Philip Guston

Known for: late figurative work; the 1970 return to figuration

Philip Guston began as an Abstract Expressionist — his lyrical, shimmering canvases of the 1950s established him as one of the major figures in that movement — before abandoning abstraction in 1970 and returning to a cartoonish figurative style that was initially dismissed by the art world and has since been recognized as prophetic. His hooded Ku Klux Klan figures, clocks, shoes, and cigarette butts addressed American political reality with a directness that abstraction could not. A major retrospective organized in 2020 was delayed after controversy over the Klan imagery in the context of Black Lives Matter.