Guston was a radical artist who lived from 1913 to 1980. One of his first works was a mural featuring the Scottsboro Boys, nine young black men falsely accused of rape. The mural was vandalized by a group known as the Red Squad, associated with the LAPD. His paintings in the Fifties were abstractions, but after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., he began to paint pictures of hooded figures which he associated with what he called the “bad habits” of America, including racism, violence, and oppression.
In September a number of museums (the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the Tate in London decided to postpone (cancel?) a showing of Guston’s paintings. They were afraid visitors might misinterpret the art work showing the Ku Klux Klan.
Are you following this? These museums decided to cancel a show of a man who painted to protest the Klan and racism because they thought visitors might be upset by images of the Klan. This is nuts.
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