How Philip Guston became a hero to a new generation of figurative painters

Why do painters represent things? There was a time when the answers seemed obvious. Art glorified power, earthly and divine, and provided moral exemplars of how to behave – in the case of sacred paintings – or how not to in the case of profane ones. When modernism threw all that into doubt, the picture frame remained. The question for modern artists was, what to put in it?

For the first decade of his career, Philip Guston had an old-fashioned answer: the murals he painted in the style of Italian Renaissance frescoes in the US and Mexico during the 1930s promoted ideals of social justice. In 1931, when LAPD’s Red Squads destroyed the teenage Guston’s portable mural in support of the Scottsboro Boys – who were falsely sentenced to death for raping a white woman – he took it personally.

Growing up as a Jewish immigrant kid in Los Angeles in the 1920s – when the Ku Klux Klan led rallies, broke strikes and drove openly around town in full regalia – he had experienced racism at first hand. In a teenage drawing he portrayed Klansmen officiating at a crucifixion, and masked or hooded figures continued to people his early allegorical paintings. They disappeared from view in the 1950s after he joined the New York School of abstract expressionists, but 15 years of non-representational painting prompted him to question its usefulness. ‘What kind of man am I,’ he found himself asking, ‘going into a frustrated fury about everything, and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?’ 

Against the political backdrop of the late 1960s the ‘hoods’ returned to his work like acid reflux, an emblem of the human capacity for evil. It’s their presence in his later paintings that caused the two-year hold-up in Tate Modern’s current Guston retrospective while the participating galleries dithered over racial sensitivities in the wake of Black Lives Matter.