This thoughtful survey of Guston’s work well represents the Canadian-born painter’s two contrasting mature styles – his Abstract Expressionist phase in the 1940s and 1950s and his brave, then misunderstood, break with abstraction at the end of the 1960s. His move from New York to Woodstock saw a radical change in the return to a figurative style. The deliberately crude, comic-strip-influenced style becomes a form of understated shorthand, whether for political fears seen in Ku Klux Klan heads or for his daily life in canvases filled with dismembered hands, smoking cigarettes and outsize boots.
