With its first stop at the Boston MFA, it’s an intelligent look at the painter’s career, except for the fainting-couch treatment of race.
Philip Guston Now has risen from limbo — after likely appeasement of protesters, excision of who knows what, and augmented by interpretation, all having to do with race in Boston, where he never lived — to have what I thought was a good run at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston during the summer. The big exhibition, a retrospective of the career of the eccentric, erratic Guston (1913–80), goes next to the Houston MFA and the National Gallery in Washington before it ends at Tate Modern in London.
It’s organized by all four prestigious museums and revisits — and celebrates — Guston, among our big-beast artists, at least in terms of ink and chatter spilled. In my time as a student and young curator, Guston, along with Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp, were the three most inspiring dead artists, at least among art students.
I can understand Cornell as a beacon but not Guston, a second-rate Abstract Expressionist and, in the early ’70s, painter of stout, cartoon Ku Klux Klan figures driving old cars, smoking cigars, and looking dopey and kooky. One KKK figure, in Bad Habits from 1970, whips himself. In The Studio from 1969, a KKK figure, which the wall label says is Guston, paints a self-portrait. They’re striking, to say the least.
Guston’s KKK pictures were to be part of the exhibition. Controversially, the four museums postponed the exhibition, which was supposed to open in 2020, given the race riots that year. The four directors announced that they were “postponing the exhibition until a time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice at the center of Philip Guston’s work can be more clearly interpreted.”
The postponement was booed, the directors pelted with garbage, and public letters, one signed by 2,000 artists, sent. I think there were camps among the booers, pelters, and stamp buyers. A lot of people want to draw museums into politics, and the BLM riots were supremely political and partisan as well as pure grift. There might as well be a new political party called the Reckoners as a forum for those pushing vengeance, blood libel, and payback.
There’s a big contingent of libertarians among artists and dealers. “Let the public decide,” they felt. I sympathized, though neither an artist nor a dealer nor particularly libertarian. “Just do it” was closer to my mark, in part because the directorial phrase “can be more clearly interpreted” means a massaging and equivocation that would amount to acres of ass-covering. And visitors need to be empowered to make their own judgments. The catalogue, which is good, was done. In 2020, I asked the National Gallery if the book was to be trashed and rewritten. I was told no.
So, the MFA finally did it. Guston, born Phillip Goldstein in Montreal, moved with his family — his parents were probably Polish Jews — to Los Angeles in 1922. In the early 1930s, he becomes an artist. The beginning of the exhibition examines his work as a muralist and points to Picasso, Max Beckmann, and Giorgio de Chirico as inspirations. The art’s neither very good nor bad.
The high point is If This Be Not I from 1945. It’s a startlingly good painting, indebted to Beckmann but more fluid. It’s a nocturne, and Modernist nocturnes are so understudied. He’s also a good composer. I would call the figures in this painting child “Punchinellos,” not the short, fat, grotesque figures of Italian rococo comedy but Punchinello as a child with possibility. In Batman, even the Joker, even the Penguin, were once young. In Guston’s picture, many look at us, half disguised, probing our space, one moving toward us, one moving back.
Guston taught art in Des Moines and St. Louis during the war. He was painting in a representational, muralist style then, with big, turbulent figures. I call it Cornpone Baroque, similar to the American Regionalists, especially Thomas Hart Benton. Benton’s most famous student, Jackson Pollock, was one of Guston’s best friends.
Guston’s Abstract Expressionist work in the ’50s isn’t good. Lots of artists, among them Willem de Kooning, another of Guston’s buddies, went from being muralists to Surrealists to Abstract Expressionists. There’s a big gallery of Guston’s Abstract Expressionist work. Like de Kooning, Guston is never without at least a hint of figures huddled together or a landscape. Some paintings, like Reverse from 1965 and Painter from 1959, are not only awful but big and awful.
