He made art that is rich in its worldly references, yet resistant to readability art that is ethically charged, but also ethically unfixed. It includes just a few abstract paintings and mixes them in with everything else, making them parts of a great wildness. If you wanted to make Guston look semi-normal - conventionally, classically Modern - you would foreground his 1950s abstractions and hang them together, a wall of gestural elegance. Much of the rest of the show expands on the idea of locating Guston’s questioning, questing presence in his art. And in “Untitled,” a small, square painting done the year Guston died, a gray battered stone with one staring eye contemplates the Sisyphean task of rolling itself up an incline. In “Head I” (1965), a mask-like tangle of dark paint floats against a light ground, under which traces of another form - a triangular shape (a Klan hood?) - can be detected.

One, dated 1944 and actually titled “Self-Portrait,” is a realistic likeness, soulful almost to the point of being a sendup of romantic melancholy. The show’s opening gallery, emblazoned with the phrase “What Kind of Man Am I?” - a quote from Guston - makes the point with a display of what the curators interpret as self-images from across his life. Constitutionally restless, he shopped through styles, and in the 1950s shifted to gestural abstraction, then the vanguard mode. He began as a figurative painter in the 1930s and ’40s, influenced by Mexican muralism, Picasso, Italian Renaissance fresco painting and comic strips (“Krazy Kat,” “Mutt and Jeff” and much later R. There he picked up art early - Jackson Pollock was a high school friend - and aligned himself with leftist politics, an involvement that led to brushes with militant right-wing groups, including the Klan. The artist was born Phillip Goldstein in 1913 in Montreal, Canada, where his parents had come as refugees fleeing anti-Jewish pogroms in Ukraine. Working with a total of 100 paintings and drawings - Boston’s will be the smallest edition of the show - they have downplayed the chronological sequencing favored by the catalog, though you can still piece together a narrative from timelines placed high on the wall in each gallery. An apology from the museum’s leadership followed, along with a promise to “make sure that everyone feels welcome here.” Boston has become acutely alert to matters of audience inclusion and sensitivity since 2019, when a visiting group of Black middle school students claimed that they had been mistreated by staff, and the allegations became national news. Caught between fight or flight, the National Gallery reduced the delay to two years, and the itinerary was revised, making Boston the initial venue, where the show - now wrapped in the equivalent of caution tape - opens on Sunday.Īctually, it’s a logical starting place. Critics, artists and curators pounced, crying censorship and demanding the survey proceed as planned. But, for good historical reason, our big, conservative museums have little to no political credibility. The National Gallery, its first stop, was careful to say that the decision to postpone in no way reflected lack of faith in the artist, but a concern about the reception of his work in a politically combustive time.

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