A struggle over artistic freedom suggests a better way out of the culture wars
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskTwice Guston, who died in 1980, made a reputation and gave it up—first as a figurative artist and muralist in the 1930s and 1940s, next by plunging into abstraction with his friend Jackson Pollock and other mid-century American pioneers. Boldly he returned to figuration in the late 1960s, dwelling on banal yet somehow uncanny objects: light bulbs, bricks, boots. He painted heads, distorted or half-submerged.
Well, who was he? The son of Jewish refugees from Odessa, he changed his name from Goldstein to evade anti-Semitism. The Klan was active in the Los Angeles of his youth and his early work also evoked its crimes, alongside other fascistic atrocities. He turned away from abstraction in part out of an enduring sense of political duty.
These works are an indictment of racism, glaring or insidious, not a case of it. But it appeared today’s viewers might not get a chance to see that for themselves. In 2020 the exhibition was postponed by the four museums involved in it, initially until 2024. Opponents of censorship protested, as did many artists. Some thought the delay smelled like a cancellation, and that “Philip Guston Now”, the show’s title, might become Philip Guston Never.
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