CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/18/2020

Darkness and hope in 'Philip Guston Now'

Featured spreads are reproduced from Philip Guston Now, the definitive retrospective published to accompany the exhibition currently on hiatus at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, and traveling to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Tate Modern and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. "Be warned," NGADC curator Harry Cooper writes. "Guston's is not a sunny art. There is a moment on film where he uses the word 'happy' almost by accident and then repeats it in disgust, spitting it out. That he endured personal traumas and took the traumas of the twentieth century to heart is evident in most of the images in this volume, if you look closely. But even in its darkest moments and seen in the darkest light, his art can be beautiful and even hopeful. His refusal to withdraw, his insistence on bearing witness to what was happening inside himself and out, was a kind of faith… Guston's work seems to inhabit a present tense, addressing us in the moment. Whether it is the freshness of the paint itself, the directness of the handling, the power of the image, or something undefinable, we feel that the work could have been done yesterday. Or just now."