Philip Guston: Head and Bottle (1975)

Philip Guston’s images of symbolism could not be better defined than by his art masterpiece called Head and Bottle. The cartoon like painting uses many undertones which lavishly embellishes self defining issues of human mortality and depression from which the artist struggled with. The images in Head and Bottle show mainly Guston’s obsession with alcohol. He portrays a giant one-eyed head gazing into an empty bottle lying on a desk. The one eyed figure is a symbol of the painter’s view inside his own art. The focus in this piece is on the contents of the desk, which include a book, an empty bottle, and a paint brush. This shows an inside to the thought of Guston, and the things which mattered to him most: The Paintbrush shows his interest in the workings of his own art, the open book realizes his love for reading and poetry, and the empty bottle obviously shows his love for alcohol.

Guston “seemed to reject his own generation in favour of a younger one” (Lucie-Smith, pg. 184) when he began to return to his admiration of Mexican muralists. When I first saw this image in class, I laughed because I saw the humor in which Guston used to relay his message. His cartoon images played with my feelings of seeing his art for face value. When I began to look deeper into his meaning, I realized the dark context of his work. The empty bottle referring to depression, and the featureless face symbolizing human mortality made me question this piece which has then become my favorite of Guston’s work. I saw Guston’s revival of formation as bliss, but during the time of its revealing, many saw it as a regression in his talents.

The atmosphere of his work reminds me of Francesco Clemente’s Two Horizon as both used vivid colors and easy brushstrokes created a fantasy land. Guston also toys with the idea of assemblage in this work bringing together elements of no connection to tell a story. He used the canvas in such a way that inspired the viewer to question what they were looking at and search for deeper meanings from drawing these elements together. Through his work, Guston used the canvas to show the artist’s struggle with paint and subject matter which also comes from the large eye staring into the bottle as though it were to find the answer in the bottom of it. As Guston shows in this piece, even though the bottle is empty, the eye is still looking for an answer which shows the confusion of the artist.