SANTA MONICA, CA.- The Santa Monica Museum of Art presents Enigma Variations: Philip Guston and Giorgio de Chirico, on view through November 25, 2006. Enigma Variations: Philip Guston & Giorgio de Chirico will explore the influence of de Chirico’s distinctive vision on Guston, while illustrating Guston’s ability to transform inspiration through the inimitable lens of his creative consciousness. This carefully selected exhibition of twenty-six paintings from early and late in the careers of both artists will reveal their direct affinities of subject and spirit. It takes as its point of departure Guston’s initial exposure to de Chirico’s work as a teenager in Los Angeles, when he visited the famed modern art collection of Louise and Walter Arensberg. As Guston later explained to the filmmaker Michael Blackwood, the artist whose work made the deepest impression on him during this visit was Giorgio de Chirico, whose paintings were hung in a prominent position in the Arensbergs’ living room, alongside major works by Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Henri Rousseau: “I was mostly struck by de Chirico. They hit me very hard. In fact it was seeing these paintings by de Chirico…it’s what made me resolve to be, want to be a painter. I felt as if I had come home.”

Enigma Variations will examine the impact of de Chirico’s enigmatic and hauntingly beautiful paintings of antique statues, mannequins, and gladiators on Guston’s early canvases of the 1930s and early 1940s. In 1948, Guston moved to Italy to take up residency at the American Academy in Rome. During this time he visited de Chirico at his home and studio on the Spanish Steps, and was exposed to his latest stylistic excursions into the realm of Italian Renaissance and Mannerist painting. This crucial meeting anticipates Guston’s own break with Abstract Expressionism in the 1960s and his controversial return to figuration. Guston’s monumental late paintings are full of references to de Chirico’s earlier motifs—clocks, canvas stretchers, and mannequins, which are transformed into the “hoods” of Guston’s Ku Klux Klan figures. Although the Greek-born, Italian de Chirico (1888-1978) and the American Philip Guston (1913-1980) were from different generations and painted in different artistic environments, the exhibition tracks how and when their paths crossed, and how Guston followed de Chirico’s work closely—through reproductions in art magazines, during his Prix de Rome, and in visits to exhibitions from the 1930s to the late 1970s.

At the end of their careers, Guston and de Chirico simultaneously embraced the idea of complete creative freedom. Flying in the face of received critical opinion, their canvases of the 1960s and 1970s sought to reinvigorate painting. Enigma Variations will feature several of de Chirico’s “New Metaphysical” works from this period—which will be on view for the first time in the United States. Although de Chirico’s late works had been much maligned by the critics, Guston remained an outspoken champion, always inspired and delighted by de Chirico’s “capacity to surprise.”