When “Philip Gaston Now” Opening at the National Gallery in Washington There seemed to be a collective sigh of relief in my Instagram feed this spring. In 2020, in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the nationwide protests that followed, four museums planning retrospectives of his work needed to ensure that Gaston’s paintings were contextualized. As there is, announced the postponement of four years of the exhibition. It contains a series of cartoonish images depicting Klansman as a clumsy Keystone Cop with the right sensibility.
Many saw this as an act of fear of controversy. Many artists, critics, and curators criticized the decision in public protests, arguing that these museums underestimated the ability of black audiences to face difficult content head-on. Among the signatories were Julie Meletu, Adrian Piper, Pope and many other black artists. L, Martin Pearer, Lorna Simpson, Henry Taylor, Stanley Whitney. In response, the museum has shortened its planned postponement, and the exhibition will open at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in May 2022. Houston Museum of Art In the fall, it is now on display at the National Museum. The Tate Modern in London will be your final destination.
The horrific protests didn’t materialize in any city, but the National Gallery exhibition, which runs through August 27, is a quiet revelation. This work contains a fairly extensive selection of the artist’s exploration of pure abstraction in the 1950s, including Voyage (1956). This is a cluster of dirty, layered patches of color coalescing against a whitish ground in a subtly reminiscent way. Willem de Kooning while expecting Cy Twombly.
But most interestingly, driven early by his own experiences of outsiderity as a Jewish refugee in Montreal, then California, and later as a erudite artist, It’s a deep dive into the long career of an artist whose work is politically involved. Speaking in the language of Abstract Expressionism (he and Jackson Pollock were friends since high school), he was never comfortable abandoning his subject.
At the National Gallery, a new introductory video narrated by Harry Cooper, one of the exhibition’s lead curators, provides an excellent entry into Gaston’s world. The violently repressed workers’ strikes, the rogue cops aiding the Ku Klux Klan, the shadow of the Holocaust, the Jim Crow horrors and the subsequent mainstream resistance to the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War. All invaded Gaston’s seemingly cheerful mood. painting. One look at “Rug” (1976), a disembodied limb piled with oversized shoes, brings to mind R. Crumb’s cartoons and what he calls “stupid men in big shoes.” you might remember. But a closer look reveals a sense of sadness. Victims of gas chambers, victims of war, what is there but a corpse?
When Clan’s painting debuted at the Marlborough Galleries in 1970, it was controversial not because of its subject, but because it had a subject in the first place. Unlike his earlier white supremacist themes, such as A Picture for the Conspirators (1930), which depicted lynchings of all horrors, Gaston attempted to undermine the power of the KKK through humor, We are asking you to look behind its terrifying reputation. And its members are seen as a bunch of hopelessly old-fashioned clowns wearing patchwork sheets, riding jalopies, and smoking stogies.
That Gaston’s Clan paintings are so convincing is unique in the history of art by 20th-century (and even 21st-century) American artists. It is Gaston’s willingness to involve himself in the KKK-controlled white establishment. Just the most spectacular symbol. That he thought these were his self-portraits is easily believed by seeing “The Studio” (1969), in which the hooded protagonist paints his own portrait while smoking a cigarette. “My attempt was not really to explain,” he said of the piece. “I imagined that I was living with Krang. What would it be like to be evil?” I understood that I was an accomplice. Blue,” he said in 1977.
The presentation of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston exhibition was replete with trigger warnings, slide-top exhibits, and handouts describing the potential traumatic experience of viewing Klan’s paintings. The National Gallery was less heavy-handed. Wall labels inform the viewer of the difficult content ahead without assuming or anticipating that the viewer will be offended or traumatized. Also, the clan paintings are set up in a separate room that visitors can easily bypass. All in all respectful without being condescending.
Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art, has come under fire for his outspoken defense of the exhibition’s decision to postpone it. The museum’s joint statement cites the need to “incorporate additional perspectives and opinions to shape how Gaston’s work is presented to the public.” For Feldman, that means a structural shift in the museum, increasing the number of members of the leadership team who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color from 0 to 60 percent, and reducing the number of board members (at least among the appointed members) to 0. to 40 percent. . Acquisition of work by women, non-binary artists, and artists of color has surged.
