Philip Guston Then and Now

Controversy was a recurrent theme throughout my career, so I write about it from time to time. There are some parallels to the recent Philip Guston controversy and those that have swirled around Robert Colescott over the years, for similar reasons, so I have my own perspective.

One of my earliest childhood art memories is standing in front of a mural by Reuben Kadish (1913-1992) and Philip Guston (1913-1980). The mural was painted in 1936 when Guston was still Goldstein, at the City of Hope in Duarte, California, a non-sectarian Jewish institution, when it was still called the Los Angeles Tubercular Sanatorium. My father spent his career there beginning in 1953, and I enjoyed occasionally accompanying him to work.

I recall many visits to the small building that still houses the mural, originally a library, I think. Gazing at the plethora of Renaissance-inspired nude and semi-nude figures arrayed across the entryway I had no idea what they were about. Only later would Guston renounce figuration and become a seminal figure in the Abstract Expressionist movement. During the 1960s he renounced abstraction in favor of his signature cartoonish style. This was the style that earned him the most art world esteem, especially of younger generations of artists, as much for his audacious content as for his technical mastery.

In 2020, I was among those people eagerly anticipating Guston's long overdue retrospective four years in the making, Philip Guston Now. The show was scheduled to open soon when it was suddenly postponed. The decision was led by the newly installed director at one of the co-organizing institutions, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Kaywin Feldman is the first Jewish person and first woman to lead the institution. The directors of the Tate Modern, London, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, went along with her in a massive betrayal of their curators and the artist. The statement issued read in part that the show was postponed "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."

Instead of seizing the moment, especially as a Jewish person, to proudly embrace the exploration of the complexity of humanity's complicity in evil in Guston's work, grounded in his lived experience, and to support its deeply researched explication in the already-published catalog with essays by multiple authors, the museums caved. As is often the case with controversy--there was none. It was imagined and based on a misrepresentation of Guston's depictions of KKK hoods, which he had long used as a symbol for the culpability of white people, himself included.

Even if someone had complained, Guston's work is an important touchstone in light of contemporary concerns and is worth defending. It is especially on point against the backdrop of the frightening current resurrgence of white supremacy and antisemitic hatred. The opportunity was lost for the museum to demonstrate some relevance and morale authority.

The decision to postpone caused outrage in art world and the museums eventually dialed it back. A lot has been published about the whole debacle. Zoé Samudzi, a Zimbabwean-American scholar, wrote a righteous response to the revised and sanitized version of the exhibition that is now traveling. She interrogates Guston's meditations on the American Jewish relationship to anti-Black violence. I recommend reading it. (Zoé Samudzi, "Under the Hood", Jewish Currents, November 16, 2022, https://jewishcurrents.org/under-the-hood.)

Gazing at those City of Hope murals as a child with no one to interpret them for me, I learned an important lesson about how to look at art with an open heart and an open mind, and to draw my own conclusions. Five year old me decided they were worthy of my attention. Years later, working on on museum exhibitions, I hope I was able to maintain the important distinction between interpretation and contextualization, and to allow artists and the art works speak for themselves. Museums should not be in the business of robbing visitors of that experience.

The exhibition is currently on view at the National Gallery's East Building through August 27, 2023. To my knowledge over the course of the tour the exhibition has received positive reviews and no controversy.