“This serious play, which we call art, can’t be static,” said Philip Guston. “You have to keep learning how to play in new ways all the time.” Indeed, Guston’s style was continually in flux. In the 1930s, he created murals for the WPA, then shifted to the Abstract Expressionism of the New York School. In 1968, he rejected that style too and removed himself from the New York art scene. Influenced by the existentialism of Kafka and Sartre, as well as the social upheaval of the time, Guston’s paintings became darker, his images of humankind reductive, cartoonish, haunted. Guston died in 1980, at 66. This new exhibition spotlights an intimate and underappreciated side of his oeuvre: paintings that drew on Guston’s marriage to poet Musa McKim and their secluded lives in Woodstock, New York. Three of these works have never before been exhibited. —Maggie Turner