Philip Guston: Are his 1960s Klan paintings too provocative for 2020?
Four leading art museums recently made “a terrible mistake,” said Sebastian Smee in The Washington Post. During a year when museum exhibitions have been rare, the National Gallery of Art in Washington and three partnering institutions announced that a planned retrospective of painter Philip Guston would be postponed until 2024, not because of Covid, but to display the work at a time when it can be, in their words, “more clearly interpreted.” What they don’t mention is that Guston (1913–1980), a Montreal-born,
Los Angeles–raised son of Jewish immigrants, is today most famous for his bitterly comic, cartoon-inspired 1960s paintings of the Ku Klux Klan. Guston despised the Klan; of that there’s no question. “But the best kind of art always presents some kind of problem,” and the museums’ suggestion that art instead must deliver an unambiguous message recalls Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany. Of course these museums don’t favor state censorship, but “we are in the middle of a culture war. It is not a good time for institutions to make false moves.”
If the aim was to head off controversy, the decision failed, said Jerry Saltz in NYMag. com. “Almost instantaneously,” the art world united in loudly defending Guston and denouncing censorship. A letter requesting reinstatement of the exhibition garnered more than 1,000 signatories, including renowned black artists Martin Puryear, Adrian Piper, and Mickalene Thomas. But the argument for postponement is not an argument for appeasing philistines and snowflakes. If institutions are to meet the moment created by the protests that erupted after the police killing of George Floyd, they can’t have four white curators (backed by largely white boards of directors) displaying images of white violence against black people and insisting that it’s great art. As critic Aruna D’Souza has said, “At this point, more than ever, it’s important not to tell black audiences what they should be looking at, but asking them what they want to see.” The question will be whether museum leadership truly changes by 2024.
In the meantime, the four museums “may have doomed the exhibition, when it lands, to being a referendum on the political acceptability of the Klan images,” said Robert Armstrong in the Financial Times. Though that will unfairly diminish Guston’s work, you have to sympathize with the stallers. “Great art is dangerous and unstable”; it elicits responses that can’t be predicted, which is why museums are right to be scared of a Guston show. Their fear, in fact, points to a silver lining in this latest art world brawl: “At a time when outrage has turned into a commodity, we can still be unsettled by a painting.”