Philip Guston Now
The Estate of Philip Guston
Four major institutions, including the Museum of Fine Art Houston, issued a joint statement on September 21st to postpone a blockbuster retrospective Philip Guston Now. Kaywin Feldman, Director of the National Gallery of Art, Frances Morris, Director of the Tate Modern, Matthew Teitelbaum, director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Gary Tinterow, Director of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston said in their statement:
‘After a great deal of reflection and extensive consultation, our four institutions have jointly made the decision to delay our successive presentations of Philip Guston Now. 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.
We recognize that the world we live in is very different from the one in which we first began to collaborate on this project five years ago. The racial justice movement that started in the U.S. and radiated to countries around the world, in addition to challenges of a global health crisis, have led us to pause.
As museum directors, we have a responsibility to meet the very real urgencies of the moment. We feel it is necessary to reframe our programming and, in this case, step back, and bring in additional perspectives and voices to shape how we present Guston's work to our public. That process will take time.’
The reason for the delay being the inclusion of “approximately 25 paintings and drawings that Guston created depicting white-hooded figures that allude to the Ku Klux Klan.” Guston, whose family members were Jewish immigrants who fled Ukraine to escape persecution “knew what hatred was”. Guston himself wrote that he had been “haunted” by the Klan since he saw them violently assault striking workers as a child in Los Angeles.
This decision has been met with serious backlash from the art community. Guston’s daughter and the leader of the Guston Foundation, Musa Mayer, said she was saddened by the decision. His works “unveil white culpability… exposing the banality of evil and the systemic racism we are still struggling to confront today … This should be a time of reckoning, of dialogue,” she wrote. “These paintings meet the moment we are in today. The danger is not in looking at Philip Guston’s work, but in looking away.”
Echoing her sentiment, Darby English, a professor of art history at the University of Chicago and a former adjunct curator at the Museum of Modern Art, called the decision “cowardly” and “an insult to art and the public alike.” And Mark Godfrey, a curator at Tate Modern in London who co-organized the exhibition, posted a searing statement on Instagram saying that the decision was “extremely patronizing” to audiences because it assumes that they are not able to understand and appreciate the nuance of Guston’s works.
In defense of the decision to postpone the show, Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, told the Hyperallergic podcast that “it just felt like this was a tough time in America to do this exhibition, particularly at this moment”, stressing that the show cannot move forward with all-white curatorial teams. “Number one in today’s America—because Guston appropriated images of black trauma—[is that] the show needs to be about more than Guston. And we weren’t prepared for that. And that’s one of the reasons why I just want to pause and just think about what that means. Also, related [to this], an exhibition with such strong commentary on race cannot be done by all white curators. Everybody involved in this project is white,” she says. “We definitely need some curators of colour working on the project with us. I think all four museums agree with that statement.”
She adds: “I do think it’s part of the learning journey of institutions [after the death of George Floyd]. I don’t give a single public presentation anymore without acknowledging by 2043, America will be majority people of colour…. Museums that haven’t stepped up to that, do so to their peril.”