Guston: A Genius Beyond Controversy

There is the option to bypass the Klan pictures altogether, via a specially designed ‘off ramp.’ Don’t take it.

Philip Guston, ‘Web,’ 1975. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Edward R. Broida, 2005. © The Estate of Philip Guston, courtesy Hauser & Wirth. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Philip Guston was born Philip Goldstein, the son of refugees from Odessa, and died as one of the most original artists of the 20th century. Guston claimed that we are “image-makers and image-ridden.” To spend time with Guston’s own images is to meet an artist who in the wake of the Holocaust and in the midst of the Civil Rights movement found an artistic language for turmoil. 

“Philip Guston Now,” running to September 11 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, is a rightsized immersion in the work of a painter who moved fitfully between abstraction, Renaissance-esque figuration, and his signature mature style: cartoon-like large canvases that flirt with the grotesque and land just short of the straightforward. Guston is an accessible artist to look at, but a difficult one to grasp. 

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