Payne Medal and was purchased for the museum’s permanent collection.
Special Loan Exhibition, Mary Washington College, Fredericksburg, Va., May 6 – 20, 1953
Philip Guston, The University Gallery, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, April 10 – May 12, 1950
[No Title], Mary Washington College, Fredericksburg, Va., May 3 – 7, 1948
[No Title], Norfolk Museum of Arts & Sciences (now the Chrysler Museum of Art), 1947
New Accessions USA, Colorado Springs Fine Art Center, Colorado Springs, CO, July 15 – September 2, 1946
"The Fifth Binneial Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings," Vriginia Museum of Fine Arts, March 30 - April 25, 1946
Philip Guston, Midtown Galleries, New York, N.Y., January 15 – February 3, 1945
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