At the end of the 1960s, having already gained recognition as an abstract painter, Philip Guston began to produce works of a radically different kind. These new paintings contained representational imagery formed from the stylized shapes and bold outlines that one might see in cartoons. Despite their humorous or childlike rendering, the scenes that Guston depicted were deeply unsettling, incorporating references to social evils such as piles of shoes evocative of World War II concentration camps and hooded figures reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan. Guston’s biography, too, seemed to inform these pictures, with the dangling bulb at the center of The Oracle a possible allusion to the artist’s father’s suicide by hanging. Guston’s unrelenting subject matter, appearing at a time when America was embroiled in the Vietnam War and civil rights struggles, implies his profound questioning of the relationship between looking, guilt, and responsibility. One might identify the wide-eyed being in The Oracle with an artist scouting content for future work or with viewers primed to receive new pictures. In either case, it remains uncertain whether the figure, evidently powerless except for its capacity to see, will be moved to acknowledge and respond to the foreboding forms surrounding it.