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Oil on canvas painting, featuring an automobile being driven through urban downtown; signed and attr. Philip Guston (American, 1913-1980); 22.5 x 28 inch (57.15 x 71.12 cm). Philip Guston was a painter and printmaker in the New York School, an art movement that included many abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. In the late 1960s Guston helped to lead a transition from abstract expressionism to neo-expressionism in painting, abandoning so-called "pure abstraction" in favor of more representational, cartoonish renderings of various personal situations, symbols and objects. He is known for his cartoonish paintings of an existential, lugubrious nature that employed a limited palette and were created in the period after 1968. From 1968 onwards, after moving away from abstractionism, he made these words his motto. In this body of work he created a lexicon of images such as Klansmen, lightbulbs, shoes, cigarettes and clocks. In late 2009, the McKee gallery, Guston's historic dealer, mounted a show revealing that lexicon in 49 small oil paintings on panel painted between 1969 and 1972 that had never been publicly displayed together as a whole. Guston is best known to the world for these late existential and lugubrious paintings, which, at the time of his death in 1980, had reached a wide audience, and found great popular acceptance. Guston's artworks are now held and exhibited in major museums worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and the Tate Modern. PROVENANCE: Southern Ontario Estate