This old picture made me think of the more recent time I saw Guston's paintings, at the Boston MFA in the exhibit described in this Jewish Currents article. I think I leaned more towards the sentiment discussed in the article -- that holding the complexity of Guston's treatment of American racism and his liminal position of Jewish whiteness at arm's length was doing the audience a disservice -- until I actually attended the exhibit. There's always something unexpected about seeing a painting in person, and I think I was surprised by how unsettled I was standing in front of a gigantic image of a Klansman figure, and appreciated the contextualization with the recent history and ongoing struggle with racism here. My recollection is that the context of the Klan imagery in Guston's career was included, as well as materials related to the real-life Klan. Many Americans don't really know that history, because it is not taught in a useful way in many schools even though it's culturally relevant to all of us (while racist parents diligently make sure to pass on their racism to their kids), so it is useful context to include. I felt like it deepened my relationship with the work to think more concretely about how the artist was forced to confront violence shaping his life, and how that may have led him to figure himself "under the hood."
I also think it's significant that although Guston had a relationship to antifascist struggle, he also spent a large part of his career having very little to say about politics except that he didn't care for it, like many painters of his time. I think that silence, that refusal to articulate a meaning beyond "I'm trying to figure out this color and this shape", was a condition of the success and acceptance that created a demand for the exhibition. It left me hungry for art that is more explicitly political! And institutions like museums can't fully hold that, because of their relationship to the landowning, policing, cross-burning class.