In another set of interactions, works by the perennially influential Philip Guston appear across three
generational shifts: a Social Realist drawing of Klansmen, dated 1930, hangs amid politically progressive paintings by Jacob Lawrence (the great War Series from 1946 - 47), prints by Louis Lozowick, Hugo Gellert and Mabel Dwight, and photographs by Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke - White and Walker Evans; his modestly scaled abstraction, «Dial» (1956), is installed between
Mark Rothko's imposing «Four Darks in Red» (1958) and Louise Bourgeois» classically phallic «Quarantania» (1941) in the galleries devoted to Abstract Expressionism; and a large, brooding, late figurative canvas of heads, shoes and eyeballs, «Cabal» (1977), turns up beside paintings by artists twenty - five to thirty years his junior, along with one from Cy Twombly, who was two years older than Guston, born in 1911, and one by Alma Thomas, who lived from 1891 to 1978.
The installation explores the mid-century
shift — both geographic (Paris to New York) and
generational — that
marks the beginning of Abstract Expressionism in the US.