Head and Bottle exemplifies Guston's move away from painting the hooded Klansmen in the late 1960s. He invented this lima-bean shaped Cyclops head, with no body and one giant eye, to represent the all-seeing artist. In this work, the eye scrutinizes a green bottle, studying it as if about to pick up the nearby paintbrush to render it in red paint. The year after he painted this, Guston was hospitalized with exhaustion.
Philip Guston (1913-1980) bio je ključni kanadsko-američki umjetnik poznat po evoluciji od apstraktnog ekspresionizma do sirove figurativne umjetnosti koja istražuje rasizam, identitet i političku satiru. Ključna figura New York Schoola.