Philip Guston exhibition review, Tate Modern, London

Riding Around (1969): the Klan gave Guston 'parodic purpose'

(Image credit: Estate of Philip Guston, courtesy Hauser & Wirth)

published 20 October 2023

In 1970, Philip Guston, "the most quietly painterly" of the great American abstract expressionists, held a new exhibition at Marlborough Gallery in New York, said Adrian Searle in The Guardian. Instead of the clumpy brushwork and "atmospheric jumbles" of the works that had made his name, here – "suddenly – were cartoonish depictions of pointy-hatted Ku Klux Klansmen going about their business of idiot evil": they sit in their rooms, drive around looking for trouble, they eat, they smoke. All Guston's skills – he was then in his 60s – were pressed into "a new and parodic purpose". His "late style shocked the art world and alienated the artist from many of his friends". But today, these images are regarded as some of the most powerful created in postwar America. Tate Modern's new retrospective, tracing "Guston's progress" over a long, varied career, is "a five-star show".

For Guston, the Klan was a "deeply personal" subject, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. Born Phillip Goldstein in Montreal in 1913, to a Russian-Jewish family, he was brought up in Los Angeles, where the "anti-black, anti-Jewish rantings of the KKK were an insistent feature" of his childhood. In 1923, his father, unable to get work because of antisemitic feeling, hanged himself in the garage. Guston was an "immediately adept" artist: his earliest works, influenced by Picasso and the surrealist Giorgio de Chirico, show that "talent was in his fingers". In the 1930s, he moved into "socially progressive public art": he painted an "explosive tondo recording the bombing of Guernica", and a "rousing" antifascist mural in Mexico. Later in the decade, he went to New York, where he moved in circles that included Jackson Pollock, an old friend from high school. The abstract expressionist work he created there is "the equal, I would argue, of Mark Rothko and Pollock". But by the late 1950s, Guston was "restless" once again. "Political dismay was still gnawing at him. Abstraction could not convey it." Hence his final "transformation" to the "remarkable, fearless, crazily inventive, light-touched, sarcastic, slobbish art" he began churning out in the Nixon years.

The work that he made in the "final, astonishing decade" before his death in 1980 is deeply "unsettling", said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. There are "piled-up body parts, charged with knowledge of the Holocaust; spiders scuttling across scrofulous, bulbous heads; cigarette butts, empty bottles, and lukewarm, congealing chips". The pictures of Klansmen are the reason why this touring exhibition, originally scheduled to open several years ago, was postponed following the Black Lives Matter protests – which is absurd, given the artist's lifelong antifascism. It's good to see Guston at Tate Modern at last, said Jackie Wullschläger in the Financial Times – "rampant and magnificent in a thrilling show".