Philip Guston was a painter born in Montreal in 1913 who died in 1980, beginning his career as a WPA-era muralist and social realist before becoming a leading Abstract Expressionist in the 1950s known for soft-edged, luminous abstractions. In the late 1960s he abruptly abandoned abstraction for a deliberately crude, cartoonish figurative style depicting hooded Ku Klux Klan figures, cigarettes, shoes and other blunt everyday objects, a reversal that shocked critics at his 1970 exhibition at New York's Marlborough Gallery. This late style, dismissed at the time, later came to be seen as hugely influential on subsequent figurative and narrative painting.
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Began as a core Abstract Expressionist painter.
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1. Wikipedia: Philip Guston
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He frequently depicted racism, antisemitism, fascism and American identity, as well as-especially in his later most cartoonish and mocking work-the banality of evil.
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