Guston was a founding figure in the New York School abstract expressionist movement in the 1950s and a contemporary of Wolf Kahn. His work continues to provoke and raise social and political questions about freedom, brutality, violence, racism, and civil strife. In 2023, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., featured Philip Guston Now, an exhibition of more than 150 paintings and drawings that follow Guston's 50-year career.

Living in poverty and losing his father to suicide when he was 10 years old, Guston retreated into art, hiding away in a closet where he read and taught himself to draw under a bare lightbulb, according to the National Gallery. 

Guston's bold art has sparked controversy and debate over when and where to show work that includes his haunting, hooded Ku Klux Klan figures. As a teenager, Guston painted a fresco in Los Angeles attacking the KKK. It was destroyed by the LAPD's red squad. In response to the violence of war and social unrest of the 1960s, Guston returned to the KKK figures he had first depicted in LA in the 1930s. After World War II, Guston addressed the horrors of the Holocaust, especially in a pair of paintings called The Porch (see above). "The only reason to be an artist," Guston said, "is to bear witness." 

Resources: 

• The Guston Foundation: https://www.philipguston.org/home/foundation

• The National Art Gallery, "Philip Guston's Story;" National Gallery of Art; MoMA

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  If you are inspired by this artist, respond to the challenge with your own creations!