Entry - 12.11.21

 

Philip Guston - The Studio - 1969

I was leafing through the December 2020 issue of ARTFORUM when I came across an article by Steve Locke which addressed the art of Philip Guston.  In this article, Locke describes an experience he had while enrolled in an MFA program back in 1999. During one of his classes, the instructor was showing slides of a variety of images from art history and was briefly discussing them. When he displayed Philip Guston's The Studio, which presents an artist dressed in Klan-like robes painting a self portrait, Locke, the only African-American in the class, was shocked.

I hear my teacher say, "Philip Guston, 1969, The Studio, about six by six feet, oil on canvas."

"Why are you showing us this?" I ask. Everyone looks at me.

"This painting is the beginning of Guston's departure from abstraction and return to a new kind of figuration."

"And was he in the Klan?" I ask.

"No," my professor says. "Although he uses this figure as an alter ego."

"He's white?"

"Yes. And Jewish. There was a lot of controversy about Guston. You should examine it. Next slide."

I scribble down the name. An alter ego? A Jewish artist painting himself as a Klansman? I am not able to pay attention to the other artists in the slide presentation. The Guston picture is all I can think about. I feel certain that my classmates can smell my anger.

-Steve Locke, "Guston, Whiteness and the Unfinished Business of the Vile World", ARTFORUM December 2020

After that class, Locke investigated Guston's oeuvre and personal history and concluded that Guston's painting wasn't an attempt to promote the Ku Klux Klan but to recognize within himself the vestiges of racism. Locke believes that Guston actually confronted his own “whiteness” and the inherent complicity to which silence regarding race issues naturally attests. By the end of the article, Locke determines that in incorporating Klan imagery in his painting Guston wished to expose the undercurrents of racism, hidden and preferred to be ignored by many in America, that continues to assert a powerful and degenerative influence on our society and concludes that Guston had taken the first steps toward “accountability”.

I found several aspects of Locke's article admirable. The courage he exhibits in challenging his professor before his (I assume) all-white classmates is laudable. I honestly doubt that I would have had the grit to do that. And when disturbed by Guston's image, he does something which is seldom done in our modern era: he performs research to learn more about the artist's intentions. Ultimately, he arrives at a conclusion that is in direct opposition to his initial impression. To me, that is evident of an objectivity and intellectual curiosity that is truly rare.

But the article also raised some disturbing questions for me. Shouldn't an artwork be able to function independently as an expression of the artist's intent without the intrusion of supporting documentation, personal history and critical assessment? If The Studio was parachuted into a community of isolated folk with no knowledge of art history or America's checkered past, would the Klansman persona portrayed in the work be viewed as appealing? Could the painting be conceived as a recruitment advertisement for the Klan?

Apparently, a lot of people would have trouble answering these questions.

In 2020, a retrospective exhibit of Guston's work including 125 paintings and 70 drawings was scheduled to open at the National Gallery of Art, after which the exhibit would move on to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Tate Museum in London and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. However, due to the COVID pandemic, the opening was delayed until 2021. Then, in September 2020, all four museums announced in a joint statement that the exhibit would not happen until 2024, that they were”postponing the exhibition until a time at which we think the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Guston's work can be more clearly interpreted”. Obviously, after the May 25^th murder of George Floyd and a summer of heated protests (which unfortunately included incidents of arson, rioting and looting), these four museums were apprehensive about the reception that an exhibition that included Guston's Klan imagery might receive. Would museum goers understand Guston's message? Maybe not. Could the exhibit itself spark rioting? That seems a reasonable prospect. Is it possible that Guston's Klan paintings could be damaged or destroyed in response to their public display? It certainly seemed plausible at that time.

So... Was the postponement of the exhibition an act of cowardly submission or the judicious acknowledgment of a risk that the museums could not justify taking? I believe a look at Guston's oeuvre and an exploration of contemporary censorship might offer some insight.

I studied art many years before Steve Locke did and cannot recall any instructor either in my undergrad or grad school classes addressing Guston's work. There are probably several reasons for this. Guston was a “first generation” member of the Abstract Expressionism movement in New York City. His paintings, at that time, usually consisted of a clot of colors applied in impasto brushstrokes positioned at the center of a canvas. These paintings are difficult and display none of the energy and virtuosity embodied in the work of, let's say, Pollock or de Kooning. In these paintings, Guston was deliberately restricting his artistic vocabulary, forcing his audience to assess paint itself and reexamine what can be construed as “beautiful”. There is a misleading sameness to them which makes it hard to discuss specific works or distinguish an arc of development. Dissecting compositional elements, technical methodologies or historic influences becomes nearly impossible.

