Philip Guston's daughter on his Klan paintings: 'They're about white culpability'

The postponement last year of an exhibition of the artist's work led to a fraught debate over race and culture. His daughter Musa Mayer fears his complex images are being misrepresented

Musa Mayer has been holed up" in Woodstock, upstate New York, which she describes as a liberal community in the midst of Trump land", since the beginning of lockdown in March of last year. She is staying in a house she inherited from her parents and nearby is a building that was once the art studio of her father, Philip Guston. It is now the Guston Foundation, which she established in 2013 to promote his work and further his legacy. Of late, she has had her hands full.

Last September Mayer answered a call from Matthew Teitelbaum, the director of the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, one of four galleries (including Tate Modern in London) that had agreed to host Philip Guston Now, a much anticipated touring retrospective of her father's work. It had been scheduled to open in Washington DC in July, but had been pushed back to 2021 by the pandemic. Now, to Mayer's astonishment, Teitelbaum informed her that he and the other three museum directors had decided to postpone the exhibition until 2024. (They have since announced it will go ahead from May 2022.)