Philip Guston: Why not now?

Philip Guston, American, 1913-1980, Stationary Figure, (Detail), 1973, Oil on canvas

by Irina Sheynfeld

In the summer of 2020, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC postponed the Philip Guston (1913-1980) retrospective Philip Guston Now. The show had been planned by the museum curators for at least five years and was supposed to include approximately 125 paintings and 70 drawings from public and private collections. The retrospective was due to open on July 3rd of the last year. However, in a joint statement, all four museums involved (National Gallery of Art, Tate Modern, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) announced that it would be delayed until “a time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Guston’s work can be more clearly interpreted”. So as of now, the retrospective will not occur until 2024 or maybe, some sources say, 2022. Why is this? And what are we waiting for in the intervening years that will allow us to interpret things more clearly than now?

When the National Gallery of Art’s new director, Keywin Feldman, discussed her decision to delay the exhibition with the host of the Hyperallergic podcast, Harg Vartanian, she gave three main reasons: Guston, a white artist, appropriated images of black trauma, the show needs to be more than about Guston. Only white curators were involved in the planning of this show, and they alone cannot be responsible for making such a strong commentary on race. And finally, because the audience needs to have a voice. We cannot ignore this moment in history. We have to demonstrate our awareness of the need for racial justice.

Apparently, these reasons didn’t make much sense to a large contingency of the art world, which pushed back against the decision. When Barry Schwabsky and Aindrea Emelife spoke with the host of The Week in Art podcast, Ben Luke, on October 16, 2020, both curators were highly critical of the museums’ decision to delay Guston’s very timely exhibition. Schwabsky wrote an open letter of protest, which was published in Brooklyn Rail and signed by over 2,600 people (at the time of this writing), including many prominent figures from the art world, such as Ellen Gallagher, Julie Mehretu, Isaac Julien, Pope L., Julie Reiss, and Adrian Piper. The letter states that the museums’ decision is nothing short of censorship; it is also cowardly and self-serving:

The people who run our great institutions do not want trouble. They fear controversy. They lack faith in the intelligence of their audience. And they realize that to remind museumgoers of white supremacy today is not only to speak to them about the past, or events somewhere else. It is also to raise uncomfortable questions about museums themselves—about their class and racial foundations.[1]

The letter demands that Philip Guston Now happens now and not later, for museums must do their job and present this art as it is to the public without patronizing or second-guessing its reaction. In her article for The Guardian “Philip Guston's KKK Images Force Us to Stare Evil in the Face – We Need Art like This,” published in September of 2020, the art historian Emelife writes that as a black female curator she believes in the power of change and that change means difficult conversations. “Postponing this discussion … may avoid some discomfort in the short term, but it’s akin to putting a plaster on a wound. Band-Aids don’t fix bullet holes; society will never heal unless there is a process of truth and reconciliation.”

The irony of canceling Guston’s retrospective for the reason that some of his paintings may be misinterpreted as racist is hard to ignore. It is worth remembering that the artist’s parents arrived in The United States at the beginning of the twentieth century after escaping rampant antisemitism and pogroms in Imperial Russia. Growing up in Los Angeles in the 1920s, Guston witnessed KKK marches and cross burnings in the lawns of his neighbors. In protest, eighteen-year-old Guston together with his friend Reuben Kadish (1913-1992), painted anti-fascist, anti-racist murals, some of which were vandalized by LA police, who were at the time fighting leftist elements. Kadish and Guston, “watched in horror as sympathetic depictions of black Americans they and their cohort had painted on the Reed Club panels were bashed with lead pipes and rifle butts; Guston later recalled the eyes and genitals being pierced by bullets.”[2]

The images of towering, hooded monsters figure prominently in the artist’s work from that period, such as Conspirators (1930-1932). The painting is now lost, but the preparatory sketch, Drawing for Conspirators, 1930, can be seen in the Whitney Museum of American Art. In the drawing, a group of medieval apparitions is standing in front of the brick prison wall. A lugubrious, large figure is sitting in the foreground holding a rope in his hands as if facing in disbelief his own dark deeds. The body of an African American is visible in the background, hanged from a dead tree; it is replacing the body of the crucified Christ. There is a mood of foreboding, pain, and dark enigma  – silence binds hooded figures in frozen immobility, and incomprehension of evil is emanating from the drawing.

