Philip Guston’s KKK Paintings Must Be Shown – But Not as Pawns in the Culture Wars
J.J. Charlesworth.
"Museums now cower from anything that (they imagine) will bring them more negative publicity
The backlash over the postponement of the touring exhibition Philip Guston Now is the latest, starkest example of how museums are becoming little more than sites of social and political contestation. The show’s first incarnation, at London’s Tate Modern, had been due to open early next year. Now the show, rethought, reimagined and redone is not projected to go on view until 2024 – ‘until a time’, according to the directors of the four institutions involved (Washington’s National Gallery of Art (NGA), the Tate, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) ‘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’.
In the strange debate that has played out following this panicked decision, commentators have rushed to reassert Guston’s political credentials, both as someone who had experienced ethnic persecution himself and fought against racism in his work, arguing that his paintings of the cartoonish, white-hooded figures of Ku Klux Klansmen that the artist made at the end of the 1960s should be seen, not hidden, precisely because of their relevance to the politics of anti-racism in 2020.
What has transpired, however, is a disingenuous debate over who gets to determine what political need takes priority in determining whether art gets shown at all. Citing comments made by an NGA spokesperson, ArtNews reported that ‘organizers raised concerns over ‘painful’ imagery including the recurring Ku Klux Klan characters that appear in Guston’s late-period works’. Darren Walker, president of the hugely wealthy philanthropic Ford Foundation (and influential board member of the NGA) was even more blunt about the motives for the decision. In a statement to The New York Times, Walker retorted that ‘what those who criticise this decision do not understand […] is that in the past few months the context in the US has fundamentally, profoundly changed on issues of incendiary and toxic racial imagery in art, regardless of the virtue or intention of the artist who created it.’"