“As much as his career zigged and zagged, Guston always worked in opposition to something. The impetus for his early work was a John Reed Club appeal to “abandon decisively the treacherous illusion that art can exist for art’s sake.” In 1932 he made the Scottsboro Boys frescos, introduced towering Ku Klux Klan figures, their hollow eyes full of malice. Later, when he painted abstractly, it was always against the “known image,” as he called it. Once he returned to figuration, he labored under a sort of scrutiny that the Pop artists avoided. Their slick, media-derived imagery was an appealing comment on commerce; his goal was to develop an iconography already half-ruined by iconoclasm. Guston infects his objects with tragicomic suffering. Bugs, shoes, bodiless heads, KKK fools, hands and the cigarette caught between their fingers—all were, as he put it, “doomed.” Poor Richard fits into this late work because of its humor, more complex and insidious than the earnestness of his early murals. Guston understood that when you laugh in an art context, you are laughing alone; you are laughing at yourself. The moral question at the heart of his late work is complicity.”