The Boston Museum of Fine Arts has just inaugurated one of the most controversial museum exhibitions in recent years. The retrospective in question is devoted to Philip Guston (1913-1980), a painter born in Montreal who spent his career in New York and caused an aesthetic scandal at the turn of the 1970s with cartoon characters evoking members of the Ku Klux Klan busy with mundane tasks.
These works were intended to be committed against racism and critical of the hypocrisy of American society. They are now on display with a warning written by a “trauma specialist”.
The exhibition, titled Philip Guston Now, was originally scheduled to open at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in June 2020, then embark on a tour of Houston, London and Boston. The pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement have delayed this inauguration, which has just ended in a slightly shortened version of around a hundred works at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston.
The controversy germinated from the preparation of the project. The denunciation of racism by Guston’s mature works was and still is in no doubt. He was not even blamed for being another male and white artist dubbed by an old Western institution that exhibits so many and more. On the other hand, the lack of precaution with regard to the display of the works and the lack of diversity within the team of curators gave rise to criticism.
“The racial justice movement that began in the United States and has spread to countries around the world, in addition to the challenges of a global health crisis, has caused us to pause,” explained the four museums. in a joint statement posted on the National Gallery’s website in September 2020. shaping the way we present Guston’s work to our audience. »
This decision has itself been strongly criticized. An open letter signed by hundreds of artists described the prorogation as a cowardly submission refusing to face controversy and trust the judgments of visitors. These reproaches will have served at least to bring forward by two years the postponement of the program of the retrospective, first announced for 2024.
One thing is certain, this new bickering is writing a new chapter in the great book now promoting the decolonization of museums. In this perspective, museum institutions are described as places of legitimization of power and identity construction of societies that need to be criticized and reoriented in order to diversify points of view on the history and history of the art.
The MFA and its partners took advantage of the break time to consult, listen to and hire new commissioners from “diversity”. The exhibition opens with an “emotional pamphlet” from a trauma specialist, asking visitors to “take care of themselves”. A detour allows visitors wishing to do so to avoid the room of “kukluxklanesque” works.
Canadian or American?
Philip Guston — real name Phillip Goldstein — was born in Montreal in 1913 to a Jewish family who had emigrated from Odessa, Ukraine. The English version of Wikipedia still identifies it as ” canadian painter “. Encyclopedias in French, Italian and German describe him more as a United States or American artist. In Portuguese, he is presented as a “North American painter”, which solves the problem.
The Goldstein family moved to California in 1919, and the father committed suicide in 1923. The adolescent Phillip enrolled in an art school in Los Angeles in 1927, where he met Jackson Pollock, a future pillar of abstract expressionism, also in training.
He produced his first works in a realistic style, marked by Mexican muralists, but also by Renaissance frescoes. His style took an abstract and automatist turn after his installation in New York at the end of the 1930s. He signed his paintings with the name of Guston to counter the ambient anti-Semitism. Sotheby’s hopes to draw between 20 and 30 million from its large canvas nile from 1958 in an upcoming sale in the middle of May.
The painter imposed a new aesthetic turn from the 1960s. He returned to “representation”, but in a vaguely cartoonish style. He paints still lifes, but also figures wearing Ku Klux Klan robes busy with daily chores. There are 25 in this vein in Boston. One of the most famous paintings, titled City Limits (1969), shows three clansmen in a car and nothing more. Another (The Studio1969) shows a hooded “man” taking a self-portrait.
At the time, the art world’s reaction to these images was so visceral that its stylistic mutation was compared to artistic suicide. Recognition bodies (galleries, critics, collectors) reproach the star for denying the abstract avant-garde that has become the trade mark of trendy America.
Philip Guston has since largely gotten his revenge. Works in his later fashion fetch even more than the abstract paintings of the 1950s. They also continue to inspire new creators committed to anti-racism. The Boston catalog also includes contributions from several artists claiming his work, including Dana Schutz and Art Spiegelman.