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View at the museum ↗Bad Times
Philip Guston1970
- Attribution
- Philip Guston American, born Canada, 1913–1980
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Physical dimensions
- 182.9 × 289.6 cm (72 × 114 in.)
- Credit line
- Bequest of Musa Guston
Museum metadata is available under CC0. Image availability and rights are separate; consult the source record.
Source rights statement: © The Estate of Philip Guston
View the museum record ↗From the museum
In the late 1960s, painter Philip Guston made a radical shift. Previously acclaimed for lush, luminous abstract works, he turned to crude, awkward renderings of often-sinister figures and objects. “I got sick and tired of that purity,” he declared. “I wanted to tell stories.” In an outpouring of figurative work near the end of his career that employed recurring imagery such as cartoonish Ku Klux Klansmen and piles of prone legs with the soles of their shoes exposed, Guston addressed sociopolitical issues as well as his own artistic conflicts. Starkly titled, Bad Times is dominated by brushy, almost pearlescent passages of paint that seem at odds with, but that also ground, a graphic scene of violence or its aftermath.
Description: Art Institute of Chicago · CC BY 4.0