Philip Guston's Cartoonish Paintings
Right, Philip Guston in his Woodstock studio a few months before his 1970 Marlborough Gallery show. Photograph by Frank R. Lloyd. Left, Philip Guston, Scared Stiff, Private Collection. © The Estate of Philip Guston Philip Guston’s Cartoonish Paintings by Larry Baumhor Self-taught rebel artist Philip Guston defied the art world spitting in the face of his former abstract expressionist style for a comical brutal figurative style, holding a mirror up to American culture and politics. The directors at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and Tate Modern postponed their scheduled Guston exhibit and all hell broke loose in the art world. Matthew Teitelbaum, director of MFA in Boston wrote that “how we present the work needs to be reconsidered because the work has changed since we first envisioned the exhibition.” Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery stated that Guston “appropriated images of Black tra...