Four of the most important institutions in the world had the idea, this summer, to shed light on the work of the American painter Philip Guston, a notorious anti-racist who died in 1980, through the prism of American news. After postponing the exhibition to 2021 because of the pandemic, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Tate Modern in London, as well as the Museums of Fine Arts in Boston and Houston deemed it urgent to postpone the retrospective without delay. to… 2024.
The time needed, they indicate in a statement published on September 21, for the “Powerful message of social and racial justice” of the painter can “To be interpreted more clearly” in the light of “New perspectives”. The object of their discomfort is never mentioned: twenty-four drawings and paintings using the imagery of the Ku Klux Klan in cartoon style. Works which, far from condoning it, stigmatize the white supremacist secret organization.
Ghosts of the Klan
Born in 1913 in Montreal, Canada, to immigrant Ukrainian Jewish parents, Philip Guston was marked by the violence of racial segregation at a very young age. From 1931, this anti-racist sensitive to the Marxist cause produced a canvas in support of the “Scottsboro Boys”, these nine young blacks from Alabama accused of the rape of two young white girls. The work will be destroyed without further trial by Los Angeles police.
After a parenthesis in which, following his friend Jackson Pollock, the painter merges into the New York abstract school, Guston returns to figuration in 1969. From 1970, in paintings dominated by cadmium red accorded to pink, the KKK hood became one of his recurring motifs.
If he depicts the ghosts of the Klan smoking their cigars or driving their car, he does not hide behind the whistleblower’s good conscience: he represents himself in a hood, in other words a passive accomplice of supremacy. white, thereby denouncing systemic racism. It’s hard to imagine working more in tune with the tensions that have crossed America since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May.
“The postponement of Guston’s exhibition is only a sign of ordinary cowardice and the integration of censorship. »Laurent Dubreuil, professor of comparative literature
Still, the four museums feared an insulting lawsuit from the African-American community. Interviewed on September 26 by the New York Times, Darren Walker, powerful patron of the Ford Foundation and curator of the National Gallery of Art, defended the postponement, arguing “That the context in the United States has fundamentally, profoundly changed on questions of‘inflammatory and toxic racist imagery in art, whatever the virtue or intention of the‘artist ”.
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