Philip Guston - Zone - 1953

Philip Guston - For M - 1955

Philip Guston - Prague - 1956

I didn't know of these works until years after I had become familiar with Guston's later figurative paintings. His abstract work didn't interest me. It was too limited and homogeneous, and I dismissed it. Only recently have I been able to look at these paintings and appreciate, to some degree, their beauty and lyricism.

His later representational work, though initially reviled for being reactionary, was more interesting to me. But, I want to be clear, reverting back to representational imagery at that time (the late 60's) wasn't really that radical. Almost two decades earlier, de Kooning had shocked his fellow Abstract Expressionists by reintroducing the figure in his work, but de Kooning, as did Richard Diebenkorn and the Bay Area artists, retained his Expressionist “vocabulary” while addressing representational imagery. Guston's break with Abstract Expressionism was more extreme.

Guston's representational paintings discarded the technical process and objectives of his earlier work. While the abstract work was lyrical and romantic, the new work was brutal, clumsy and blunt. The colors were dirty, commonly infused with grays, and his palette was extremely limited. Guston adopted cartoon imagery, not the slick commercial replications of the Pop Art artists but an invented catalog of recurring, personal symbols that hearkened back to the crude comic strips of the early twentieth century. The representational paintings are neither pretty nor easily accessible. They offend the viewer's aesthetic acumen. They defy his or her expectation of “craft”.

Philip Guston - Paintbrushes - 1978

Philip Guston - Pittore - 1973

Philip Guston - Studio Landscape - 1975

Philip Guston - The Ladder - 1978

Philip Guston - Head and Bottle - 1975

Philip Guston - Painting, Smoking, Eating - 1972

Convinced that all that I wrote above about this work is true, I must also state that these paintings provide a visual response that is truly seductive. After years of creating and looking at art, Guston has grasped the visual fundamentals and rewards that entice the viewer into looking at an image and has reduced them to a coarse, cartoony concentrate. His images play with perspective in a Cezanne-like fashion both exaggerating and defying its impact on figures and objects. Paintbrushes, shoes, pastries and various other items are artlessly and excessively stacked and overlap one another. The folds, wrinkles and stitching in cloth are overstated; the brads and sutures on the soles of shoes are too evident. Objects extend above the horizon-line or peek over it. Shadows are emphasized, often painted in flat blacks or bright reds. Paint is applied thickly, clumsily, almost haphazardly with very limited modulation of tonality, but there is a real sensitivity and balance to the brushwork all the same. These paintings enhance the pleasure the viewer experiences through visual perception, which is essentially the manner by which the eye deciphers form.

I would say that the vast majority of these paintings are self-portraits documenting the artist's physical decline and his neglected personal appearance. Guston reveals a solitary existence of limited possibilities and pleasures. He indulges in a smoke, a drink, sweets... his bed offering the sole refuge from the demands of the studio. These works are intended to be funny. They offer a playfully exaggerated commentary on the twilight years of a respected artist. I'm not sure if I Ioved these images the first time I saw them, but I do know that I quickly came to enjoy and admire them and believe them to represent an important contribution to the post-abstract idiom.

Early on in his foray into representational imagery, Guston introduced Klansmen characters into his paintings. I had trouble accepting these works. I found the inclusion of Klansmen to be a reference too specific for the type of painting Guston was producing at that time, an approach that addressed a very pared-down reality consisting of a small handful of mundane, emblematic personae and objects and employed an extremely painterly, aesthetically-weighted technical means. Inserting Klan imagery edged Guston's paintings toward the pedantic... the morally edifying. Such imagery contradicted the universality of his other representational work and instead chronicled a paradigm evocative of a specific place, time and social movement. The Klan paintings seemed at odds with Guston's other work and could be conceived to be at cross-purposes with his technical aims. Apparently, while living through the late 60's/early 70's, a time of great upheaval and radical social change in America, Guston felt compelled to participate in the contemporary discourse. Making images heavily invested in a purely aesthetic approach would not be sufficient to assuage his desire to assert his own perspective of current developments and to convey his personal experience of American hypocrisy. When I first saw these works, I was dissatisfied with them; I feel the same today.

Philip Guston - Alone - 1969

Philip Guston - Untitled, Hooded Figures Driving

Philip Guston - Open Window II - 1969

Philip Guston - Scared Stiff - 1970

Philip Guston - City Limits - 1969

But my unhappiness with the Klansmen paintings was about objectives and aesthetics. I was never confused about Guston's attitude toward the hooded figures depicted in his art. The Klansmen are not appealing or admirable. Their robes are stitched together from rags and are often splattered with red splotches (what I assume to be blood). Commonly, the hands of these Klansman are colored a deep red, suggesting their culpability in the murder of numerous victims. The square of stitching at the back of each hood proposes that the wearer may have undergone some kind of hemispherectomy or lobotomy leaving him or her too impaired to evaluate reality rationally. In many works, the Klansmen are crowded compactly into very small cars, triggering associations with the Keystone Kops. Comically, these Klansmen invariably possess cigarettes, somehow finding access to their mouths through their cloth headgear. Guston is ridiculing his Klansmen. They are buffoons.

