Phillip Guston is, of course, one of the greatest American painters—which might be because he wasn’t born American at all. Canadian by origin, Guston spent a lifetime dissecting the rot of American life with cartoonish hysteria and a grotesque tenderness that rarely survives fame. His paintings move with a satirical clarity, a sense of dread made palpable by his symbols: hooded figures, disembodied limbs, worn shoes, cigarette smoke, a persistent haze of pinks and grays. Guston borrowed from the grandeur of Mexican muralists—Rivera, Orozco—but quickly rerouted their monumentalism into something both more intimate and more horrific: domestic terror, racial violence, the banality of evil, the psychic weight of living inside a country in denial.
I first encountered Guston’s work in a freshman art history class at Eugene Lang, the liberal arts branch of the New School—a place where social critique was often filtered through a thick haze of student performativity. Even then, surrounded by peers who saw every painting as a mirror of their own morality, Guston’s work felt like something else entirely. Not a posture, but a plea. A disgusted embrace.
His late paintings are often the most instantly recognizable—those clumsy, shamed, hooded men—but Guston’s real power lies in his refusal of purity. He flipped between abstraction and figuration, between elegance and revulsion, without ever asking permission. What gets lost in the flattening of his legacy is just how funny his paintings are. And how sad. There’s nothing ironic about his sincerity, and nothing soft about his grotesques. Guston doesn’t need defending. He annihilates the imitators on contact. Every carbon-copy canvas, every try-hard homage: irrelevant. His language is still the most legible. His hand, the most human.
-Jane Balfus