BOSTON — In the summer of 2020, looking over a checklist of images and the installation plan for the upcoming Philip Guston show at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, Kaywin Feldman, who was in her second year as the museum’s director, felt uneasy. How would the cartoonish, hooded Ku Klux Klan figures painted by Guston — who explored racism in his enigmatic, politically charged work — look to visitors amid the pain and the push for racial justice that had just exploded after the killing of George Floyd?
