Philip Guston

Lower Level

Price available upon request

1975
Oil on canvas
188 x 250.2 cm / 74 x 98 ½ in
191.8 x 254 x 5.3 cm / 75 1/2 x 100 x 2 ⅛ in (framed)

In Philip Guston’s ‘Lower Level’ (1975), a cluster of upended legs sink helplessly into a blood-red sea while another disembodied pair clad in sturdy boots appears to bear witness from a higher plane. Among the artist’s most evocative works, the painting is an elegy to lives lost, with floundering limbs symbolizing the broader historical and psychological trauma that reverberates throughout the artist’s late paintings.

Described by Ross Feld as a ‘ravenous’ picture, ‘Lower Level’ is somewhat ambiguous. Painted with gestural brushstrokes, body parts ‘seem to quiver and shake, a quality Guston associated with imminent metamorphosis.’[1] Cool and enigmatic, Guston does not pass judgment on the apathy of the land-locked legs. Yet, one could read the picture as a comment on the negligence of the watching world to interfere in the atrocities committed by the Nazis during the Second World War.

Born to Jewish immigrants from Odessa who fled the Russian pogroms, Phillip Goldstein would change his name to Philip Guston in the years before the outbreak of the Second World War. Later, his daughter Musa writes, he would regret this decision: ‘I knew that after the Second World War and the revelations of the Holocaust, when it became crucial for him to reclaim his Jewish identity, it was too late to change it back. His reputation was already established with the new name.’[2]

In the aftermath of the war, and following the dissemination of liberation photography documenting the barbarity of concentration camps, Guston was struck by images of piles of confiscated shoes. The inclusion of coarsely rendered shoes in ‘Lower Level’ is an esoteric gesture towards the artist’s abandoned faith. ‘We are the witnesses of hell,’ he wrote. ‘When I think of the victims, it is unbearable.’ [3] With its group of submerged bodies, ‘Lower Level’ can be viewed as grief made manifest, a way of shouldering collective responsibility.

The years between 1974 and 1979 were the most prolific of Guston’s career. ‘They don’t seem to be pictures anymore,’ he wrote, ‘But sort of confessions—exposures.’[4] Teeming with references to the artist’s turbulent inner world, Musa recalls of these paintings, ‘everywhere there were legs—feet and shoes and legs.’[5] From the remote limbs of ‘Lower Level’ to the stomping mass of intertwined legs that scuttle across the ground of ‘Monument’ (1976), Guston’s anthropomorphized appendages propose muted yet powerful attestations—in Andrew Graham-Dixon’s words, ‘still lifes composed from dead lives.’[6]

About the artist

Born in Montreal, Canada in 1913, Philip Guston moved with his family to California in 1919. Except for briefly attending the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles in 1930, he was completely self-taught and went on to become one of the great luminaries of 20th-century art. From his early ties to social realism, the muralist movement, and abstract expressionism to the highly personal and allegorical expressions of his late figurative work, Guston’s commitment to producing art from genuine emotion and lived experience ensures its enduring impact. With a legendary career spanning a half century, Guston’s inimitable oeuvre continues to exert a powerful influence on younger generations of painters.

Learn more

Artwork images © The Estate of Philip Guston. Photo: Genevieve Hanson
Portrait of Philip Guston © The Estate of Philip Guston. Photo: Frank Lloyd

1.) Christopher Bucklow, ‘What is in the Dwat: The Universe of Guston’s Final Decade.’ Grasmere/UK: Wordsworth Trust, 2007, p. 88.
2.) Musa Mayer, ‘Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston.’ Zurich/CH: Hauser & Wirth Publishers, 2023, p. 307.
3.) Philip Guston, quoted in Andrew Graham-Dixon, ‘A Maker of Worlds: The Later Paintings of Philip Guston’ in Dore Ashton, Michael Auping, Bill Berkson (et al.), ‘Philip Guston. Retrospective,’ London/UK: Thames & Hudson and the Royal Academy of Arts, 2003, p. 58.
4.) Mayer, ‘Night Studio,’ p. 246.
5.) Ibid., p. 248.
6.) Andrew Graham-Dixon, ‘A Maker of Worlds,’ ip. 58.