The artist is in his studio working on a self-portrait, a smaller version of this larger painting. He wears a Klansman’s white hood. It has vertical slits for eyes and hyphenated stitches, which he is getting down on canvas with one gigantic red hand, while the other totes a cigarette. The clock ticks, a bulb glows and the day is starting to fade. But still the painter keeps at it.
Philip Guston’s The Studio (1969) is such a fierce cartoon, wilfully awkward, self-satirising, all pictorial intelligence. It presents the artist as nicotine addict – fag and brush in jutting parallel (he chainsmoked Camels) – and as foolish antihero, trying to paint his own likeness in a hood. But Guston catches himself red-handed, complicit, fingers cocked like a gun. “I almost tried to imagine I was living with the Klan,” he wrote about the painting. “What would it be like to be evil?”
