Two years ago I began revisiting Philip Guston’s work. I thought I was more interested in his WPA murals and the influence of Renaissance artists like Piero on his early projects. At the time I was working on a set of images on the theme of war & peace and was particularly interested in Piero’s war scenes. But the more I looked at Guston, the more interested I became in his later very raw depictions of violence in the American South. I created a mixed media response to those images, incorporating some of my old prints of war scenes, playing with Piero, and inserting Guston-like characters. I called it ‘Remembering Guston Remembering’. When I learned of a scheduled National Gallery Guston retrospective, I considered a post-Covid trip to DC. No sooner had I begun imagining this trip than I learned about the Show’s cancellation. I was amazed at the controversy this proposed retrospective generated—some of the work to be included was deemed racist. In the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement the Gallery’s caution was understandable but it was disappointing that the NG did not rise to the challenge to contextualize the controversial imagery in some of the work—an exploration of raw, racist American history laid out by one of the country’s great 20th c artists and intellectuals. Maybe the National Gallery was persuaded that our own brutal, racist history was too much for us to see and that we were incapable of understanding the artist’s irony. Fortunately there was enough dissent to cause reconsideration, and rescheduling. No doubt we’ll all be very carefully instructed…..
