Fear postponed a Philip Guston retrospective.
A reckoning must follow.
Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
(The length of a presidential term.)
This is a cloudy bureaucratic obfuscation if ever there was one.
In one astonishing scene, we see an artist in a Klan hood painting at his easel.
But these works do not seem to be the cause of the uproar.
One huge Klansman stares down at two blocks, shaped like Mississippi and Louisiana, at his feet.
Almost instantaneously, the art world went into its dont tread on me, dont censor us act.
A collective cri de coeur arose, How dare you postpone this show.
Everyone knows these paintings are against racism.
The WashingtonPosts Sebastian Smeecomparedthe postponement to actions taken in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia.
The art world has never been one for getting a grip.
Of course, I reacted this way at first too.
In a way, he is right: The curators canceling the show do seem to be scared.
This sets a bad precedent.
The danger is not in looking at Philip Gustons work, but in looking away.
Is art to be definedexclusivelyby ideology, demographics, subject matter, current events, and populism?
Unfortunately, the museums duck all this.
The statement never mentions the Klan paintings.
They are the white elephants in the room.
Of course these images are disturbing!
These modern gargoyles freak me out.
Yet the paintings are also physically beautiful and deeply strange.
But it is easy to imagine all sorts of responses to these works now.
Ours is a moment of lived and witnessed blatant racism and everyday Black pain.
Of course, so was Gustons.
He was among the most important, powerful, and influential American painters of the last 100 years.
Born in 1913, he was the son of Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants, originally named Goldstein.
As a young artist, he worked with the great Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros.
Hes an art-world hero.
I was told the letter may also appear inLe Monde.
Thats when I saw two tweets by critic Aruna DSouza that stopped me in my tracks.
(Someone countered that the catalog is being done under the auspices of the Guston Foundation.
Either way, Hauser & Wirth represents the estate.)
Yes we may need a Guston show, but not ANY Guston show.
She could have added that all four of the museum directors are white.
Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, sealed the deal for me.
He wrote that it would be tone deaf for the show to go on as scheduled.
He added that it would be absurdnot toreconsider the who and how behind all of this.
I decided to pause, shut up, and listen.
He finishes, No wonder they caved to misunderstanding in Trump times.
Many museums have addressed and are addressing internal issues of inequality and structural racism.
These museums had better have healed themselves by then.
