Philip Guston Now

Abstract

Philip Guston Now is a major publication produced for a four-venue international retrospective; the first for nearly twenty years. It is a large, serious, hardback book that is well-illustrated and contains contributions by fashionable contemporary artists yet is also scholarly and engaging. The title clearly announces what it offers: a reconsideration of the importance of Guston right now, in the light of both contemporary approaches to painting – which make his late figurative work more interesting – and the urgent reconsideration of the troubled symbolism inherent to these same paintings – many of which include cartoonish, white-hooded Ku Klux Klan-type figures. However, we do not need to get very far into the book to discover that Guston was both Jewish (born Philip Goldstein) and a committed artist of the left, who had made anti-Klan works (including murals) from the early 1930s on – so was neither a white-supremacist, nor someone...