Philip Guston at Tate Modern review: An extraordinary, startling show full of moral disquiet

Back in September 2020, directors at the Tate decided we wouldn’t see this retrospective of Philip Guston until 2024. After the murder of George Floyd, it was felt that the American painter’s cartoonish Klu Klux Klan imagery was too inflammatory for the highpoint of the Black Lives Matter moment. Thus Tate, along with the three major American galleries also hosting the exhibition, put the show on hold for two years. Now finally it opens at Tate Modern this week, and it’s a revelation.

Yet that original decision to postpone didn’t come without massive controversy. A letter signed by 2,000 artists, including many leading figures, condemned the museums’ lack of courage and failure to interpret the work or come to terms with their own “history of prejudice”. Yet in that charged atmosphere, the fact that Guston was a lifelong anti-racist and Jewish – therefore a target for America’s most notorious racist organisation himself – didn’t seem to count. Mindful of the fact that the statue of Bristol slave trader Edward Colston had only recently been consigned to the River Avon, and not wanting to provide even the slightest incitement for mobs to run amok through Tate Modern, the institution went ahead with the postponement.

The exhibition finally opened in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts in May last year, without event, and is opening now in London, with little sign of trepidation on Tate’s part. So what’s changed? Well, everything and nothing. That moment of pandemic period high uncertainty, when the world appeared to be irrevocably changing, now feels a remote historical episode – with most things put back pretty much the way they were. Philip Guston’s paintings, meanwhile, particularly the supposedly controversial late works, seem more extraordinary than ever. They’re revealed in this startling show as the final flowering product of a career of constant shifting directions, mostly in response to political and moral rather than purely artistic imperatives.