How Philip Guston became a hero to a new generation of figurative painters

Why do painters represent things? There was a time when the answers seemed obvious. Art glorified power, earthly and divine, and provided moral exemplars of how to behave – in the case of sacred paintings – or how not to in the case of profane ones. When modernism threw all that into doubt, the picture frame remained. The question for modern artists was, what to put in it?

Fifteen years of non-representational painting prompted Guston to question its usefulness

For the first decade of his career, Philip Guston had an old-fashioned answer: the murals he painted in the style of Italian Renaissance frescoes in the US and Mexico during the 1930s promoted ideals of social justice. In 1931, when LAPD’s Red Squads destroyed the teenage Guston’s portable mural in support of the Scottsboro Boys – who were falsely sentenced to death for raping a white woman – he took it personally.

Growing up as a Jewish immigrant kid in Los Angeles in the 1920s – when the Ku Klux Klan led rallies, broke strikes and drove openly around town in full regalia – he had experienced racism at first hand.