Philip Guston Now

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1 May - 11 September 2022

The Boston Museum of Fine Arts is the first venue to house the Guston show planned for 2020, which was postponed due to curators’ concerns following the murder of George Floyd. To recap the art-world saga: the curators thought that Guston’s depictions of hooded Ku Klux Klan figures would be too incendiary for that moment, and they bottled it. Some of them, such as the Tate's Mark Godfrey, objected that it might be precisely the time to show Guston’s work given that it deals with the everydayness of evil and the ubiquity of racism. Godfrey got the sack. 

When push came to shove, the curators showed that they had no faith in the project they’d spent years planning, and that they mistrusted the ability of audiences to respond intelligently to paintings that so frankly hold a mirror to society’s – especially white people’s – face. Let’s be honest with ourselves: art is little more than a blip in the periphery of most people’s lives. At the precise instant that it had a chance to speak forcefully and directly to the main issue of the day, the people who are paid to care about it bound it up, gagged it, and chucked it in the back of a van.

With the time they bought with the postponement, the curators got busy multiplying and pushing themselves further into the limelight. There is a video, for example, where they sit around and solemnly discuss the non-story that Guston’s Deluge was painted over a failed Klan painting, of which the barest trace is still visible. This and other interventions must come at the expense of something, and it seems to be the abstract canvases Guston almost exclusively made for the best part of twenty years, which secured his reputation. 

Perhaps they’re less available from lenders, but the scarcity of abstraction in the exhibition misses one of the crucial discourses for understanding where Guston was coming from. When he stopped painting ‘abstract’ and began his cartoon-like images in the late sixties, it caused a scandal. It was a brave move which hurt Guston’s prestige, his wallet, and, following harsh reviews, his feelings. He left New York and stayed away for several years. Look at contemporary painting now: so much of it is unthinkable without Guston’s example and many see him as a hero. His social commitment was enmeshed with great artistic daring. 

The show glosses over this important episode as if it barely happened, haughtily dismissing the critics who didn’t understand him as bigots. This does Guston a disservice: had his works been completely acceptable, they wouldn’t have had the impact that they did. Today the sight of a cartoon figure on a canvas is pretty ordinary, but back then it wasn’t, and he sacrificed a lot for it. Taking Guston's achievement out of the history of twentieth-century art in this way, the show ends up taming it where it was wild. You suspect that’s exactly what the curators had in mind.