The truth about my father, Philip Guston

Philip Guston’s later work is — and I say this with love — nails-down-a-blackboard weird. The vapid pinks and flat reds lend a nightmare cheerfulness. The menacing American figure wearing Mickey Mouse gloves is rendered in cartoonish style. The clock shows it is time to panic, challenging you to call out the hood for the Ku Klux Klan symbol it appears to be.

By the time he started making these paintings, in 1968, Guston was pretty much post-everything: post-realism, post-abstract expressionism, post-criticism (he and his wife Musa sailed to Italy the day after the show’s opening night, and when a review found him in Venice, poste restante, he dropped it in a canal). He was also post-breakdown and, with the cigarettes and alcohol in his work more than painter’s props — he smoked three packs a day — hastening himself to post-mortem. When he died in 1980 he was lucky to have a gifted advocate in his daughter, Musa Mayer, who spoke to me over the phone about her new book and her father’s recent cancellation.

A big travelling retrospective, due to have arrived at Tate Modern last month, was notoriously binned last September. ‘We are postponing the Philip Guston Now exhibition,’ announced a joint statement from the four host museums, ‘until a time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the centre of Philip Guston’s work can be more clearly interpreted.’ They were referring to the images of hooded KKK figures in both early and late Guston. On a podcast, the director of the Washington National Gallery said that Guston had ‘appropriated images of black trauma’.

‘I was really wounded by the actions taken and particularly that statement,’ Musa Mayer, 78, told me last week. ‘I thought that was really uncalled for, and a misunderstanding.’