Light on Green Sea

A major figure of American postwar abstraction, Philip Guston (1913-1980) returned to figurative art in the 1960s, haunted by the Vietnam War and the political situation of the United States. He returned to the subjects that had inhabited his practice in the 1930s, especially the Ku Klux Klan. 

In 1970, the artist developed a habit of portraying himself and everyone else wearing their infamous pointed, white hoods in illustration of the internalised, often unconscious racism on which American society has been built. Guston became closer to the world of poets, whose works he illustrated, just as a part of the art scene turned its back on him.