An established painter of some of the most poetic Abstract Expressionist painting of the late 1950s, Guston gradually abandoned abstraction in the 1960s in favor of seemingly crude, cartoonish, images drawn from memory. In Couple in Bed, Guston lays in bed with his wife, Musa, their faces pressed together as one in the manner of Brancusi's The Kiss. Here the artist holds his brushes as tightly as he does his wife, who in May of 1977 suffered a series of debilitating strokes.