The banal face of evil
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 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 had a powerful effect on Guston that was to influence his later work.
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.
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.
he 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 paintings until his death in 1980.
A travelling retrospective of his work due to have been exhibited at london’s tate Modern was cancelled last year.
‘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 his work can be more clearly interpreted,’ was the joint statement from the four host museums, tate Modern, the national Gallery of Art, Washington, the 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 km.
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 is 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 2.7 km deep global ocean covering a perfectly flat, spherical Earth.
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.
A second 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 to pick up western TV stations.
East Germany’s TV station was called the national Deutscher Fernsehfunk ( DFF) because it was intended to be an all-German service.
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.
in 1986, the ban on West German TV was lifted and antennae were legalised. Fernsehen der DDR was closed down in 1991 following the reunification of Germany.
Pat Smith, Truro, Cornwall.
QUESTION Was the driver of the car in which Eddie Cochran met his death charged with a road traffic offence?
FURTHER to the earlier answer, relating how the taxi driver was fined and banned for dangerous driving, police cadet David harman was one of the first officers to arrive at the scene of the crash.
the contents of the taxi, including Eddie Cochran’s Gretsch guitar, were held for a month at the local police station. it’s been suggested that’s how harman learned to play guitar.
he later achieved fame as Dave Dee of the 1960s pop band Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & tich, who had eight UK top tens. he went on to become a successful record executive.
Bob Bell, Croydon, Surrey. n IS THERE a question to which you want to know the answer? Or do you know the answer to a question here? Write to: Charles Legge, Answers To Correspondents, Daily Mail, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TT; or email charles.legge@dailymail.co.uk. A selection is published, but we’re unable to enter into individual correspondence.
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