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Philip Guston's Hooded Men: Inconvenient Political
There was a lot of excitement in the international art scene: Last weekend four very well-known museums in the USA and London announced that their joint exhibition "Philip Guston Now" would be postponed.
One feared that the retrospective on the American painter, originally planned for this summer and then postponed to July 2021 due to Corona, could be misunderstood in the current political climate.
They will therefore only be shown in 2024, according to a joint statement by the National Gallery in Washington, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Tate Modern in London and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houson.
The museums wanted to wait for a time when "the powerful message of social and racial justice at the heart of Philip Guston's work can be more clearly interpreted."
The museums did not explicitly disclose which works by Guston give them such stomach ache, but it is obvious: The concerns relate to 24 paintings that show Ku Klux Klan figures.
"Has the painter Philip Guston become too provocative?"
asked the "Tagesspiegel", and the "Süddeutsche Zeitung" found the arguments for the rejection "terrifyingly conflict-averse".
Curator Robert Storr, who has just published a biography of the artist ("Philip Guston: A Life Spent Painting"), spoke to "Artnet News" of "the cowardice of museums".
The daughter of the painter Musa Mayer also expressed her disappointment at "Artnet", after all, 50 years ago, her father had "held up a mirror to white America and exposed systemic racism".
Left-wing and political
Is this a new high point in the "Cancel Culture", where it hits an artist of all people who has dealt with his own discriminatory experiences with white cap men in cartoon-like scenes?
Philip Guston is one of the outstanding painters of American modernism, he is known for his abstract expressionism.
The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants was born in Canada in 1913, in 1919 the family moved to California and was confronted with the Ku Klux Klan.
As a child he painted comics, in high school he was friends with Jackson Pollock and is said to have dropped out of school with him because of satirical drawings.
Guston, who died in 1980, was leftist and political, which manifested itself early on in his murals about racism.
Hoods and smoldering cigarettes appear again and again in the figurative works.
When he was 20 years old, Klansmen are said to have cut up his pictures.
He later devoted himself to abstract painting, but continued to draw hoods until the 1960s.
It is therefore absolutely essential that the reception of Guston's works relates to what will happen in the USA in 2020 - police violence, global anti-racism protests, the fall of monuments.
But the operation of large international museums is ticking very slowly.
Work has been going on for years on a traveling exhibition in the size of "Philip Guston Now".
Perhaps the curators of the young # BlackLivesMatter movement or the protests in 2016 had given too little space in their classifications and weightings.
George Floyd was still alive at this point.
Painful but right
But anyone who ignored the context of this harrowing year 2020 would turn a blind eye.
An exhibition that touches on the subject of racism and has the word "Now" in its title is obliged to respond to the current discourse.
The decision to stop the exhibitions for now in order to ensure a more detailed and up-to-date contextualization is painful, but correct.
The real nuisance lies elsewhere: in the fact that four large institutions of cultural mediation want to take three years to deal with new developments in an exhibition that contains depictions of the Ku Klux Klan.
Real-time contextualization looks different.
Well-balanced work certainly takes time, but if the art business wants to see itself as an actor in social discourse, it has to become more flexible.
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