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Philip Guston Blockbuster Show Postponed by Four Museums
Sep 25, 2020
Four major art museums said they are postponing until 2024 a much-awaited retrospective of the modernist painter Philip Guston after taking into account the surging racial justice protests in the country, adding that the work needed to be framed by “additional perspectives and voices.” The works that the museums appear to be grappling with include white hooded Ku Klux Klan figures, a motif in the politically-engaged artist’s work since the early 1930s. The four museums that organized the exhibit, called “Philip Guston Now,” include the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Tate Modern in London, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In a joint statement released quietly on Monday, the museum directors said that they were “postponing the exhibition until a time 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.” The exhibition — which was advertised as a selection of roughly 125 paintings and 70 drawings — was supposed to begin its international tour this past summer, but the coronavirus pandemic resulted in its postponement until next year. Now, the tour won’t begin until 2024.
In the statement, the museum directors said that they recognized that the world is “very different” from what it was five years ago, when they started the project. “We feel it is necessary to reframe our programming and, in this case, step back, and bring in additional perspectives and voices to shape how we present Guston’s work to our public,” the directors said in the statement. “That process will take time.” The exhibition had previously been described as including Guston’s small panel paintings from 1968 through 1972, a time period in which he was “developing his new vocabulary of hoods, books, bricks, and shoes.” Some of the figures in Guston’s works included cartoonish white-hooded figures smoking cigars , riding in a car, or, in one of Guston’s most well-known works, painting a self portrait at an easel. Guston’s daughter, Musa Mayer, who wrote a memoir of her father, said in a statement that she was “deeply saddened” by the decision from the museums to postpone the exhibition, writing that her father had “dared to unveil white culpability, our shared role in allowing the racist terror that he had witnessed since boyhood.” “This should be a time of reckoning, of dialogue,” she wrote. “These paintings meet the moment we are in today. The danger is not in looking at Philip Guston’s work, but in looking away.”
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