CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/14/2023

Revised 'Philip Guston Now' on view at National Gallery of Art

Featured spreads are reproduced from Philip Guston Now, the catalog to the exhibition on view at the National Gallery of Art—following a notorious two-year delay spurred by one of the most passionate and evenly divided artworld controversies of our time (concerning the artist’s use of hooded KKK-esque figures in his highly critical—and self-critical—paintings). The exhibition has undergone extensive reconsideration. In his catalog essay, Glenn Ligon writes, “In a 1977 interview exploring his turn from abstract painting, Guston said, ‘I got sick and tired of all that Purity! Wanted to tell stories.’ To be ‘in the hood’ was a solution to a problem, one that enabled Guston to break from the elevated critical discourse surrounding postwar abstraction and dive into the muck and mire of the American experience, allowing him to tell the truth of what it meant to be a citizen reckoning with a particularly turbulent moment in the nation’s history. The comedian George Carlin once said, ‘The reason they call it the “American Dream” is because you have to be asleep to believe in it.’ Guston’s ‘hood’ paintings, with their ambiguous narratives and incendiary subject matter, are not asleep. They’re woke.”