Red Painting from 1947 and The Tormentors from 1950 are fantastic. They’re Holocaust pictures. Guston is one of the few American artists to tackle the Holocaust. He knew as much as any assiduous newspaper reader what happened, or was happening, in Germany and Poland and learned to his horror how American news fudged the story. There’s a small section in the show about the direct, horrifying reporting on the Holocaust by Joseph Pulitzer, editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Guston followed it. He studied the Holocaust. Guston Now doesn’t do much with it. Holocaust or no, Guston’s work in the ’50s and ’60s can be splotchy. Alfred Leslie, Franz Kline, Helen Frankenthaler he ain’t.
When Marlborough Gallery, Guston’s dealer, showed his KKK paintings in 1970, they were panned not because of the subject but because the artist, though no star, had until then been a faithful Abstract Expressionist. “I got sick and tired of all that Purity,” Guston said. “I wanted to tell stories.” Abstract Expressionism was about paint, and flinging it, or, if Barnett Newman’s there, zipping it. Narrative was banned. At Guston’s Marlborough opening, his friend de Kooning told him, “You know what your real subject is . . . it’s about freedom, to be free, an artist’s first duty.”
The KKK figure pictures are displayed in a gallery within a gallery. Visitors are told they don’t have to enter, which is silly. They’re adults. There’s a room for reflection, and visitors are warned of upsetment. The exhibition needs a reality-based rather than fantasy-based explanation of what the Klan was and is. Guston said he saw a KKK rally in Los Angeles in 1931, which horrified him and stayed with him for the rest of his life. I think visitors to the show need a good look at the KKK in Southern California when Guston was there. The Klan in the ’60s? What was it? What is it now? The show seems to assume that the Red Line, the branch of the T that heads to Boston’s southern suburbs, is lined with Klansmen.
Seeing the KKK paintings, I think they’re goofy. He’s proposing that racism was as ubiquitous as the comics, and he was probably right. Guston’s small pictures include clocks, shoes, chairs, lightbulbs, bricks, and lima-bean-shaped heads. His palette’s red, pink, grey, ochre, and white. These faux little clunkers just don’t do anything for me.
The time lines in the exhibition are awful. The curators of the show are mostly art historians, and the MFA curator, Ethan Lasser, was my intern, but I think all of them need to remember that “art historian” includes the word “historian” for a reason. We write history, and that requires disinterest and empathy for the dead, and doesn’t mean picking and choosing to invent the story you want.
The exhibition presents the acquittal of the New York cops who shot Amadou Diallo in 1999, a synagogue bombing in California in 1999, the Trayvon Martin shooting in 2012, the riot in Charlottesville in 2017, the fake-news racial taunts at the MFA in 2019, and the riot at the Capitol in 2021 as the timeline of six pivotal events defining the last generation. It proposes one led to another and that these were transformative. They have little to do with each other, aside from occurring on our planet. The 2019 Helen Y. Davis Leadership Academy fake racial incident at the MFA was abetted by the MFA’s director, who threw his staff under the bus.
I thought Guston Now ended on high points. Flame and Talking, both from 1979, show Guston painting his best things at the end of his life and at a time — the late ’70s — when many critics, academics, and even artists thought American painting was dying. These and other big, late Gustons in the show are indeed very beautifully painted, and I can see why so many young painters found his work compelling. I enjoyed the filmed interview with the curators, too. The time lines aside, the exhibition is coherent and interpretation is good. I would have ditched the fainting-couch treatment of the KKK pictures, but the curators conceived an intelligent show.
The catalogue is very good, too. Harry Cooper, the modern-art curator at the National Gallery, is the main essayist. There are a dozen or so one-page essays by artists. Glenn Ligon’s and Dana Schutz’s are two of the best. Was the two-year postponement for Guston Now necessary? The National Gallery, which seemed to get the blame, lost credibility. I thought then that it was, among the four museums, the one that pushed for it. Now, I think it was the MFA in Boston. The place has so many internal problems coming from lousy leadership that it didn’t want to risk a big race controversy in 2020.
