Via The New York Times, March 31, 2021
“Nearly a year after the postponement of a Philip Guston retrospective roiled the art world, some of the modernist painter’s controversial paintings of cartoonish Ku Klux Klan figures will be displayed in New York in September.
Hauser & Wirth, which represents the Guston estate, will exhibit the paintings from the artist’s Klansmen series as part of “Philip Guston, 1969-1979.” The exhibition will run from Sept. 9 to Oct. 30 in their New York gallery and will showcase work from the final decade of his career. (Guston died in 1980.)
The timing “is urgent because of the art’s relevance to our cultural context today,” Marc Payot, the president of the gallery, said in an email on Wednesday, though he said the show was not organized in response to the postponement of the Guston retrospective at four major museums last year.
Mr. Payot mentioned the “racial reckoning and widespread calls for social justice” after the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylorlast summer, and how they “echo the context in which Guston made these late works.””