Sea

Philip Guston

1979–80, published 1980

A late-career lithograph in which Guston clusters oversized, cartoonish heads like boulders emerging from a flat sea, using spare, hand-drawn line to turn interior states into oddly comic and haunted forms.

What strikes you is a low horizon of rippling water with a bank of bulbous, fleshy faces—closed eyes, stubbled chins, puckered mouths and a curling cigarette—rendered in looping black lines that make the grotesque feel both tender and absurd.

Made during Guston’s return to figuration, this work transforms political and psychological unease into intimate, crude caricature and helped pave the way from Abstract Expressionism toward the narrative, emotionally raw language of later Neo‑Expressionist art.

Palette

Art Terms

Lithography Print Figurative Abstract Expressionism Comic Figure/ground relationship

Exhibitions

The Drawings of Philip Guston

1988

Twenty Lithographs: Graphic Art Processes

1941

Philip Johnson: Selected Gifts

1985

American Prints, 1960–1985

1987