Everyday murderers
QUESTION Why did artist Philip Guston paint Ku Klux Klan figures?
PHILIP GUSTON’S Ku Klux Klan paintings are a powerful statement on the mundanity of white supremacy.
Born in Montreal in 1913, he was the seventh child of Jewish immigrants, originally called Goldstein, who had escaped pogroms in Ukraine. Shortly after the family moved to Los Angeles in 1920, his father Louis, a blacksmith by trade who was working as a rubbish collector, hanged himself. Philip found the body.
He began to draw obsessively, often holed up in a wardrobe with a bare lightbulb, which became a motif in his later work.
His early murals were inspired by the masters of the Italian Renaissance, in particular Paolo Uccello’s Battle of San Romano.
The artist Jackson Pollock was Guston’s best friend in high school. They were expelled together for leafleting against the school’s emphasis on sports.
In 1930, Guston produced a powerful series of paintings about the Ku Klux Klan for the Marxist John Reed Society.
In one panel, a Klansman whips a figure tied to a stake shaped like the Washington Monument.
Three years later, the painting went on view at the Stanley Rose bookshop in Los Angeles. It was attacked by Klansmen, who shredded it before the artist’s eyes. This left a powerful wound that was to influence his work years later.
In 1935, Guston moved to New York. Over the next few decades, he held down various teaching posts while working in a number of artistic modes, including abstracts. He returned to figurative painting with a vengeance in 1967.
His depictions of the Ku Klux Klan and everyday objects were painted with deliberate crudity in discordant colours.
Guston meant his paintings to be interpreted in the light of the political violence surrounding the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. He depicted racism, anti-Semitism, fascism and American identity.
Guston imagined himself living with the Klan, wondering: ‘What would it be like to be evil? To plan and plot.’ Hooded figures are shown smoking, drinking and driving around town.
Guston withdrew from the New York art scene to work on these figurative paintings until his death in June 1980, aged 66.
Shockingly, a travelling retrospective of his work, due to have been exhibited at Tate Modern in London, was cancelled last September.
‘We are postponing the Philip Guston Now exhibition until a time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the centre of Philip Guston’s work can be more clearly interpreted,’ was the joint statement that came from the four host museums: Tate Modern; National Gallery of Art, Washington; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
In light of Guston’s lifelong fight against racial injustice, the decision to cancel him was patronising and outrageous. Henry Sanderson, Guildford, Surrey.
QUESTION If all the solid material of the Earth were smoothed out into a sphere, how deep would the water be over the whole planet?
FOR simplicity, assume the Earth is a regular sphere with a radius of 6,371 kilometres. In reality, it is an oblate spheroid – a sphere squashed from the top so the circumference around the poles is less than that around the equator. The combined volume of the world’s water has been estimated at 1,386,000,000 cubic kilometres.
Using the formula for the surface area of a sphere, the idealised spherical Earth is 510,064,471 km2. Dividing these values yields a 2.7km-deep global ocean covering a perfectly flat, spherical Earth. J. B. Allen, Morecambe, Lancs.
QUESTION How many TV channels were there in East Germany?
THE former East Germany (GDR) began broadcasting TV programmes on December 21, 1952, in honour of Joseph Stalin’s official birthday. The first show was the state news programme, Aktuelle Kamera (Current Camera), which ran until 1990. A second state channel was added in 1968 and colour broadcasts began the following year.
However, the East German government was powerless to stop its citizens from pointing their aerials towards West Germany to pick up external TV stations.
From 1952 to 1956, East German broadcasts were officially in a test phase. It wasn’t until January 3, 1956, that the national Deutscher
Fernsehfunk (DFF) began fulltime transmission. It was not called GDR television because it was intended to be an all-German service. However, despite there being high-power transmitters in border areas, it did not penetrate the whole of West Germany.
The government finally accepted defeat and DFF was renamed Fernsehen der DDR (Television of the GDR) in 1972.
A typical programme was Der Schwarze Kanal (The Black Channel), in which communist propagandist Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler provided commentary on West German TV programmes.
East Germany’s TV was subject to heavy censorship, but West German TV was widely available to most of its population – except for the far northeast and southeast, which were cruelly dubbed Valley of the Clueless.
In 1986, the ban on West German TV was lifted and antennae were legalised. Fernsehen der DDR was dissolved in 1991 following the reunification of Germany.
Pat Smith, Truro, Cornwall.
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