America’s Most Controversial Art Exhibition, ‘Philip Guston Now,’ Debuts At MFA, Boston

America’s most controversial art exhibition debuts–again–this time May 1 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Originally planned to open in June of 2020 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., “Philip Guston Now” was postponed in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police and subsequent nationwide protests for racial equality.

Guston’s later work included blunt images of hooded Ku Klux Klan figures as the artist interrogated his role as a white man–and more broadly all of white America’s complicity–in the nation’s never-ending abuse of minorities. In the hands of all-white curatorial staffs, the exhibition’s organizing institutions decided to shelf the presentation until it could be more thoroughly informed by a greater diversity of expert opinions before going on public display.

Others viewed the postponement as cowardice and censorship; the debate raged well outside the insular halls of art museums.

COVID-19 induced closures further delayed the show.

Boston was originally scheduled to bat cleanup on the exhibition tour which also includes Houston and London in addition to the nation’s capital; instead, it will lead off. Still early in its preparation for the show when tabbed to go first, MFA officials were more easily able to adjust for contemporary sensitivities than had they been deep into their planning for the presentation.

“The exhibition has significantly evolved over the last year with a more diversified approach to interpretation, more historical references, and inclusion of more artists’ perspectives, led by an expanded curatorial team and guided by many voices—all of whom have helped us to create a fuller understanding of this great artist’s work,” Matthew Teitelbaum, Ann and Graham Gund Director at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, said in a statement announcing the exhibition.

The curatorial team additionally engaged regularly over the past year with a staff advisory group–unprecedented for the MFA–comprised of four MFA employees from Learning and Community Engagement and Communications and Protective Services. Input from this staff, who are not typically involved in exhibition-making decisions, powered key decisions about gallery design and interpretation.

“In different ways, the voices beyond our curatorial team guided fresh thinking about how the exhibition unfolds not only narratively, but also experientially, and how to empower visitors to interpret these paintings in relation to their own lived experiences,” Ethan Lasser, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston John Moors Cabot Chair, Art of the Americas, told Forbes.com.

Beyond museum voices, Homi Bhabha, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, served as Critic in Residence for the project. Trauma specialist Ginger Klee, LMFT, LPCC, advised on crucial aspects of visitor care, offering insights to ensure opportunities for informed consent for visitors and to prepare varied audiences for viewing the challenging imagery. Input was sought from and provided by an expanded selection of artists, scholars and former students of Guston’s at Boston University.

“Our working process changed substantially—and meaningfully—during the winter of 2020–21, and we have built on initiatives across the MFA to rethink the approach to curatorial work,” exhibition guest curator Terence Washington told Forbes.com. “We believe ‘Philip Guston Now’ has only benefitted from the expansion of our curatorial team, our close collaboration with our staff advisory group, the time committed by our numerous other interlocutors and advisors, and our collective commitment to engaging in close looking and hard conversations. Together we also committed to taking care of our visitors just as we take care of the artworks on our walls. As a result, we’ve perhaps felt more attuned to Guston’s own lifelong commitment to raising difficult, even fundamentally unanswerable questions.”

Decades after his death, Guston’s (1913-1980) paintings remain open to individual interpretation shaped by the complexity of each viewer’s background; this exhibition presents them as a conduit for direct conversations about reckoning with the inequities of the world and the role of the artist in an unjust society.

Philip Guston

Philip Guston was born Philip Goldstein in Montreal, Canada, to Jewish immigrants from Odessa, in present-day Ukraine. Or so the story goes. The exhibition catalogue does a fine job of challenging where Guston’s memory and family lore may have diverged from reality.

He was raised in Los Angeles, becoming serious about drawing at age 12 and amazingly attending Manual Arts High School alongside Jackson Pollock.

Guston’s early life was defined by tragedy.

Three days after his 10^th birthday and just over a year after moving to Los Angeles, Guston’s father hanged himself, despondent over not being able to carve out a better life for himself in America. In Canada, he worked as a boilermaker for the railroad, in California he had to settle for being a rag picker.

