Amna: Two years ago, four
museums were set to present a
retrospective of painter Philip
guston.
And then, in one of the biggest
controversies to hit the art
world in the last few years, it
all imploded.
Now, the show has finally
launched at the museum of fine
arts in Boston.
Special correspondent Jared
Bowen of gbh Boston has the
story for our arts and culture
series, canvas.
And a warning, some of the
artwork may be disturbing to
some viewers.
Jared: Philip guston was the
jewish son of immigrant parents
from present-day Ukraine, who
learned early on what it meant
to be a Jew in America.
>> The seminal moment for him is
in 1933 in L.A., when he submits
a work showing Klan violence to
an exhibition, and it's
vandalized by the red squad of
the L.A.P.D., which has
affiliations with the Klan.
Jared: The event marked him
deeply enough that within four
years, the then-phillip
Goldstein changed his name to
guston, and he embarked on a
career that, alongside his high
school friend Jackson Pollock,
would make him one of the most
famous names in 20th-century
art.
>> Guston is, in the 1940's,
1950's, one of the great
abstract expressionist painters
selling out shows, but always
feels the limits of that
approach to painting.
Jared: Ethan Lasser is
co-curator of the nationally
touring exhibition Philip guston
now, which recently opened at
the museum of fine arts, Boston.
It's a retrospective that charts
how hate and anti-semitism
churned within guston.
>> In 1968, as he's watching TV,
he's watching Kent state, he's
watching Vietnam, and he says,
"What kind of man am I, going
into my studio to adjust a red
to a blue to make abstract
paintings?
What can an abstract painting
actually say in the world of
civil rights?"
Jared: So the painter made a
pivot, walking away from
abstract expressionism.
It was abrupt and, to the art
world, unforgivable.
Taking cues from the Sunday
comics, and krazy kat in
particular, he started painting
cartoonish images, often in
pink, a comics color, but one
that can also be read as fleshy
and raw.
And, in a motif that would
appear throughout most of his
50-year career, he painted the
Ku klux Klan.
Guston did not discuss his work.
That's been left to interpreters
like Lasser.
>> What he paints are images of
klansmen who had haunted guston
since he was a young artist.
Images of himself in a hood, as
a klansman, painting.
Images that call to account the
underlying, I think, structures
of racism in the art world and
in America in general.
>> How do you create a way for
those images to be understood?
Jared: Matthew Teitelbaum is the
mfa's director.
He, along with the heads of the
three other presenting museums,
were caught in a firestorm of
controversy in 2020, when the
show was set to open at the
national gallery in Washington,
D.C.
>> We're marching for black
life.
Jared: In the wake of George
Floyd's murder and ensuing
protests, the museums -- which
also included mfa Houston and
London's Tate modern-- chose to
postpone the show four years,
when, they announced, the work,
including its kkk imagery, could
be, quote, "More clearly
interpreted."
>> We felt it was a very charged
moment to talk about race and to
not have the community voices
helping us interpret how these
images would be received.
It was never about whether or
not guston had a voice that we
needed to hear at any time and
at all time.
Jared: But that's not how the
art world saw it.
Thousands of artists, curators,
and writers signed a petition
blasting the museums' decision
and accused them of, quote,
"Lacking faith in the
intelligence of their audience."
And worse.
How much did it hit you when you
were accused by artists, you
being the four institutions, of
cowardice?
>> I never had anybody say that
about me before.
And it wasn't something that I
even thought about.
It wasn't about avoiding
something.
Jared: Instead, the mfa is now
launching the national tour two
years ahead of schedule.
It's curated the show unlike any
other, inviting museum staff to
weigh in, engaging a trauma
specialist, and expanding the
curatorial team to four,
including guest curator Terence
Washington.
>> The debate around the
controversy talked about this
exhibition as being the one that
would start a conversation about
And it would hold up a mirror to
people who had stormed the
capitol, dot-dot-dot.
And I just thought, yeah, but,
like, are those people coming
in?
This feels really abstract.
Jared: Washington's approach had
less to do with guston than
museums themselves.
Are they, he wonders, as
accessible as they claim?
>> To me, that's the central
thing.
How do we understand why
exhibitions are done and for
whom they're done?
All these places are open
because they're supposed to be
for everybody.
And I'm just not sure that
that's the case.
Jared: Each of the four museums
is devising their own plan for
showing the work.
Here at the mfa, some of
guston's most searing hood
paintings are on view in a
single gallery.
If visitors prefer to avoid
them, they're invited to
circumvent the space.
If they do enter, it's
deliberately claustrophobic.
>> We hope that will cause
people to be a little less
comfortable, or cause people to
aestheticize them, and neuter
the paintings a bit less.
Jared: Because Washington wants
to ensure that we never get so
used to seeing Klan images that
we don't really see them
anymore.
Just as he doesn't want museums
to get used to programming with
the same old, limited
perspective.
>> Whiteness is not abstract.
Whiteness is structuring the
conversation around this
exhibition.
It's not something that we can
put on and take off.
Jared: For the "Pbs newshour,"
I'm Jared Bowen in Boston.
Amna: And on the "Pbs newshour"
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