In the last decade of his life, Guston underwent his last and most painful metamorphosis, returning from abstract expressionism – for which he is most well known – to figuration. (Incidentally, Kafka was one of his favorite writers.) When his late work, which once again included the hooded figures, was first presented to the public at the Marlborough Gallery in New York City in 1970, most critics despised it, but not because it was misinterpreted as racist. In a 1970 article, “A Mandarin Pretending To Be A Stumblebum,” published in the Sunday Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times, Hilton Kramer wrote a highly critical response to Guston’s retrospective. However, Kramer was mostly concerned with Guston’s lack of originality, his being out of touch with the contemporary art world, as well as pretentiousness, and conventionality. “What these new pictures by Mr. Guston offer us, with their “funny” Ku Klux Klan figures, their “innocent” drawing, and their “childlike” rediscovery of the world, is the artistic equivalent of a “pseudo‐event.” The figures themselves did not draw that much attention at the time; Kramer only claims that Saul Steinberg had been to this brave new world of comics and satire before Guston discovered it and had done a better job of it. 

Even the artist's closest friend, the composer Morton Feldman (1926-1987) was shocked when he first saw canvases for the Marlborough show. Feldman never saw Guston again until the artist’s death in 1980. We can judge how deeply both men were wounded by this break, since Guston wrote that Morty to him was what Theo was to Van Gogh. In Guston’s memory, Feldman wrote a musical elegy, For Philip Guston, and, following Guston’s wishes, read Kaddish at his funeral. Feldman understood and supported Guston throughout his long career; he owned many of his abstract expressionistic canvases, including Attar (1953). He often remarked how he loved the poetry of the enchanted land that the artist created in his large pink and grey canvases from the fifties. Once, Feldman remarked that Guston’s paintings “suggest an ancient Hebrew metaphor: God exists but is turned away from us.” But Feldman was ambivalent about the artist’s return to figuration. “It is such a beautiful land you created,” he said, referring to his earlier, abstract work. “How can you leave it?”[3] So, like many other critics, Feldman disliked Guston’s late figurative work – but not for the reasons it became controversial in the summer of 2020.

 Since it was first revealed to the world, the artist’s late work has often been reexamined and reinterpreted. As time went by, the combination of high and low art became more common, and the introduction of comics language into the world of painting became an accepted norm. Guston’s canvases from the seventies began to be seen not as an aberration but as the fruit of a long and productive career. Following Guston’s request, in 1980 the San Francisco Museum of Art arranged the paintings in his retrospective in reverse chronological order, so that the first canvases that viewers saw were the artist’s late figurative work. In his article from that time, “Metamorphosis: The Art of Philip Guston,” in The Threepenny Review, Ralph Toucatt argues that the artist’s return to representation reflected his desire to understand art’s ability to deal with evil. 

Interestingly, in his 2011 article, “Philip Guston's Return to Figuration and the ‘1930s Renaissance’ of 1960,” from The Art Bulletin, Robert Slifkin calls Guston’s contemporary detractors too literal and out of touch for misinterpreting “acts of fiction” for political commentary. Like Toucatt, Slifkin argues that Guston’s cartoonish, playful and crude imagery “shocked and incensed many of his friends and supporters.” Slifkin further maintains that the late figurative works signify Guston’s dismay at artistic impotence in the face of “the war, what was happening in America, the brutality of the world.” Slifkin notes that to see his Marlborough paintings as simple political commentaries or as biographical references to Guston’s own experience of the Klan as a child in Los Angeles would be an oversimplification. Figuration, being associated with the social realism of the communist block variety, as opposed to abstraction, as an adapted banner of Western individuality, has a long history of negative connotations in post-war American culture. In other words, Slifkin maintains, Guston’s return to figuration was seen by many of his contemporaries as a step back, and almost a betrayal of the modernist values and progress. Nevertheless, Slifkin remained critical of Guston’s detractors. 

