Finding Context

“PHILIP GUSTON NOW”, a retrospective on display at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, could be seen as the reverse. Guston hasn’t left the party; he was disinvited. The traveling exhibition has officially opened after a nearly two-year postponement. The organizing institutions—the Boston MFA, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., London’s Tate Modern and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas—put a hold on the June 2020 opening date at the National Gallery of Art in response to events surrounding the death of George Floyd.

“We are postponing the exhibition,” the organizers stated last fall, “until a time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Guston’s work can be more clearly