Some people might argue that, regardless of Guston's intent, simply presenting images of Klansmen in his work is offensive and shouldn't be tolerated, but I would counter that intent should not only be considered but must be of primary importance when evaluating the integrity and worth of art.

Quite a few years ago, I had my own personal episode during which I had to make a judgment call on whether intent is more important than ostensible appearance.

Back then, when our family was still quite young, I always read bedtime stories to the kids... as I would assume most parents continue to do even in this twenty first century. As our children grew older, I did not give up this nightly ritual and instead said a sad farewell to Beatrix Potter, Maurice Sendak, Dr. Seuss, Astrid Lindgren and the Brothers Grimm and adopted more advanced material. My reasoning was simple. Our children were free to choose whatever books they wanted to read and, not surprisingly, commonly turned to easily digestible contemporary literature, showing a clear preference for extensive series that presented a recurring cast of characters and repetitive themes. We had no problem with this, thinking it wonderful that the kids were enthusiastic readers who rapidly pored over reams of written material each day. During this time, each of our children was also assigned a piece of classic literature to tackle on his own, and, during our nightly communal readings, I would select some pretty heavy tomes, always deliberately aiming to find something challenging... usually slightly above their immediate comprehension level. I wanted to be sure that the kids developed a taste for serious literature and attained an extensive vocabulary that included words not regularly pronounced on TV shows or included in popular literature. So together we read the works of Hawthorne, Kipling, Wharton, Camus, Tolstoy, Alcott, Spyri, Conan Doyle, Stevenson, Barrie, Tolkien, London, Fenimore Cooper and Steinbeck, just to name a few, and we, at least I believe, really enjoyed the experience.

To be frugal, I would order books through a catalog company that offered overstocked and out-of-print material at significantly reduced prices. Often, I was able to purchase exquisitely bound and beautifully illustrated hardcover books for a pittance. The downside was I had to spend quite a while leafing through pages and pages of listings to find anything of worth and of course my selections were limited to whatever happened to be available that month. So while perusing the catalog, whenever I came across a classic piece of literature suitable for the children, it would be added to my order form, and, every couple of months or so, I would receive a large cardboard box full of books afloat in a sea of styrofoam peanuts. And hence, in our evenings, the kids and I would gather in the living room, with me situated under a bright lamp and the boys scattered about helter skelter on floor and furniture, to work our way through the backlog of books I had most recently purchased.

Thus it came about that Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was slated to become our next nightly selection. I had read this novel for an American Lit class while an undergraduate in college. I recall that the course's professor had a penchant for Twain, and we read a lot of his writings that semester, including some of his lesser-known later pieces. I was particularly impacted by The Mysterious Stranger, an unfinished novel that presents a very dark, bleak perception of the human condition, as being extremely uncharacteristic within Twain's oeuvre. Huckleberry Finn made much less of an impression on me.

As we started to work our way through Huckleberry Finn, I quickly became aware that this book was very different from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a novel we had read at least a year earlier. While Tom Sawyer is a light, humorous tale exploring the whimsical conduct of children, Huckleberry Finn addresses very serious issues. In the later book, Twain exposes the blatant racism that infects antebellum plantation culture, lampooning the supposedly upstanding institutions that white society most esteemed. As was especially appreciated in nineteenth century literary assessment, Twain specializes in accurately capturing the specific dialects, accents and vocabulary of his characters. Huck, the story's narrator, employs a casual Southern child's vernacular, while Jim, an escaped captive, uses the language common to uneducated, enslaved Africans during the 1800's. We see the world through Huck's eyes. He is the innocent struggling to make sense of the flawed civilization in which he exists, while Jim represents the moral and compassionate ideal, the true embodiment of the high and revered virtues that plantation culture claims to embrace.

As we made our way through this novel, I became uneasy. My two oldest sons, just then on the cusp of adolescence, were my audience for this reading. Being homeschooled, they were insulated from the vast majority of the most contentious issues impacting American society at that time. They associated with a fairly diverse group of friends and fellow homeschoolers, and, to the best of my knowledge, their interactions were natural and unsullied by bias. I was fearful that Twain's frank depiction of racial injustice in antebellum America might impact on their relations with other children. I wasn't concerned that my sons would be transformed into racists, but I was troubled at the thought that such reading could introduce into their consciousnesses the concept of “the other”, a recognition that, though we are all human, our perceptions, attitudes, emotions and experiences are uniquely shaped by factors like gender, ethnicity and racial identity. Obviously, this period of utopian innocence could not last forever, but I hoped to extend it for as long as possible. I admit my objectives were a bit naive and idealistic.