Yet this past summer, after Philip Guston Now was canceled by the National Gallery of Art, Slifkin, like so many others, took a very different position on Guston’s fight for freedom, and hooded figures somehow rose to center stage in roles they never deserved or were intended to have. Slifkin calls the artist’s use of the hooded figures “insensitive and potentially offensive.” He goes further, descending into the popular vernacular of our day: “it seems important to examine the ways in which these works represent the evil of white supremacy not only in its most overt and hateful manifestations, such as the Klan but also in its more covert and sanctioned ones, behind the veil of white privilege.”

My guess is that Guston’s parents didn’t feel all that privileged or entitled when they fled programs of the Old World to find white hoods burning crosses in the new one. Perhaps neither did Guston when “red squads” of LA police destroyed his murals that didn’t fit the right-wing dogma of that time. Perhaps, when strapping paintings down to a Procrustean bed, forcing them to fit the popular tenets of the day, one not only strips them of their necessary complexity but also deprives the public of a meaningful dialog. In his article “Now You See Me,” published in Artforum in January of this year, Dan Nadel writes that it was a mistake to postpone the retrospective Philip Guston Now:

To flatten Guston’s Jewishness and to disallow his use of historically and ideologically loaded symbols is to preclude the nuance necessary for thoughtful interpretation. Just as Guston’s Jewishness matters, so does the fact that his Klan paintings are not themselves racist or anti-racist statements. They are paintings of ambiguity, pain, humor, terror, love, and confession. Actions such as the postponement perpetuate bad-faith readings of artworks and discourage the conversation and thinking that art might engender.

Photo Credit: © Iris Krasnopolsky, 2021

FOOTNOTES

[1] Barry Schwabsky, “Open Letter: On Philip Guston Now,” The Brooklyn Rail, accessed March 13, 2021, https://brooklynrail.org/projects/on-philip-guston-now/#signatures.

[2] Ellen G. Landau, "Double Consciousness in Mexico: How Philip Guston and Reuben Kadish Painted a Morelian Mural." American Art21, no. 1 (2007): 74-97. Accessed March 13, 2021. doi:10.1086/518295.

[3] Philip Guston in Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations, edited by Clark Coolidge, with an introduction by Dore Ashton, University of California Press, Berkley Los Angeles and London, 2011 p. 78

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kaywin Feldman, Director, National Gallery of Art Frances Morris, Director, Tate Modern Matthew Teitelbaum, Ann and Graham Gund Director, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Gary Tinterow, Director, The Margaret Alkek Williams Chair, The Museum of Fine Arts, Hous. “National Gallery of Art.” Philip Guston Now. Accessed March 13, 2021. https://www.nga.gov/press/exh/5235.html.

Kramer, Hilton. “A Mandarin Pretending To Be A Stumblebum.” The New York Times, October 25, 1970. https://www.nytimes.com/1970/10/25/archives/a-mandarin-pretending-to-be-a-stumblebum.html.

Nadel, Dan. “Dan Nadel on Philip Guston's Jewishness.” Dan Nadel on Philip Guston's Jewishness - Artforum International, January 1, 2021. https://www.artforum.com/print/202101/now-you-see-me-84660.

Schwabsky, Barry. “Open Letter: On Philip Guston Now.” The Brooklyn Rail. Accessed March 13, 2021. https://brooklynrail.org/projects/on-philip-guston-now/#signatures.

Slifkin, Robert. “Robert Slifkin on Philip Guston and White Privilege.” Robert Slifkin on Philip Guston and white privilege - Artforum International, January 1, 2021. https://www.artforum.com/print/202101/ugly-feelings-84662.

Storr, Robert. “World Enough and Time.” Essay. In Philip Guston - a Life Spent Painting. London: Laurence King Publishing, 2020.

Vartanian, Hrag. “National Gallery of Art Director Discusses the Decision to Delay the Philip Guston Exhibition.” Hyperallergic, November 5, 2020. https://hyperallergic.com/591929/national-gallery-of-art-director-discusses-the-decision-to-delay-the-philip-guston-exhibition/.