Across 50 years, Philip Guston continually explored varying means of representation, ranging from figuration to abstraction and back again, as he never stopped questioning the place of the artist in society at large. His richly worked paintings resonate with a profound humanism, defined equally by themes that touch on what he called the “brutality of the world” and his profound commitment to the joy of painting. Organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in collaboration with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH); the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Tate Modern, London, Philip Guston Now is the first retrospective of the artist’s work assembled in two decades. In Houston, the exhibition features 86 paintings, and thirty-three drawings and prints, from public and private collections, including well-known and rarely-seen works. Among the highlights are foundational paintings from the 1930s that have never been on public view; a cycle of major abstract paintings of the 1950s; a multi-part array of small panel paintings from the late 1960s as Guston developed a new vocabulary grounded in ordinary objects; a reunion of the controversial paintings from Guston’s groundbreaking Marlborough Gallery show in 1970; and a powerful selection of large, often apocalyptic paintings of the lat1970s that form Guston’s final artistic statement. “Few artists of the 20th century remain more compelling or mysterious to contemporary viewers,” said Gary Tinterow, Director of the Margaret Alkek Williams Chair, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. “Guston’s extraordinary turn away from the gorgeous abstract paintings with which he made his reputation for making inscrutable figurative paintings filled with doubt and anxiety aligns him with his hero, Francisco de Goya. Like Goya, Guston felt compelled at the end of his career to comment on society and the human condition in ways that break convention.

• Philip Guston (1913–1980), born Phillip Goldstein, was the youngest child of Jewish immigrants who fled the pogroms that swept Central Europe at the turn of the 20th century, landing first in Montreal before making their way to Los Angeles in 1922. Guston’s father died by suicide in 1923, and both cartooning and drawing provided a haven for the precociously talented young artist. Guston left high school during his senior year and was self-taught, taking inspiration from books on the Italian Renaissance and the flourishing Mexican Muralist movement. He also visited the superb African and Modern art collection assembled by Walter and Louise Arensberg, who frequently opened their home to young artists.

• Among the earliest works on view in the exhibition, Mother and Child (c. 1930, private collection) were completed when Guston was still in his teens. It reflects his admiration of Michelangelo and the Surrealist compositions of Giorgio de Chirico. During these early years, Guston’s political outlook was honed by encounters with the Los Angeles Police Department’s notorious “Red Squad” and the city’s Ku Klux Klan rallies, which prompted Guston’s first paintings condemning anti-Semitism and racialized violence.

• Guston cast off his birth name when he moved to New York in 1936 and married painter and poet Musa McKim the following year. Swirling with energy and motion, Gladiators (1940, Museum of Modern Art, New York) typifies the work Guston produced while supporting himself as a muralist for the WPA (Works Progress Administration). An allegory of World War II, Gladiators, demonstrates Guston’s assimilation of American Modernism as he depicted masked and armed children locked in a Möbius strip of unending conflict. While living and teaching in the Midwest, Guston continued his consideration of the toll of World War II with If This Be Not I (1945, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, St. Louis). Appalled by the revelations of the Holocaust, Guston presents children amid a ruined city; many masked or hiding their features from the viewer, with a sole ray of hope for a be

• After a period of personal and artistic turmoil, Guston committed to abstraction in 1950, using vibrant colors and thick brushstrokes to fill his canvases as if they were, in the words of critic Harold. Rosenberg, “an arena in which to act.” Guston became a leading figure among the New York School of Abstract Expressionists. The painterly lyricism he brought to his work over the following decade is mirrored in Summer (1954, Collection of Marguerite and Robert Hoffman), ushered in a new era of figuration in Guston’s career.

• Working in the late 1960s in the retreat of his Woodstock studio, Guston responded to the political and social turmoil of the era through a series of shockingly vivid depictions of Klansmen as cartoonlike figures, resurrecting imagery that had first haunted his early protest paintings. Much as philosopher Hannah Arendt had described “the banality of evil” in her writings about the Holocaust, Guston presents his Klansmen in everyday settings—cruising city streets, invading the artist’s studio, and inhabiting schoolroom blackboards—to decry the toxic legacy of racism and violence across American history.

In the final 20 years of Guston’s life, he began looking inward for reflection on his vices and the toxic work environment around him. To create a similarity to the effect of racism and poverty.

Philip Guston Now Brown Foundation Galleries, Audrey Jones Beck Building October 23, 2022 – January 16, 2023, More information available at www.mfah.org/philipgusto