Philip Guston Painting Sparks Dialogue in a Local Museum

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. — Philip Guston’s “Cigar” (1969), now hanging in the McMeen Gallery of the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art (SLOMA), presents a disconcerting image. One of 33 paintings first shown in Guston’s landmark 1970 New York exhibition, it depicts a pink-hooded, ham-handed klansman gripping a cigar that wafts a ragged swirl of grey impasto smoke. The late Canadian-American artist, a vocal antifascist, often explored difficult questions regarding racism and the social complicity that shrouded and enabled it in his darkly comical paintings of KKK members. Emma Saperstein, SLOMA’s chief curator, told Hyperallergic that she sees “Cigar,” in its personification of racism hidden in plain sight, as “a challenging piece that implicates both the viewer and the artist.”

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