Philip Guston had a thing with the KKK.

Don’t worry, I'm not about burst your bubble and tell you Guston was a white supremacist, he was far from it. He both loathed and feared the KKK. Guston grew up in Los Angeles during a time in which the Klan was still reigning supreme in Southern California, and being a Ukrainian Jew, this was not good news for Guston to say the least. This malevolent hatred stayed with him his entire life, and once he decided he was over bro-ing out with the Abstract Expressionist artists such as Pollock and Rothko, he moved onto painting these hooded hooligans.

Guston spent much of his career painting KKK members in their day to day lives as a way to explore identity and mortality. Having grown up in fear of the Klan, it comes as no surprise that this informed Guston’s artistic career. It seems that the KKK did not like him much either, for rumor has it that a band of Klan members once destroyed one of this exhibitions.

It is important to note when looking at Guston’s work that his life was pretty much one big existential crisis. He was often down in the dumps and used alcohol to grease the gears of a life encrusted with injustice and pain. So when Guston wasn't obsessing over the KKK like we see in this painting, he was depicting lives of debauchery and destruction. Definitely not an artist to look at if you need a pick me up.