To rescue Kahlo from the clutches of the corporate art market, we need to acknowledge the overt and covert political dimensions of the work, demands GAVIN O’TOOLE
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The bigot in the hood
JAN WOOLF relishes the shocking candour with which an artist who could paint anything depicted the systemic racism and anti-semitism of the US
FROM ANTI-FASCIST MURALS TO ANTI-FASCIST CARTOONS: Beneath the hammer and sickle of Communism, the first use of the hood motif to designate violent bigotry in the recently rediscovered mural The Struggle against Terror (Against War and Fascism) by Philip Guston, Reuben Kadish, Jules Langsner, 1934–35, Museo Regional de Michoacán, Morelia, Mexico; The Studio by Philip Guston, 1969
[Ruben E. Reyes; Jan Woolf]
If you can see past the relentless commodification you will be rewarded by enormously powerful work, suggests JENNY MITCHELL
CHRIS SEARLE revels in the one-off collaboration between an American polymath and a British Muslim, and detects the presence of their revolutionary forebear
GORDON PARSONS revels in an ebullient production of Shakespeare’s magical comedy
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a thoughtful analysis of the Erdogan regime, viewed through the evolving history of a neighbourhood in Istanbul
GORDON PARSONS regrets the price, but is dazzled by an outstandingly ambitious study of the way art restoration in particular, and culture in general was weaponised by the Nazis
Philip Guston
Tate Modern, London
PHILIP GUSTON (born Goldstein in Canada, 1913) could paint anything he wanted to. The palette was his oyster. If painters could be heroes he’d be one.
Known latterly for his wild cod cartoony canvases, after the Krazy Kat style replaced the high renaissance style (echoing Pierro De Francesca), the stunning Weimar expressionism If This Be Not I (1945) the abstracts and the figurative muralism, he was his own man; and famous.
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