EDGE OF TOWN
PHILIP GUSTON, 1969
He just stopped. Philip Guston was one of the big abstract painters in America. He knew how to make the beautiful kind — brushwork, atmosphere, all of it. And then, near the end of the 1960s, he looked at those paintings and decided he couldn't do it anymore. King had been killed. The war was everywhere. Nixon was coming. And Guston said the beautiful paintings started to feel like a lie. So he put things back in. Hoods. Bricks. Shoes. Clocks. The dumb, blunt stuff of the actual world. And the style he reached for was rough — almost comic-strip rough. Cheap illustration, Krazy Kat, that kind of language. Which is what makes the hoods so unsettling. They're almost funny. That's the problem. He doesn't paint them like grand historical villains. He paints them like they might live nearby. Driving around. Hanging out. Going about their business. The cartoon style doesn't make them lighter. It makes them harder to push away. And here's the part that matters most. Guston said he wanted to see himself as the Klansman. Not them. Him. He was Jewish — born Phillip Goldstein — and grew up in Los Angeles when the Klan was active and visible there. He'd been making Klan imagery as early as the 1930s. So this wasn't a new subject. It was unfinished business. The question wasn't: who are these people? It was: what is the version of this that lives in me? That's why these paintings still hit. Not because they show evil as some monstrous other. Because they refuse that comfort. When he showed this work in 1970, people hated it. Critics were brutal. Friends felt betrayed. They wanted the beautiful abstraction back. He kept going. And that's what makes the paintings hold. Not just that he painted the hood. That he painted it close enough to himself that it stopped being history and became conscience.