Untitled

Details

Provenance:Renate Ponsold-Motherwell, Greenwich, Connecticut, gift from the artist; Private ownership, Bavaria, by descent to the present owner.

Descrizione

• Rare work from the estate of Renate Ponsold-Motherwell, a close friend of Philip Guston
• In private ownership for over 50 years, now appearing on the international market for the first time
• A work from his abstract period using the colour palette typical of the phase between 1949-1966
• The Tate Modern in London will be showing a Philip Guston retrospective until early 2024. The Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, each house over 20 works by this artist.
• “Two artists fascinate me – Piero della Francesca and Rembrandt. Piero is the ideal painter: he pursued abstraction, some kind of fantastic, metaphysical, perfect organism. …I do not think of modern art as Modern Art. The problem started long ago, and the question is: Can there be any art at all?” Philip Guston, Art News Annual 31, 1965/66 The rare early gouache and two later ink drawings (lots 707 and 708) by Philip Guston tell the story of the intimate friendship with Renate Ponsold, who came to New York from Munich as a young photographer in the early 1960s. There she met Philip Guston, 22 years her senior, who was already one of the established artists of the New York School at the time and had already had his first retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in 1962. Renate Ponsold was captivated by the incredible vibrancy of the New York art scene and began her career as a photographer taking portraits of artists. It was in this context that she met Philip Guston, of whom she took a photograph in his studio in 1965 showing him in conversation with the legendary composer Morton Feldman. During this time, the artist and the photographer became close and Philip Guston gave her a number of works from various phases of his career. Particularly noteworthy here is the small-format gouache from 1949, whose pastel colours and layered application of paint are vaguely reminiscent of Piero della Francesca’s frescoes. Guston had travelled to Italy for the first time ever the previous year for the Prix de Rome and was deeply impressed by the Italian Renaissance artist’s murals in Arezzo. This was the creative phase in which Guston devoted himself entirely to abstraction for around 15 years. Years later, he gave this very special early gouache as a gift and inscribed it with the euphoric dedication “To The Only One, the unique one Renate.” The abstract ink drawing (lot 707) from 1961, also dedicated to her, is another very typical work by Philip Guston with its clear and skilfully placed lines. Finally, there is a very personal gift from the artist to the young photographer: a marvellous portrait of Renate from 1965, drawn with just a few strokes. Easily recognisable and an early reference to the unique style of his figurative late work with its cartoon-like faces and figures. Renate Ponsold married the painter Robert Motherwell in 1972. She kept these three special works by Philip Guston in her flat on 5th Avenue in New York until her death in the spring of this year.