"Guston worked in a number of artistic modes, from Renaissance-inspired figuration to formally accomplished abstraction,"[1] and is now regarded as one of the "most important, powerful, and influential American painters of the last 100 years".

It calls Guston's KKK themes a timely catalyst for a "reckoning" with cultural and institutional white supremacy, and argues that that is why the exhibition must proceed without delay.

[9] The child of Ukrainian Jewish parents who escaped the persecution of pogroms by immigrating to Canada from Odessa, Guston was born in Montreal in 1913 and moved to Los Angeles in 1919.

[11] In 1927, at the age of 14, Guston began painting and enrolled in the Los Angeles Manual Arts High School, where he met Jackson Pollock, who became a lifelong friend.

[7] The two studied under Frederick John de St. Vrain Schwankovsky and were introduced to European modern art, Eastern philosophy, theosophy and mystic literature.

The pair later published a paper opposing the high school's emphasis on sports over art, which led to expulsions, although Pollock eventually returned and graduated.

As an early activist, in 1932, the 18-year-old Guston produced an indoor mural with the artist Reuben Kadish in an effort by the communist-affiliated John Reed Club of Los Angeles to raise money in support of the defendants in the Scottsboro Boys Trial, in which nine Black teenagers were falsely accused of a rape in Alabama and sentenced to death.

In 1934, Philip Goldstein (who had not yet changed his name to Guston)[13] and Kadish joined their friend the poet Jules Langsner on a trip to Mexico, where they were commissioned to paint a 1,000-square-foot (93 m2) mural on a wall in the former summer palace of the Emperor Maximilian in the state capital of Morelia.

[citation needed] In 1934–35, Guston and Kadish completed a mural, still on display, at City of Hope Medical Center, a tuberculosis hospital at the time, in Duarte, California, US.

[1] "It disappointed many when he returned to figuration with aplomb, painting mysterious images in which cartoonish-looking cups, heads, easels, and other visions were depicted against vacant beige backgrounds.

The initial reaction of Robert Hughes, critic for Time magazine, who later changed his views, was put into a scathing review entitled "Ku Klux Komix".

[19] According to Musa Mayer's biography of her father in Night Studio, the painter Willem de Kooning was one of the few who instantly understood the importance of these paintings, telling Guston at the time that they were "about freedom.

A catalogue raisonné of the artist's work was compiled by the Guston Foundation in 2013, coinciding with recent scholarly interest that explored the periods he spent in Italy.

[26] Among Guston's students were two graduates of the University of Iowa, painters Stephen Greene (1917–1999)[27] and Fridtjof Schroder (1917–1990),[28] as well as Ken Kerslake (1930–2007), who attended the Pratt Institute.

The letter featured a "list of signatories [that] reads like a roll call of the most accomplished American artists alive: old and young, white and Black, local and expat, painters and otherwise,"[34] including Matthew Barney, Nicole Eisenman, Charles Gaines, Ellen Gallagher, Wade Guyton, Rachel Harrison, Joan Jonas, Julie Mehretu, Adrian Piper, Pope.L, Martin Puryear, Amy Sillman, Lorna Simpson, Henry Taylor, and Christopher Williams.

Strongly criticizing the museums' lack of courage to display the work, attempt to interpret it, or come to terms with the institutions' own "history of prejudice", the signers unanimously described the exhibition as a timely prompt for a "reckoning" — adding that that was why it must proceed as scheduled.