Maybe Guston found the body; maybe his mother did. Here, again, memory and reality prove difficult to parse. In any case, ropes and porches figure prominently in Guston’s work through the 1940s.

Another tragedy involved Guston’s brother who died in 1932 after his legs were crushed when he walked behind his car and it rolled over him. The shoes and piles of dismembered legs reoccurring in Guston’s work could be owed to this trauma. Or perhaps they take inspiration from an exhibition of large-scale photographs of liberated German concentration camps Guston saw in 1945 when teaching at Washington University in St. Louis.

Also in 1932, Guston experienced an event which would vividly demonstrate to the artist the effects of politics on art and vice versa. Late that year, he and some friends painted murals for the local John Reed Club, part of a network of Communist clubs started in New York. The mural focused on the Scottsboro Boys, nine Black youths falsely accused of rape in Alabama in the spring of 1931 and, except for the youngest, sentenced to death.

As detailed in the exhibition catalogue, “Early one morning a band of raiders…led by the chief of the Red Squad [a unit of the Los Angeles Police Department that went after Communists and strikers]…entered the John Reed Club brandishing lead pipes and guns.” They desecrated several murals and, “as Guston recalls with a shudder, shot out the eyes and genitals of the figures in his completed work.”

The specifics of the damage are disputed, but scholars believe this attack triggered Guston’s return to the Klan hoods in the late 1960s. In a chilling echo to today, as is often the case throughout this exhibition, interest has renewed in historic and ongoing deputy gangs in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

As antisemitism in America and around the world ramped up in the 1930s, the artist changed his name from Philip Goldstein to Philip Guston.

The Hoods

“The idea of evil fascinated me,” Guston said during this life. “I almost tried to imagine that I was living with the Klan. What would it be like to be evil? To plan and plot.”

By the late 1950s, Guston was acclaimed as one of America’s preeminent abstract painters. He abandoned abstraction in the late 60s as political assassinations, race protests and images of death and horror from Vietnam filled his TV screen.

By the end of 1968, a single figure emerged among Guston’s otherwise object-focused paintings: a cartoonish Ku Klux Klansman, represented as a white triangle with black eye slits. Unlike the artist’s hooded imagery of the 1930s, these Klan figures are bumbling, idling, biding their time.

“They plan, they plot, they ride around in cars smoking cigars. We never see their acts of hatred. We never know what is in their minds. But it is clear that they are us. Our denial, our concealment,” Musa Mayer, the artist’s daughter and head of the Guston Foundation, said in a statement following the exhibition’s initial postponement. “My father dared to unveil white culpability, our shared role in allowing the racist terror that he had witnessed since boyhood when the Klan marched openly by the thousands in the streets of Los Angeles.”

Considering Guston’s Klansmen in this light, less threatening to Blacks than accusatory of whites, the assumed necessity for the exhibition’s added racial sensitivity is altered. It’s not minority audiences who require hand-holding through the presentation, it’s whites, accustomed as they are to variously blaming others for being unable to overcome the obstacles confronted them in a nation established by and for privileged white people, or pointing fingers only at the most vocal and virulent racists among them, absolving themselves of culpability.

The non-racist vs. anti-racist question.

As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”

“Guston’s paintings are conduits for hard conversations, as much of his work addresses and confronts topics such as white supremacy, racism, anti-Semitism, and violence—issues as relevant today as they were during, as well as before, his lifetime,” Megan Bernard, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Director of Membership, told Forbes.com. “Multiple paintings in the exhibition depict Ku Klux Klansmen, truncated body parts, and enigmatic scenes of struggle. These images, as well as their meanings, can appear unmistakable, indeterminate and everything in between. The ‘Now’ in which Guston made his paintings was historically specific, but in some ways also more continuous with our own moment than we’re always able (or inclined) to see on the surface.”

“Philip Guston Now” will be on view at the MFA, Boston through September 11, 2022, before visiting the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, October 23, 2022–January 15, 2023, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., February 26–August 27, 2023 and Tate Modern, London, October 3, 2023–February 4, 2024.