Philip Guston's attack on KKK racism via his art.

Philip Goldstein Guston (1913-80)’s Ukrainian Jewish parents es­cap­ed pog­r­om violence so they moved to Canada from Odessa. Philip was born in Mon­t­real then moved with his family to Los Angeles as a child. His parents had been brutally aware of Fascistic anti-Semitism at home, and Philip became aware of the regular Ku Klux Klan actions against Jews and blacks across California. Per­haps due to the earlier persecut­ion, Philip’s father tragically hanged himself.

The Struggle Against Terror, mural, 1934-5 (top image)

Philip Guston, Reuben Kadish and Jules Langsner 

Morelia, Mexico

In 1934 Guston went to Mexico with his artist friend Reuben Kadish & poet friend Jules Langsner where they were given space in Emperor Max­imilian’s former summer palace. These artists created the impressive The  Struggle Against Terror (1934-5), an anti-Fascist and pro-worker mural. The 3 colleagues, all Jewish sons of Eu­r­opean parents, were clearly sen­sitive to racist pol­icies in the USA and faced Red-baiting, witch-hunting and anti-Union activities of the KKK in response. In any case, criticism of the Catholic Church led to the mural being hidden away in the early 1940s. 

Celebrated mainly for his abstract art, Philip Guston later decided to move into figurative painting that included the Ku Klux Klan motif. In this post, I am focusing solely on the later, anti-Fascist images of this pol­itically-engaged artist.

Guston died in 1980 at 66. Below are some of the works to be shown .. well after his death.

 

The Studio, 1969

Private collection

Edge of Town, 1969

New York Times

Riding Around, 1969, 

The Guardian

Now let me cite the papers Guardian and NY Times that told the story of 4 important art instit­utions (Nat Gallery of Art Washington; Mus­eum of Fine Arts Houston; Museum of Fine Arts Boston; Tate Lon­don). They were to host the much awaited travelling exhib­ition in 2020: Philip Guston Now. And giv­en the surging racial jus­tice pro­tests in the USA this year, the c125 paintings and 70 draw­ings were going to be exhibited in the perfect year for depicting rac­ism.

The decision to postpone the Guston show, which except for coronavirus would have begun earlier this year, caused conflict on both sides of the art world. So the retrospective was post­poned, not for 3 months but for 4 years!! The four galleries said they’d wait until the pow­er­ful message of social and racial jus­tice at the centre of Gus­t­on’s work could be more clearly under­stood. There was, they said, a risk that Guston’s messages could be misint­erp­reted and the resulting response could over­sh­adow the totality of his le­gacy. And the 4 museums wanted to avoid painful experiences that the imagery could cause for viewers in 2020.

The directors recognised that the world was very different from what it had been in 2015, when they started the Guston project. The works that most ignited their concern were the white-hooded Ku Klux Klan figures. These white-hooded figures were images that the justice-focused, Jewish and left-wing artist had repeated from the early 1930s to his death. The directors felt it was necessary to reframe their program­ming, to step back and bring in new perspectives to shape how they pres­en­t­ed Guston’s work to the public. That process will take time: until 2024.

 

Dawn, 1970, 

Credit

 

Courtroom, 1970, 

The Met

Cornered, 1971, 

Tate

Art Daily reminded readers that art museums have, in the last three years, increasingly found themselves on the defen­sive for showing works that depicted racial violence. Some observers have protested the showing of work considered traum­at­is­ing to communities sc­arred by that violence. Some work was re­moved from exhibitions. One painting was considered so sin­is­t­er by the Ku Klux Klan that it was shot at and destroyed by Klan supporters. 

But art academics told the Guardian that Guston’s work was exactly the kind of art that still needs to be discussed today. Guston’s work was deep; he had the foresight to see things as they were happening and his im­ages are as poignant now as they had ever been. Art was not sup­posed to be a pretty picture; it was actually a reflect­ion. So an exhibition org­an­is­ed several years ago, no mat­t­er how intell­ig­ent, must be recon­sid­ered in light of what has ch­anged. Thus the four museums seemed tone-deaf to what is happening in public dis­course in 2020. 

Guston’s daughter, Musa Mayer (b1943), said that she was saddened by the decision from the museums to postpone the exhibition. Her fat­h­er had dared to unveil white culpability, the shared role in all­owing the racist terror that he had wit­nessed since boyhood. Her father had made a body of work that sh­ocked the art world; he had violated the canon of what a noted abst­ract artist should be painting, at a time of doctrinaire art criticism! Furthermore he dared to hold a mirror to White Amer­ica, exposing the Banality of Evil and the systemic rac­ism the US was still struggling to confront today. In these works, car­toonish hooded figures evoked the Ku Klux Klan. They planned, plotted and rode around in cars smoking cigars. The viewer never saw their acts of hatred, never knew what was in their minds. But it was clear that they were us. Our denial, our conceal­ment. 

Musa believed this should be a time of reckoning & dialogue. The danger was not in looking at her father’s work, but in looking away.

Conclusion 

Guston always considered his own KKK art to be about the pervasive­ness of evil and white supremacy. A curator at the Modern Art Mus­eum Fort Worth in Texas, who organised their Guston survey in 2003, concluded the case well: If the goal of the 2020 exhibition was to survey the late artist’s career in a contemporary context, it is ironic that if ever there was a poignant time to have these Guston images shown, it would be now!