Don’t Look Away From Philip Guston’s Cartoonish Paintings of Klansmen

Anybody who has seen one of Philip Guston’s representational paintings knows the rest of them. I mean that in a strictly literal sense: The visual universe that Guston began creating in the late 1960s, when he rejected the abstraction that was then dominating the New York art world, is impossible not to recognize. Guston painted in thick, fleshy pinks, commonly outlining his figures in red or black instead of filling them in. His commitment to this palette was such that, according to his daughter, Musa Mayer, in her memoir Night Studio, when Guston died in 1980, she and her mother inherited “hundreds of tubes of cadmium red medium, mars black, titanium white.”

Many of his pink canvases are self-portraits in which he appears as a giant, worried head, all forehead wrinkles and wide eyes; many show household objects—cherries, cigarettes, bottles, light bulbs—swollen to menacing proportions; and many are full of puffy, cartoonish Ku Klux Klansmen, typically doing activities that, per Mayer, came from the routines of their, , or, as in the 1969 work , painting a self-portrait while wearing a hooded white robe.