Curator

  • Art Institute Chicago
  • Harvard art museum
  • My Exhibition
Two figures, one red, one yellow, lying under white sheets with limbs sticking out.

Couple in Bed

1977

Philip Guston American, born Canada, 1913–1980

United States

An established painter of some of the most poetic Abstract Expressionist painting of the late 1950s, Guston gradually abandoned abstraction in the 1960s in favor of seemingly crude, cartoonish, images drawn from memory. In Couple in Bed, Guston lays in bed with his wife, Musa, their faces pressed together as one in the manner of Brancusi's The Kiss. Here the artist holds his brushes as tightly as he does his wife, who in May of 1977 suffered a series of debilitating strokes.

Oil on canvas

Contemporary Art

Essentials