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“This was the beginning. They are self-portraits. I perceive myself as being behind a hood,” recalled Philip Guston in 1978. “My attempt was really not to illustrate, to do pictures of the KKK, as I had done earlier. The idea of evil fascinated me, and rather like Isaac Babel who had joined the Cossacks, lived with them and written stories about them, I almost tried to imagine that I was living with the Klan. What would it be like to be evil?”

Philip Guston’s paintings reflect his lived experience. Guston was the artist-activist son of an immigrant Jewish family that fled “extermination in the Ukraine,” according to his daughter. His early anti-KKK paintings were actually destroyed by Klan members. Moreover, Guston has inspired generations of artists for his legendary conversion from painting the figure, to abstraction, and back to figuration — along with his embrace of cartooning.

His career took “dramatic turns,” writes Sarah Cowan of The Paris Review. “He was a WPA muralist in the thirties; by 1962, he was treated to a midcareer Guggenheim retrospective as a member of the New York School; later, when he broke with abstraction, he was ‘excommunicated’ (his word) by the art establishment. Today, he’s been canonized for his bravery as a freethinker with a moral compass.”

Nevertheless, 50 years after Guston debuted his Hood paintings, his work is under fire again. Four museums have postponed Guston’s touring retrospective exhibition, titled Philip Guston Now. The participating museums include the Tate; the National Gallery of Art, Washington; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. In a joint statement, they announced, “We are postponing the exhibition 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.”

The controversy has roiled the art world. Hundreds of artists have signed an open letter to demand that the retrospective proceed. Tate Modern Senior Curator Mark Godfrey observes on Instagram, “A message is sent out that the institutions ‘get’ Guston’s Klan paintings, but do not trust their audiences.” The New York Times′ Jason Farago writes, “This is a precancellation: a case of institutions running scared from phantasms, recoiling from their missions, assuming that their public is too clueless to look and think.” He adds, “Really, a museum unequipped to exhibit Guston is barely a museum at all, or else only a museum in the most derogatory sense: a dusty storehouse of dead things.”

On the other side is Darren Walker, President of the Ford Foundation, and National Gallery trustee: “What those who criticize this decision do not understand, is that in the past few months the context in the U.S. has fundamentally, profoundly changed on issues of incendiary and toxic racist imagery in art, regardless of the virtue or intention of the artist who created it.” 

Darren Walker’s focus on “intention” echoes a line in Hannah Black’s open letter, Must Go, a response to Dana Schutz′ Open Casket, a painting derived from a horrifying press photo of Emmett Till’s disfigured face. Black writes, “Although Schutz’s intention may be to present white shame...those non-Black artists who sincerely wish to highlight the shameful nature of white violence should first of all stop treating Black pain as raw material.”

What does this mean for artists and creative people of all stripes? Will they be censored — or censured — for addressing issues of race? Are the museums, in this case, in the ideological minority?

For insight, we contacted Catherine Rosamond, Chair of the MA/MAT Art Education Department here at SVA. Rosamond has worked as an art educator at Queens College and the Museum of Arts and Design, and is offering the Continuing Education course, “The Art, Music and Literature of the Harlem Renaissance.”

MB: Who benefits from the Guston postponement, and what exactly do they gain?

CR: I am not sure if “benefit” is the appropriate word, but the postponement can be interpreted as a way for the museums that are involved in the Guston exhibition to kick the can down the road by avoiding confrontation with the public over controversial works of art. In this case, their collective decision seems to have blown up in their face mostly because of their flawed, misguided, and weak reasoning to wait “...until a time at which [they] 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.” Did they somehow think that BIPOC’s trauma over racial injustice will be healed by the year 2024? I don’t think they reaped the “benefit” that they had hoped for. 

MB: The Guston postponement reminds me of past museum controversies, including Dana Schutz′ Open Casket painting of Emmett Till in the Whitney Biennial and Robert Gober’s Hanging Man wallpaper installation at the Hirshhorn. Based on your experience, are we seeing recurrences of similar conflicts? Or is the Guston postponement a unique occurrence? 

CR: I think it’s important not to put them all in one “potentially controversial/problematic” category. Guston’s KKK paintings, Gober’s Hanging Man Sleeping Man wallpaper, and Schutz’s Open Casket are quite different even though they all address racial (in)justice and white supremacy. I think the biggest difference between Guston’s work and Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till is who they are depicting—the oppressor (Klansmen) or the victim (Black people). Schutz, being a highly successful white woman painter, was in no position to be appropriating images of black suffering, and her defense of the painting was highly problematic (that’s another conversation altogether). However, the Whitney did open doors for public discourse, which is where I believe education holds the greatest power and potential for learning and change to happen within individuals and institutions. As an educator, I always choose to discuss with my SVA students (I teach the graduate course, Museum Studies: Theory and Practice) works that open up critical discussions. I can certainly imagine myself engaging in meaningful dialogue around Guston, a Canadian-American artist of Ukranian Jewish descent, painting himself as a hooded Klansman. I am not sure if this postponement is a unique occurence, but it is clear that the museums that are involved are avoiding important conversations, which are sorely needed, to happen. 

MB: It seems that both Darren Walker and Hannah Black want to remove “intention” from artistic expression. With Hannah Black, this is a prescription, something that “should” happen. Is it similarly a prescription from Darren Walker? Or is it a description, a reflection of actual changes observed among art museums? 

CR: Artists have various reasons for doing what they do, but when their work goes out into the world, their original intentions for producing the work should never be the centerpiece for understanding and engaging with the work. However, if I read or hear about artists′ intentions that might deepen the viewers′ understanding of the work, or perhaps give another perspective to understanding the work, I might include them in my teaching. This is where the wall text (or the audio guide) that museums provide can be more carefully thought out--perhaps the museums should consider offering pertinent contextual information coupled with inquiry-based questions, including asking the viewers what the artists′ intentions might have been. For example, the viewers can contemplate why Guston depicted himself wearing a KKK hood, alongside the facts such as Guston’s Ukranian-Jewish parents having escaped persecution in Odessa, and the active Klan activities against Jewish and Black people in California during Guston’s childhood. I believe it’s difficult to separate artistic intention from expression while the artwork is being produced, but it is neither important nor accurate to understand the artist’s intentions after the work is shared with the public. That was the real problem for me when Schutz as an artist offered her intentions.

MB: How broadly can we apply this restriction on “incendiary and toxic racist imagery?” Does it include, for example, Collier Schorr, who has photographed young men in Nazi uniforms; Thomas Hart Benton, who painted the Klan into his historical vignettes; or even Kara Walker? What about films like Jojo Rabbit or Django Unchained?  

CR: Again, I think each work or body of work must be considered separately. There shouldn’t be any applicable restrictions on “incendiary and toxic racist imagery” that can be listed in the form of a checklist. My litmus test when I consider work to be worthy of discussion around race and social justice issues is to see if the work holds layers of meaning and perspectives. Also, it is important to address who is creating the work, how the narrative is being conveyed, and in what ways the artist (or the director for movies) is depicting the images that might be considered “toxic racist imagery.” It is a shame that these museums did not think that the public can handle the discomfort of seeing Guston’s imagery – it is rather patronizing. However, I think the postponement of Guston’s exhibition is more about the museums not being able to handle their own discomfort.

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