Telling Stories

InTelling Stories, the first monograph devoted to the art of Philip Guston in more than two decades, David Kaufmann follows the development of Guston's painting from the early 1960s until the artist's death in 1980. Guston, best known during the 1950s for strictly abstract work, shocked the art world in 1970 when he began to show willfully clumsy and often beautiful "cartoons"-figurative depictions (dubbed "Hoods" by the artist) of what looked like members of the Ku Klux Klan. Kaufmann looks closely at the early critical reception of these works-largely dismissive-and compares it to the critics' discussions of them a decade later, when Pop art, allegory, and politically explicit works had not only become acceptable but were the new vogue. Grounding his historical approach in careful readings of the paintings, Kaufmann explores Guston's intense and complicated relationship to Judaism. He situates the artist in the context of the changing fashions of the New York art world and provides unique insight into the workings of that world at the moment when artistic modernism began to fade.