All Stories
Mar 03, 2011
Philip Guston’s Roma @ The Phillips Collection
A raw pink foot captured mid-step breathes a dreamlike life to a fragment of ancient Roman sculpture: this is but one of the unusual transformations seen throughout Philip Guston’s Roma and much of his career. With a Pepto-Bismol palette and consciously amateurish execution, like a child who learned to draw from Robert Crumb comics, Guston wanted to paint like someone who had never seen a painting before — and the results are not exactly what fans of Luncheon of the Boating Party think of when they think of the Phillips. But there is a definite charm to the works, a visual innocence that upon further study becomes an obsessive’s anxiety.