I don’t think the world’s crying for another Philip Guston retrospective. Guston (1913–1980) is the very last gasp of the post-war New York School, a second-tier abstract expressionist who changed styles in the 1960s. He and Jackson Pollock studied together in the 1930s. It’s an unusual coincidence that he and Pollock, one of founding fathers of this style, are both in the news, and so many years after they left us. A nice Pollock painting sold earlier this week at Christie’s for $13 million, controversially and wrongly sold by the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse to buy work by artists of color and women.
Last week, the National Gallery, Tate Modern, the Houston MFA, and the Boston MFA said they’d postpone their Guston retrospective, scheduled to open in the spring. The exhibition could be postponed, we’re told, until 2024.
Their reason? Guston did a series of paintings with little Ku Klux Klan figures in them. He painted them during the 1960s as cartoon characters suggesting the simple-mindedness of even the most brutish violence. The four museums felt that in these tempestuous times, unforeseen when the curators developed the objects list and wrote the catalogue, the show needed more work. This might involve a separate, addendum book and extensive programming. The museums fear that people will be triggered or join the KKK, which doesn’t exist.
Guston is a very good painter but not worth the Sturm und Drang. I think his cartoon figures, which he developed after his career as a strict abstractionist deflated, appealed to a market that saw itself as edgy but, in reality, liked to play it safe. Guston painted precisely for that market. He played with well-tested looks. He merged the dreamy weirdness of abstract expressionist painting — we come back to Pollock — with pop-art kitsch à la Claes Oldenburg or Roy Lichtenstein, using the amalgam to promote a civil-rights message — KKK bad — that no one could dispute.
I look at art first and foremost in terms of aesthetics. That’s where art lives. Painting that’s deliberately clumsy doesn’t appeal to me. It’s play-acting dumb. Much as Pollock found a shtick through pouring paint on a canvas lying on a floor, Guston uses the visual language of comic strips. The pictures are ugly.
Guston was Jewish, and Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem was published in 1964. He started the Klan pictures not long after that. There, Arendt launched the term “banality of evil.” Eichmann, she said, was complacent, unintelligent, even a dope, and a joiner. Lots of people, she felt, will go along for the ride, destination horrible.
Insofar as these paintings are concerned, I think that’s it. I would have shown them with a contextual wall panel. No one would have died.
In the 1980s and 1990s, young painters admired Guston for his technique, color, and jokiness. He helped introduce the trend in art toward gigantism, too. As you might guess, I think he’s overrated. Still, Harry Cooper, the curator of the show, is brilliant. I’d like to see his take on Guston. The catalogue has articles by the artist Glenn Ligon, the Harvard scholar Jennifer Roberts, and many other smart and articulate people.
Scholars and critics think the four museums are run by cowards, and, worse, that the directors and trustees think their audience is too stupid to make its own judgment, and, worse still, that in trying to seem anti-racist, the directors show how racist they are. An open letter from artists — you’re no one unless you’re signing an open letter these days — says the decision-makers at the four museums show “an apparent feeling of powerlessness” as they struggle to interpret Guston, blinkered as they are by . . . guess what . . . white supremacy. The museums must hope that the current angst disappears. They’re merely playing for time, and, by the way, the artists think this present moment won’t disappear, God help us.
Others have said, and this comforts me, that Guston’s work — the KKK pictures are 50 years old — have to be understood in their historical context, both in Guston’s history as a Jewish immigrant escaping pogroms and the civil-rights era in the 1960s and 1970s.
Is historical context back in style? I hope so. It’s heartening to see more artists, scholars, and critics sickened by the culture of fear and repudiation strangling creativity that isn’t PC. I’m certain the scholars in the show will say the Proud Boys are today’s KKK, but they’re wrong.
Today, the Cancel Culture is the Ku Klux Klan, this time with college degrees. The KKK today is Antifa. They’ll lynch people they don’t like professionally, or they’ll smother their voices and opinions on campus, but that’s just for starters. Shouting down a conservative speaker, calling a distinguished professor a racist, and punishing students for their beliefs were shocking a few years ago. Now, they’re commonplace. They’re acceptable. They’re banal.
So who pulled the plug? It’s not the English. They’re angry the show was postponed since it leaves a big hole in the Tate Modern’s schedule, and, besides, they think the U.S. is run by the KKK anyway. The Houston MFA? I don’t think so. Alison Greene, the curator responsible for the show there, and Gary Tinterow, the director, have seen the objects list a hundred times. Greene knows Guston’s work thoroughly. If they saw trouble on the horizon, they wouldn’t have taken the show. They’re old-school, anyway. They cleave to the line.
The MFA in Boston? The director’s Canadian, and Canada’s Eleventh Commandment is “thou shalt not give offense to anyone, ever.” That said, even if the MFA got Yukon foot freeze over the show, the other three wouldn’t have agreed to postpone it and suffer the wrath they had to know would descend on them. The MFA in Boston isn’t important enough to sink this ship. The other three would have told the MFA to drop out. Then they’d find another partner.
That leaves the National Gallery in D.C. They’re the ones defending the postponement. The others, except the Brits, are quiet. Darren Walker, a trustee of the National Gallery and the president of the Ford Foundation, is the only trustee from the four museums to say anything in public. He said it would be “tone deaf” to open the exhibition on schedule without additional, deep contextualization. He later tweeted an apology. He was mortified at having insulted deaf people. “My use of this phrase as a pejorative was insensitive and undermines our intent to advance justice and inclusion” for the disabled, he said.
