I recently went to the Philip Guston exhibition at The Tate Modern. I have never seen anything quite like his paintings. The exhibition charts his extraordinary 50 year career. Guston famously said that the only reason to be an artist was to "bear witness" and to "unnumb oneself to the brutality of the world".
Philip Guston was born Philip Goldstein, the youngest child of Jewish immigrants who had fled antisemitic persecution in present day Ukraine. In 1936 he changed his name to Guston to mask his Jewish identity at a time of growing antisemitism and a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.
One of the rooms in the exhibition is dedicated to his massive paintings of hooded figures. We are told that Guston saw these hooded figures as symbols of evil. "My attempt was really not to do pictures of the Ku Klux Klan as I had done earlier. The idea of evil fascinated me... I almost tried to imagine that I was living with the Klan. What would it be like to be evil? To plan and to plot". We are asked to question who is behind the hood. What is our culpability.
There follows a striking artwork in which the artist paints himself curled up in bed disturbed by his nightmares of the injustices and violence in the world.
In his early artistic career he made directly political art and he served as co-chaire for Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) a civil rights organisation providing legal aid for activists, funding education and supporting Black Voter registration.
My favourite artwork in the exhibition is in the last room entitled "Couple in Bed". There is such tenderness in the painting as Guston depicts himself clinging to his paintbrushes and to his partner McKim.
The exhibition runs until 25 February 2024.
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