But the National Gallery’s ‘Philip Gaston Now’ exhibition is not without its nasty conflicts. The Washington exhibition includes a complete painting of the same artist’s “Poor Richard” on a separate floor, made shortly after the 1970 Marlborough performance by the Gaston Foundation’s promise to donate to the facility. version is displayed. (The Houston edition does not include this series at all for space reasons, and the Tate edition follows suit for the same reason. The Boston edition included only a small portion of it.)
Inspired in part by the publication of Our Gang by his friend Philip Roth and the Pentagon Papers, published in the summer of 1971, the Poor Richard series is a bitter, resentful, frustrating, and And often portrays hilarious reactions. President Richard Nixon at the time. Before Watergate, Mr. Gaston’s anger stemmed from what he saw as Mr. Nixon’s disingenuous reception of minority voters and his covert ties with China despite his hardline anti-communist espionage at home. It was aimed at entering into negotiations. Gaston chose 73 of his 164 paintings on the subject for his graphic novel that never materialized.
As he came to power, Nixon’s nose became longer and more penis-like, and his jaw more testicle-like. Henry Kissinger is represented only by thick-rimmed spectacles (in one scene they fly to China in a propeller plane, in the next they return home after Chinese artillery shoots down their spectacles). Vice President Spiro Agnew, on the other hand, is depicted as a triangular mass. It doesn’t look like Gaston’s cartoonish Klansman.
But some paintings stopped my steps.
In one photo, Nixon holds a young black girl in his arms and plays for the camera. The use of racist stereotypes here is shocking. In a later instance, he showed up to a Halloween party in black. In another picture, he is shown addressing an African with white googly eyes and white lips. Elsewhere, Nixon prepares for a visit to China in embroidered long mountains, pigtails and a so-called Fu Manchu mustache. His eyes are slightly tilted upwards.
In a book featuring the “Poor Richard” series, published by the National Gallery in 2020 to coincide with “Philip Gaston Now,” Cooper, author and curator of the exhibition, said about these images: not mentioned at all. In the exhibition itself, the opening wall label of the gallery dedicated to the series adds a warning about “depiction of anti-black and anti-Asian racism,” but says the caricatures are Nixon’s representations. Beyond short statements. As for attitudes, no further discussion of images takes place.
In a phone interview, Cooper agreed that some of the paintings used racist imagery, but felt Gaston’s approach could be “contextualized by the rest of the series”. rice field.
Furthermore, “In Gaston’s view, Nixon panders to various voter groups, including blacks, hippies, youth voters, and older people, and we are essentially caricatures of all those that are comments on Nixon’s racism.” have,” he added.
Musa Meyer, Gaston’s daughter and president of the Gaston Foundation, characterized the caricatures as unique among Gaston’s work, saying in another telephone conversation: Rather, he denounces Nixon’s own hypocrisy. “
Gaston’s approach is well-known in the history of political caricature, often relying on the most direct visual cues to convey meaning, even if those cues have turned into stereotypes. But no matter how familiar the strategy is, or how numb some people are to it, it’s still worth asking the question, “Is this all right?”
Gaston’s Clan portrays a kneecap supremacist through humor. But while the racist stereotypes in “Poor Richard” may help denounce Nixon, they also drag down his victims as collateral damage. When an artist like Kara Walker circulates anti-black imagery, sometimes shockingly demeaning, she does so not merely to recreate that violence, but to transform it and challenge the audience. is there.
The issue here is not censorship. Nor is it the relatively uninteresting or narrow question of whether an artist was racist. Gaston was never a covert white supremacist.
But Gaston, in particular, is a much more effective and effective way to combat the noxious anti-blackness seen around him just a year or so before his “Poor Richard” painting of Clunn at the Marlborough Gallery. , found a way to be infinitely brave, and this series is offensive. . Perhaps he himself was aware of it. He was ready to put his hand-picked picture of Poor Richard in a binder and send it to the publisher, but he never got around to mailing it.
Philip Guston now
National Museum until August 27th. Washington DC, NW, 6th and Constitution Avenue, nga.gov.
