But beyond the clouds and landscape being identical in both paintings, painted months apart, the one in the Annenberg Collection has additional red flags.
With dissection, which entailed taking painting apart, piece by piece, and throwing out essential things.
Color also sets Guston's painting apart from just about everything else in the Ab-Ex rehang, with the possible exception of de Kooning's "Woman I".
But it is the odd sense of melancholy, even exhaustion, on the face of the dancer in "Chorus Captain" that sets the painting apart.
With that in mind, he took Western painting apart, sorted out its most sacred and exclusive attributes -- genius, idealism, beauty, taste -- on the ground in broad daylight, fooled around with them, cleaned them off and encouraged adventurous souls of all ages, classes and talents to use them, or not, as they pleased.
It is such instantaneous inspiration, along with the ever-changing natural light and its play on outdoor hues, that sets plein-air painting apart, said the artists who work in the tradition of 19th-century French and American masters such as Claude Monet and Childe Hassam.
I might go to my sister's room and get my nails painted, but apart from that nothing at all ever happens on Sundays.
I jump about five feet in the air and look across the grass immediately, where I find my daughter headed towards a large sculpture of a surfboard, painted black, apart from a yellow tip.
Just one problem: The two paintings were "painted" three months apart.
Little men clamber through a morass of thick paint, pulling apart a building that seems as vast as Soane's ruined Bank of England.
