SFMOMA, Part 40: Floor 4, Fisher Collection, Ways of Seeing: Fourteen Artists.
The most famous painter of his generation, and he is painting his paintbrushes.
Brushes (1978) is the smallest Guston in the room — 42 by 48 inches, practically intimate next to the wall-sized abstractions and the sprawling late canvases — and it does the quietest, strangest thing. A cluster of paintbrushes, bristles up, handles down, rendered in Guston's thick, dragging late touch, in the reds and grays of a wound healing. That's it. No Klansmen, no shoes, no clocks. Just the tools. The painter has turned the camera on the instrument, and the instrument is looking back.
He was 65 when he painted it. He had two years left. The brushes are the things that had been in his hand for fifty years — through the WPA murals, through the abstract expressionist anointment, through the excommunication and the return — and in 1978 he finally painted them the way you'd paint a portrait of someone you love: plainly, without flinching, the wear showing. The bristles are splayed. The handles are stubby. They look tired. They look like they've earned it.
Philip Guston painted Brushes in 1978, in oil on canvas. It measures 42 × 48 inches — 106.7 × 121.9 cm. It belongs to the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection and is on view on Floor 4 as part of Ways of Seeing: Fourteen Artists, in the monographic Guston gallery of the reimagined Fisher Collection presentation that opened April 18, 2026. Entry is included with general admission.
The easy reading is: late Guston, the humble still life, the master finding beauty in the everyday. And that reading is accurate, as far as it goes. But the subject is sharper than that. Brushes isn't humble. It's a reckoning. After a career spent arguing — with abstraction, with figuration, with the entire New York art world — Guston paints the one subject that can't argue back, and the painting becomes a kind of accounting: this is what did it. These handles, these bristles. Fifty years of looking, dragging, piling, confessing. The tools are the autobiography. Everything else was commentary.
1971–1978: The studio years
To feel the weight of this small painting, you have to know where Guston was in the 70s. The Marlborough disaster was behind him — the 1970 show, the walkouts, the dealer gone, the friends silent. He was in Woodstock, painting in a studio that was filling up with the inventory of a life: shoes, clocks, light bulbs, cigarettes, eyeglasses, piles of legs, heads like lumps of clay. The art world had decided he was finished. He responded by painting the things in front of him, thickly, in colors one critic called "the colors of a wound healing," as if daring anyone to call it a decline.
And then there were the Nixon drawings. In 1971, Guston and his friend the poet Bill Berkson made a series of savage satirical drawings — Poor Richard — depicting Richard Nixon as a grotesque, testicular, paranoid buffoon, rendered in the same clumsy cartoon style as the Klansmen. They were vicious, funny, and completely unexhibitable at the time; Guston kept them in a drawer. The drawings matter because they show what the "clumsiness" was for: it wasn't a lack of skill. It was a weapon. Guston could still paint like a master — the touch in Brushes proves it, every stroke placed with total authority — but he'd decided that mastery, deployed straight, was a lie. The cartoon style told the truth about power. The dragging brush told the truth about everything else.
Brushes (1978) sits at the far end of that decade, past the satire, past the scandal, into something quieter. The Klansmen were about America. The Nixon drawings were about power. The shoes and clocks were about mortality. The brushes are about the only thing left: the work itself. Not the career, not the reputation, not the movements — the bristles, the handles, the daily fact of putting paint on canvas. After fifty years of painting everything else, Guston finally painted the thing that had made all of it possible, and he painted it like a man saying thank you and goodbye at the same time.
The inventory
There's a way of reading the whole late Guston as an inventory — not of objects, but of attention. The shoes: what he walked in. The clock: what he watched. The cigarettes: what he did while thinking. The light bulb: what he saw by. The brushes: what he saw with. Each painting isolates one instrument of a life and renders it at a scale that won't let you look away, in paint so physical you can see the decisions from six feet off.
What makes Brushes different from the rest of the inventory is the absence of metaphor. A shoe can be about the journey. A clock can be about time. A brush is about painting, and painting is what the painting is made of, and the loop closes so tightly it hums. The bristles are painted with brushes. The image is the tool and the tool is the image. It's the most self-contained thing Guston ever made — a painting that needs nothing outside itself, after a career spent dragging the whole outside world onto the canvas.
And the touch — look at the touch. This is the same dragging, piling, unapologetic hand that made The Street in 1956, twenty-two years earlier, and it's doing something the 1956 hand couldn't do: it's at rest. Not tired — rested. The performance is over. The excommunication is over. The vindication hasn't arrived yet and doesn't matter. There's just the brush, the paint, the canvas, the man. As it goes.
The painting, again
So back to Floor 4, back to the smallest painting in the room. Here's what I want you to notice: in a gallery built around a career of spectacular ruptures — the anointment, the crisis, the scandal, the return — Brushes is the one work with no drama in it at all. No hoods, no history, no argument. Just the tools, rendered with total love by the hand that held them.
That's the final Guston lesson, and it's the opposite of the Marlborough moral. The art world wanted the rupture to be the story — the betrayal of abstraction, the scandal of the Klansmen. But the real story was always quieter: a man, a brush, fifty years of looking, and the honesty to paint the brush last. The objects were never symbols. They were just there, the way things are just there in a room where someone has worked for a lifetime and stopped pretending it was about anything else.
He died June 7, 1980, in Woodstock, two years after painting his brushes. The tools outlived the hand. In a studio, they always do.
Go see the brushes last. Let the street overwhelm you, let the fall unnerve you, and then stand in front of 42 by 48 inches of quiet. It's the smallest painting in the Guston room and the most complete sentence he ever wrote. 🌁
Timeline — Philip Guston
1970 — the Marlborough show; excommunication
1971 — the Poor Richard Nixon drawings with Bill Berkson; satire as exorcism, kept in a drawer
1970s — Woodstock; the studio inventory: shoes, clocks, light bulbs, cigarettes, heads like clay
1978 — paints Brushes, oil on canvas, 42 × 48 in.; the tools as autobiography, the loop closed
1980 — dies June 7, Woodstock, New York, age 66; the vindication still a rumor
2013 — a Guston sells for $25.9 million at Christie's; the young painters cite him like scripture
Today — Brushes on view, Floor 4, Ways of Seeing: Fourteen Artists, the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection, SFMOMA, 151 Third Street