Oil on canvas painting, featuring an automobile being driven through urban downtown, American New York Expressionist School. Signed Philip Guston (1913-1980, American) on the lower right corner. 22.5 x 28 inches (57.15 x 71.12 cm). PROVENANCE: Southern Ontario estate. Private collection (Belgium)

Philip Guston was an iconic American painter. Throughout his prolific career, he transitioned from Abstract Expressionism into an idiosyncratic lexicon characterized by painterly forms, cartoonish drawing style, and predominantly pink palette. “The painting is not on a surface, but on a plane which is imagined,” he once reflected. “It moves in a mind. It is not there physically at all. It is an illusion, a piece of magic, so that what you see is not what you see.” Born Philip Goldstein on June 27, 1913 in Montreal, Canada to Ukranian-Jewish immigrant parents, he grew up in California, where he attended the Los Angeles Manual Arts High School with Jackson Pollock. Moving to New York, Guston was enrolled in the Works Progress Administration during the 1930s, producing murals inspired both by Mexican muralists and Italian Renaissance paintings. He went on to become an integral part of the city’s art scene in the 1950s, alongside Willem de Kooning and his former classmate Pollock. He would famously abandon the success and dialogue he had with abstraction by the late 1960s, resulting in the loss of his gallery representation and virulent scorn from critics. Guston’s late work, however, has proven to be his most lasting contribution to art history. Featuring recurring imagery such as hooded Klansmen, President Richard Nixon, smoldering cigarettes, studio detritus, and huge eyeballs, these paintings influenced Neo-Expressionism and established Guston firmly in the canon of 20th-century masters. He died on June 7, 1980 in Woodstock, NY. Today, the artist's works can be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Tate Gallery in London, among others.

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American, 19th century : This work was executed by an unknown hand, and can only be identified by origin (i.e., region, period).