Red Cloth

In the mid-1960s Philip Guston made a radical shift from lyrical abstraction to a cartoonlike style that reimagined scenes of historic brutality. In Red Cloth, Guston reckons with images from the Holocaust, the state-sponsored persecution and murder of Jews and others deemed undesirable by the Nazi regime during World War II. Illuminated by a single naked light bulb, the severed legs and boots recall the mounds of shoes that the Allied troops found in 1945 at the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Dachau, and Bergen-Belsen. A brilliant vermillion tapestry held aloft by two hands, which reference Manus Dei, or the Hand of God, an ancient Judeo-Christian motif, offsets the barren room. In Guston’s imaginative narrative, God’s intervention cannot stop the horrors of genocide.