SFMOMA, Part 38: Floor 4, Fisher Collection, Ways of Seeing: Fourteen Artists.
The street is in there somewhere, but good luck finding it.
The Street (1956) is six feet tall and nearly six feet wide, and from across the gallery it reads as weather — a field of dragging, piled-up strokes in grays and bruised pinks, the paint worked and reworked until the surface looks like it's been through something. Walk closer and the strokes start to separate: verticals that could be buildings, horizontals that could be pavement, a tangle of marks that your eye keeps trying to resolve into a city and that the painting keeps refusing to become. The title promises a street. The painting delivers the feeling of one — crowded, layered, half-remembered — without ever showing you a single curb.
This is Philip Guston at the absolute peak of his first career, the one he would later throw away. In 1956 he was the "painter's painter" of abstract expressionism, the insider's insider, showing at the Sidney Janis Gallery alongside Pollock and de Kooning and Rothko. Fourteen years later he would unveil cartoon Klansmen at the Marlborough Gallery and get excommunicated. Standing in front of The Street, you are looking at the top of the mountain, painted by a man who was already, quietly, sick of the view.
Philip Guston painted The Street in 1956, in oil on canvas. It measures 76 × 71½ inches — 193.0 × 181.6 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: classic abstract expressionism, the gestural 50s, Guston doing what the New York School did. And that reading is accurate. But the subject is sharper than that. The Street is an abstraction that can't quite let go of the world — the title keeps pulling it back toward the city, toward something seen. Guston's abstractions were never pure. They were always haunted by figuration, by the memory of things, and that haunting is the crack through which his entire second career would eventually escape. This painting is the sound of a man painting brilliantly at something he no longer fully believes.
1913–1956: The making of a painter's painter
Philip Guston was born June 27, 1913, in Montreal, as Phillip Goldstein, the youngest of seven children of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants. The family moved to Los Angeles when he was six. When he was nineteen, his father hanged himself in a shed, and Guston — who found the body — almost never spoke about it, and painted hooded, faceless figures for the rest of his life. Hold that fact. Everything else in his career rhymes with it.
He was a prodigy of the wrong kind: expelled from high school, briefly at the Otis Art Institute, painting murals for the WPA in the 1930s under the spell of the Mexican muralists and de Chirico and Picasso. By the early 1950s he had converted to the new religion — abstract expressionism — and he converted completely: the brushy, built-up, pinkish-gray abstractions, the surfaces worked like frescoes, the reputation as the "painter's painter," the one the other painters watched. Sidney Janis Gallery. The Cedar Tavern crowd. The whole anointment.
And here is the thing the anointment stories leave out: Guston was already uneasy. His abstractions, unlike Rothko's or Newman's, never achieved that cool transcendence — they stayed thick, anxious, worked-over, as if the paint itself were arguing. The street keeps getting into them. The city, the crowd, the memory of figuration. The Street (1956) is the purest statement of that unease: an abstraction titled like a realist painting, a gesture reaching for a world it has promised not to depict.
1956: The year the gesture peaked
Context matters, because 1956 was the year abstract expressionism hit its ceiling. In August, Jackson Pollock died in a car crash on Long Island, and the movement lost its mythic center. The second generation was already painting bigger, emptier, more decorative versions of the gesture. The whole New York apparatus — the critics, the galleries, the collectors — was running on momentum, and everyone in the Cedar Tavern could feel the air going out of it.
The Street was painted right into that moment, and you can feel the effort in it — not the effort of technique, which Guston had mastered, but the effort of belief. The paint is gorgeous. The touch is extraordinary. And the whole thing has the quality of a performance being given slightly too well, the way a great actor overplays a role he's tired of. Guston's own phrase, years later, for what happened to him in the 60s was that he got "sick of the whole performance." The Street is the performance at its absolute finest, which is why it's also, in retrospect, the beginning of the end.
There's a cruel irony the Fisher hang makes visible: the Fishers collected Guston across the whole arc — the abstraction and the objects, the mountain and the second life — and in the monographic gallery you can stand between them. The 1956 street you can't find, and the 1978 brushes you can't miss. Same hand. Same dragging touch. Twenty-two years apart, and the second career only exists because the first one, for all its mastery, stopped being honest.
The painting, again
So back to Floor 4, back to the weather. Here's what I want you to do: stand in front of The Street and then, without moving, think about the Guston you probably know — the shoes, the clocks, the hooded figures, the cartoon junk of the late work. Now look at the abstraction again. The haunting is visible once you know to look for it: the verticals that want to be buildings, the massings that want to be crowds, the paint that wants to be about something. The figuration isn't in the painting. It's pressing against it from the other side, like a face against glass.
That's the thing about the great break — the 1970 Marlborough show, the Klansmen, the excommunication. It looks, from the outside, like a rupture, a man destroying his career overnight. Standing in front of The Street, it looks like something else: a return. The street was always in there. It just took Guston fourteen years to admit he wanted to paint it.
He died June 7, 1980, in Woodstock, New York, at 66 — two years after painting his brushes, his clocks, his shoes, the whole honest inventory of a life. The abstraction got the museums first. The objects got the future.
Go see the street before you see the objects. Let the paint do its gorgeous, anxious work. Then walk twenty-two years forward in the same room and watch the same hand stop performing. That's not a career. That's a confession, in two acts. 🌁
Timeline — Philip Guston
1913 — born June 27, Montreal, as Phillip Goldstein; family moves to Los Angeles at six
1932 — age nineteen, finds his father's body after his suicide; the hooded figures begin
1930s — WPA murals; the Mexican muralists, de Chirico, Picasso
Early 1950s — converts to abstract expressionism; the "painter's painter"; Sidney Janis Gallery
1956 — paints The Street, oil on canvas, 76 × 71½ in.; abstraction at its peak, figuration pressing through
Late 1960s — the Klansmen, the cartoon cars; the art world recoils
1970 — Marlborough Gallery show; the excommunication
1978 — Brushes; the studio inventory
1980 — dies June 7, Woodstock, New York, age 66
Today — The Street on view, Floor 4, Ways of Seeing: Fourteen Artists, the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection, SFMOMA, 151 Third Street