Equally disturbing for me was Twain's regular use of the word “nigger” in his book. I understand that the author desired to accurately reflect the repugnant vocabulary of his characters and relished assaulting his white audience with its repeated intonation over and over again. But I'm pretty sure that my children had never heard this word before, and I didn't want it introduced into their lexicons. I seriously considered surreptitiously replacing the word “nigger” with “scoundrel” or “lowlife” or “drudge” whenever it appeared.

I am dead set against censorship. When I was growing up, the issue of censorship was hotly debated. Serious literature that depicted sexual activity openly and honestly had been banned from publication in the USA for many years, and this suppression was being challenged in the courts in the early 60's. Promiscuity, adultery, premarital sex, prostitution and homosexuality were considered topics too risque and noxious to be consumed by the general public. The Hays Code, which strictly prohibited the inclusion of nude scenes in movies, was being violated by a new generation of film directors. Comedians who included four-letter words in their routines were charged with obscenity. Lyrics that referred, even obliquely, to drug culture were often revised for television and radio broadcast. Content that didn't support the Vietnam War was considered unpatriotic and was vulnerable to censorship, and material that threatened organized religion or promoted atheism was prohibited. I recall seeing repeatedly on the TV news, clips from courtrooms across the nation showing decrepit, hoary-headed male judges passing sentence on and bitterly remonstrating many a celebrity culprit for violating the high and mighty moral code of the United States of America. At the time, I thought that these proponents of censorship were simply representative of a bygone generation, too inculcated in a long-ago discarded way of thinking to recognize that our society was progressing toward a more reasonable, mature and equitable approach to self-evaluation. The battle against censorship was fiercely and unremittingly fought. I still believe it was a moral struggle, one that secured a sacred freedom for all Americans.

So when I considered putting aside The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or making adjustments to its language, I was naturally conflicted. Ultimately, I determined that I would trust Twain, as one more skilled and intelligent than I, to effectively communicate his message, one which deplored bias and condemned those individuals who promoted intolerance and prejudice. I decided that “intent” was more important than “content”, that my children would benefit from and be enlightened by Twain's words.

I've always embraced the conviction (falsely attributed to Voltaire) that “I may disagree with what you say, but I shall defend, to death, your right to say it.” I believe that shallow and insupportable concepts will always be discredited in open debate, that base lies will be exposed should a factual examination of their foundations be performed. I want to hear a multitude of opinions, no matter how outlandish they may sometimes seem, and arrive at my own decision as to what is credible or ridiculous or abhorrent. I unequivocally value intellectual investigation over emotional knee-jerk reaction. And I fervently hope that as a people we can make an effort to appreciate that words and images and deeds are complex things that merit fair evaluation and should not be dismissed upon a cursory perusal.

It's pretty ironic that Philip Guston is being reappraised now as a possible bigot, that his art is considered too controversial to be exhibited not by conservatives and racists but by liberals and progressives. I would hope that Guston could find the humor in this. Philip Guston was born in Canada in 1913 to Jewish parents who had fled pogroms in Russia. His family eventually emigrated to California where they hoped to find greater economic opportunity. In America, they were confronted with a rise in persecution resulting from the growth of the Klan, and it has been suggested that the suicide of his father, when Guston was just ten years old, may be partially attributed to his despair over the intolerance he endured in the US. As he developed into an artist, Guston was influenced by the Social Realists, Regionalists and Mexican muralists. Much of his early representational work promotes progressive social change and expresses a desire for a more equitable and humane culture... some of his imagery directly addressing the scourge of the Klan. An early mural, executed by him and fellow artist, Reuben Kadish, was intended to raise money for the defense of the Scottsboro Boys, nine black teens falsely accused of rape, but that work was defaced by LA police (incidentally never held accountable for their actions). When many years later he returned to representational imagery, he didn't shy away from the themes that obsessed him in his youth; instead he chose to look deep within himself to find the unacknowledged racist that resides in each of us.

It came as a surprise to me when the Guston retrospective was postponed. I never thought that his art could be construed as “racist” and simply assumed that Guston's presentation of Klansmen as comic figures, clumsy, moronic buffoons stumbling along through the shadowy periphery of society, must have offended the new generation of pundits and arbiters who could find nothing vaguely humorous in these individuals. I was wrong. I should have understood that, in a time of extremely high emotions, paintings that present controversial imagery, even the well-intentioned work of an unquestionably progressive artist, would be deemed too incendiary to be exhibited publicly.

As always, I encourage readers to comment here. If you would prefer to comment privately, you can email me at gerardwickham@gmail.com.