In a potentially game-changing donation that will make the Metropolitan Museum of New York the museum with the greatest collection of Philip Guston artwork in the world, Musa Mayer, the artist’s daughter, will donate 220 of her father’s works.
Guston is one of the most important 20th-century American artists, the subject of a traveling retrospective. Before transitioning to a popular type of abstraction in the years after World War II, he painted angular, impenetrable figurations at the start of his career. He then shocked critics by returning to figuration in the 1960s.
The paintings he produced at the time—a sequence of pictures showing Ku Klux Klan members in absurdist situations—became a flashpoint in 2020, as the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., was preparing to host the current retrospective.
Out of worry that some people might not be able to understand Guston’s messages, the museum and the other three co-organizing organizations postponed the performance and said that it would be changed. This choice was the subject of fierce discussion both inside and outside the art world.
The exhibit eventually debuted in 2022 at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; at the moment, it is on display at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston in a completely revised version, complete with trigger warnings.
Numerous Guston works, including several important ones from the artist’s first retrospective in 2003, are already part of The Met’s collection. Mayer’s promised gift, which includes several works that are a part of the present retrospective and are nearly unmatched by any other institution, will help create a more comprehensive picture of Guston’s body of work.
