In the late 60s, one of my favorite painters, Philip Guston abandoned his sublime abstract paintings for images of clumsy cartoonish klansmen driving around smoking, painting, and looking for trouble. Of the transition, Guston said “… when the 1960s came along I was feeling split, schizophrenic. The war, what was happening in America, the brutality of the world. What kind of a man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything – and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue.” Guston’s topsy-turvy compositions, wry humor, and acrid-yet-beautiful palette are good enough reasons to love any painter, but I love him most because he threw away the beautiful and confronted the ugliness of the real world instead. [Read more…]