What Guston was painting was now unmistakable; why it appeared on the canvas could be mysterious. The mysteries multiplied when, in 1969, a year after he’d ended his two-year break from painting, Guston began painting hooded Ku Klux Klansmen. It might not have seemed so strange to him at the time. The small paintings he’d made the year before had been of single objects—still lifes, more or less—or mere fragments of figures (a hand, the back of a head) offering little sense of personal identity. Now, in paintings with more narrative content, the protagonists remained anonymous. In an image with two or three Klansmen, the viewer can’t distinguish one from another. It’s more like one figure multiplied than a multiplicity of figures. Each is an alter ego of the others. A conversation among Klansmen might as well be one Klansmen parleying with himself, solipsistically.
But painting Klansmen had to be something more than a formal device—more than a way of getting back to figurative painting without quite having to paint people. Back around 1930, as a young artist and activist, he had painted scenes of Klan violence as a gesture of protest. But this was something different. In 1969, a painting like The Studio, which shows a Klansman as a painter like Guston himself, presented a more ambiguous image. Storr makes a canny proposal: To paint the Klansman was, for Guston, “a coded emblem of his coming to terms with his Jewish heritage and the vexing problems of assimilation.” As Guston said: “I perceive myself as being behind a hood.” He also drew a parallel with one of his favorite writers, Isaac Babel, who in the 1920s had ridden with a band of violently anti-Semitic Cossack cavalrymen and written about them. Guston spoke of imagining himself among the Klansman. “What would it be like to be evil?”
Whatever the self-accusation embedded in Guston’s Klan imagery, it was surpassed by the rejection he experienced when, in 1970, he exhibited his new figurative work for the first time—not so much because of the Klan imagery (though in Time magazine Robert Hughes opined, too optimistically, that it was “a little late in the century to mount an entire exhibition on the Ku Klux Klan”) as because he had betrayed the cause of abstraction for which his friends (and he himself) had sacrificed so much. Among those who could not accept this conversion was Feldman, the brother figure whose responsiveness, he’d said, kept him sane.