Postponing Guston’s provocative touring exhibition may avoid short-term discomfort, but it’s a profoundly patronising move
What would it be like to be evil? Philip Guston invites us to reason this in a provocative set of paintings of the Ku Klux Klan from the 1960s. “They are self-portraits,” said the white, Jewish artist. “I perceive myself as being behind the hood.”
Philip Guston Now, a touring exhibition that was set to open at National Gallery of Art Washington, and travel to Tate Modern, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and Boston, could have been art’s final call-to-action in the year Black Lives Matter was reignited as a social justice movement after the murder of George Floyd.
