Philip Guston Now

Philip Guston Now is the catalogue for the retrospective co-organized by the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Tate Modern, and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. It traces Guston's career from his 1930s social-realist murals through the cartoonish, hooded-figure paintings of his final two decades.

Harry Cooper, Mark Godfrey, Alison de Lima Greene, and Kate Nesin edited the book. It pairs scholarly essays with short responses from artists and writers working in Guston's wake. Contributors include Tacita Dean, Peter Fischli, Trenton Doyle Hancock, William Kentridge, Glenn Ligon, David Reed, Dana Schutz, Amy Sillman, Art Spiegelman, and Rirkrit Tiravanija. Distributed Art Publishers issued the book for the National Gallery of Art in 2020.

The exhibition itself was delayed after the four museums announced in 2020 that they would postpone it. They cited concern over Guston's Ku Klux Klan imagery amid that year's protests over racial violence. The decision drew public objection from artists, including several of this book's own contributors, before the show went forward on a later schedule.