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As many of us know, to be in the presence of a work of art is to be present with your whole body. One doesn’t just look, one feels. This is especially true for those whose artwork has become so well known that we think we know it because of all the times we’ve seen its image reproduced. Artists understand this predicament with acute sensibility. For this reason, we asked a few artists to respond to the paintings of master Philip Guston at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. We're honored to share their luminous responses below.

Dan Nadel on Philip Guston’s Jewishness Philip Guston, If This Be Not I, 1945, oil on canvas, 42 1/4 × 55 1/4". © The Estate of Philip Guston. TO BE A JEW in twentieth-century America was to be an outsider. We Jews gathered in temples and schools, we bought properties, physical and intellectual, to maintain control of our environments. We formed our own magazines. We exploited ourselves and others. Ashkenazi Jews can pass as non-Jewish when it suits us, or Jewish again when we wish to be “chosen.” And when blame is to be assigned, or walls ere...