PHILIP GUSTON

This remarkable double portrait of Guston and his wife Musa, who died the year this work was completed, shows the artist at his most vulnerable, personal, and revealing. Curled in the foetus position, his limbs emerging from crumpled covers, he holds with equal strength the two things that have kept him together in his turbulent life, love and art. The couples faces are pushed together in a kiss as they lie on the pillow, their forms merging together into a single, abstract block of flesh like a naive Klimpt. As the child of Jewish refugees in Canada, who witnessed the suicide of his father and death of his brother before he was 18, Guston began as an abstract expressionist until he moved into large scale, almost cartoonist works that addressed the contemporary injustices of the world and worked through his past trauma. Painted towards the end of his own life as well as his wife’s, the work is both ode and penance - after decades of strife and trouble, of personal trauma, financial hardship, ill health and plunges into darkness through his art and his mind, it is touching if not surprising that at the end of his career, Guston moves to the most simple and relatable imagery of his career. Gone are illusions to the Holocaust and the Klu Klax Klan, to violence and disharmony that featured in so much of his most celebrated work and instead, the artist becomes a child again, clinging on for dear life to to his dual salvation.

EDVARD MUNCH

Surreal manifestations of modern anxieties, the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch used individual vignettes to speak to universal themes of loneliness, despair, and pain. Yet while his work has consistency in its emotional potency, his variation of style is enormous. This delicate, romantic image of girl, standing at the billowing curtains of a window in her flowing night dress as the light illuminates squares of darkness was painted in the same year as his more famous ‘The Scream’. While the latter work has become one of the most famous pieces of modern art, acclaimed for bold brushstrokes and radical composition that was inspired by his visits to mainland Europe and interactions with the impressionists and symbolistS, ‘The Girl by the Window’ speaks more to his native Scandinavia. Both in its romantic subject and its aesthetic style, it is a work firmly in the tradition of Northern Europe and yet for all of its simple, innocent beauty, there is the Munchian sense of disquiet across the canvas. We become voyeurs, peering in on our unknowing subject in the small of the night, watching a private moment of worry or despair as she contemplates, unaware of our presence.

FREDERIC REMINGTON

Less concerned with history than with mythology, Frederic Remington created a persona around himself that matched the vision of America that he created with his inks, oils and watercolors. An illustrator of the ‘Old West’ who became lauded on the East Coast for his portraits of cowboys, native Americans, ranchers, military men and great battles on horseback, his work sits somewhere between historical record and fantastical storytelling. The work is narrative and dramatic, capturing moments of action with dynamic composition and modern aesthetics, and Remington spent time in the landscapes he painted enough to capture a truthful accuracy to the color, light and natural forms. Yet this technical accuracy did not translate into a historical one, and Remington’s vision of America was just that: a vision. It was, however, strong enough to ingrain his ideas into the popular imagination such that the common understanding of the ‘Old West’ is in part the creation of a wealthy New Englander, educated at Yale, and hired by Harper’s to create illustrations that would excite and enthral their readers.