There must have been a full moon that day. Walker heads the Ford Foundation. He’s at the tippity top of America’s philanthropic and social establishment. Are we really in a place where we spend our days apologizing for everything?
I admire Darren Walker. He’s a distinguished, principled leader. I thought it was a mistake to put him on the National Gallery board. He has too many agendas and has too much power. The Ford Foundation is on a massive social-justice-warrior kick. It’s Walker’s vision at work and his passion. The National Gallery, though, is an art museum, period. If he was the instigator, then he’s made a hot mess.
What to do? I see two options. In times like these, I wish more people were willing to say “oops.” My advice is this. Say, “Golly, one of our whiz curators is writing a booklet on Guston and KKK imagery, and writing it fast.” Give it away for free in the exhibition. Reinstate the original schedule. Do it now before people get angrier than they are. Say you’re sorry and call it a teachable moment.
I worked for a high school for ten years. Teachable moments soothed all sorts of missteps and miseries. Judging from the world today, some fresh hell, or several, will supplant this sad, scary, silly episode by the end of the week.
There’s another alternative, a hardball one. I’d suggest that the instigators of the artist open letter repackage it and send it not to the four museums doing the Guston show but to the lenders. There are probably no more than a hundred. Postponing the show means renegotiating the loans, and that means the collectors, private and institutional, need to agree to new dates. “We won’t accommodate you” is a perfectly good, and dispositive, way for owners of Guston’s work to make the point that fear eats the soul. That was, after all, Guston’s message: Fear of difference, fear of controversy, and fear of change, each in its own way, keep people from doing the right thing.
Without the loan extensions, the four museums are stuck with the original schedule. To the lenders, rouse your inner Nancy Reagan and just say no. It’s perfectly good pushback and enlists the arts community in the most effective way to put the Guston show back on track.
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National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. (Frank Schulenburg/via Wikimedia/CC BY-SA 4.0)
The 1619 Project appeared in the New York Times, but it’s a D.C. story, too. I think Nikole Hannah-Jones, who edited it, is a hateful, angry person. She’s not smart, either. She can’t reconcile nuanced, contradictory historical events and opinions. There aren’t enough brain cells in her henna-rinsed head. That’s why she’s insisting the country was inspired by slavery and racism. Matthew Desmond, who wrote an essay contending that capitalism is racist, is an idiot.
Other than that, I liked some of the essays. It won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary, not news reporting, and I see it as an event rather than good history. Teachers using it as history need their supervisors, school boards, and parents to tell them it’s opinion and, in part, fiction. For goodness’ sake, it’s from the New York Times.
What surprised me most when I read the piece, and I thought some of it was good, was the back page of the magazine. It was a full-page statement by Lonnie Bunch, the head of the Smithsonian Institution. “Let us use history to inspire us to push a country forward,” he wrote, “to help us believe all things are possible and to demand a country lives up to its ideals.” It wasn’t a paid ad — there were ads in the magazine — but comped in return for the help the Smithsonian gave to Hannah-Jones.
It’s a bit awkward. Would “a country” mean “our country,” the detective in me asks? If so, the only amendment I would have suggested is noting that the U.S. is the only place on earth where it’s possible, and encouraged, to “believe all things are possible” and to demand that its civic culture lives up to its ideals.
I interviewed Bunch last year. I admire him. He’s an impressive leader. I asked him how the Smithsonian was involved in the 1619 Project. He said the Smithsonian lent historians to advise the project. What Hannah-Jones did with the advice, he said, wasn’t something the Smithsonian could control. Her argument that slavery forged the United States, he said, was her take, not that of anyone at the Smithsonian, though I wonder if that’s the case now.
I looked at the website of the Museum of African American History and Culture, the new museum. I love the place. Bunch was the director who built it from scratch. There’s a page called “Talking About Race” that takes us to a section called “Being Antiracist.” It’s meant for classroom use. I suppose teachers are using it in schools.
“Talking About Race” wanders well beyond what I think the museum should do. The charlatan and outrage pimp Ibram X. Kendi promotes his book. In a Ted Talk, Verna Myers talks about police shootings as today’s parallel for KKK-era lynchings. She doesn’t address black-on-black urban shootings, which kill thousands of innocent men, women, and children. That’s the real tragedy of African-American life today, and it’s airbrushed by the museum. In most American cities, it’s the year’s big news story, along with Black Lives Matters–inspired riots.
The museum’s education page is slathered with material on white privilege, unconscious bias, safe spaces, and the perversion of every aspect of American life with racial anxiety. There are good videos on abuse of power and the history of slavery. Lonnie Bunch speaks compellingly in another video. It links to OneTilt, a “diversity training company,” and I wish the museum would remove this. The diversity, equity, and inclusion business is a big one now, and like any new-fad business, it’s filled with hucksters. I’d prefer not to see a federally funded museum promote it.
I’d rather see the museum focus its education department on promoting and highlighting the history of African Americans. That, according to its website, is the mission of the place.
Instead, it’s jumping into teaching based on critical race theory, and that’s supposed to be verboten in the federal government now, according to a new executive order from President Trump, issued by the Office of Management and Budget. The Smithsonian reports to the Department of the Interior. Is anybody there watching the store?
