Four years after the decision to delay the exhibition Philip Guston Now to what would have been this year, it’s still not clear how and why it was made. The directors associated with the museums that planned it, and the director of the Ford Foundation, which funded it, expressed themselves to the public in platitudes and prevarications. They said many foolish things, but one of the worst was when National Gallery of Art director Kaywin Feldman told Artnet, “I’m not sure that I would argue that the public needs a white artist to explain racism to them right now.”
Philip Guston Now appeared in 2022, delayed one year instead of three, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Again, why it was no longer necessary to wait until 2024 to mount the exhibition, as per their original announcement, the directors never explained. One of the ostensible reasons for the pause was to include more Black voices in the exhibition. (“Black” appears capitalized in this essay over the objections of its author.) This confused the artist’s daughter and director of the Guston Foundation, Musa Mayer. As she said to the Guardian in February 2021, “The issues they raised were all fully addressed in the catalogue, in which two black artists were among the many contributors who had written brilliantly about the work.” One of those artists was Trenton Doyle Hancock, whose paintings deal smartly and honestly with Guston’s imagery.
When I reviewed the MFA Boston appearance of the show, I noted that the museums “established an economy of racial credibility in which Jewish pain is worth less than Black pain.” Implicitly, the museums told us Jews that we need Black permission to have an experience. I have never entirely shaken the impression that when I’m in a museum, particularly the MFA Boston, I am standing in a place which, to appropriate the germane rhetoric, hates my Jewish body for troubling the simplistic narrative of the ethos known with diminishing justification as “antiracism.”
That was before the events of October 7, 2023. Art institutions that fell over themselves to issue statements in honor of Black lives in 2020 and Ukrainian sovereignty in 2022 clammed up like criminals on the occasion of the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust. It was followed by grotesque displays of art world antisemitism, couched in anti-Zionism. The entrance to the home of Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak was vandalized with splashes of blood-red paint and a sign calling her a “white supremacist Zionist,” for which three people, including an artist, were charged with hate crimes. In February, a group claiming to be “anti-Zionist Jews” attempted to prevent a talk by Israeli artist Zoya Cherkassky at the Jewish Museum, given in conjunction with an exhibition of her drawings responding to October 7. The protest appeared to be retaliation for Cherkassky’s characterization of the signatories of an open letter in Artforum, decrying Israel’s military reply to October 7 but never mentioning Hamas or its Israeli hostages, as “ignorant bitches who have no clue about what is going on.”
There’s a new exhibition at the Jewish Museum, Draw Them In, Paint Them Out: Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Philip Guston, with a catalogue of the same title to be published January 7. Museum exhibitions take a long time to put together, and the circumstances that justify them at their inception sometimes evaporate by the time they appear. That happened to Philip Guston Now, and it happened to Draw Them In.
The premise of Draw Them In was to pair a sampling of Guston’s later Klan paintings with a survey of Hancock’s work that they inspired. Since some of the former appeared at the MFA Boston in a room on the other side of a sign warning viewers about their content and indicating an exit from the show by which they could avoid them, it was encouraging to see them displayed as if viewers had a usual allotment of sense.
Hancock has an inner dialogue with a cast of avatars for one psychological state or another. The main one is Torpedoboy, a Black male figure dressed in a yellow body suit and underpants atop it. He and the others interact with Klansmen rendered in the Guston style, pared down, mixing malevolence and banality. Hancock’s tendency is horror vacui, and I get the sense that he’s taking cues from Guston to moderate it. These characters play out mysterious racial dramas, interacting with alternating violence and cooperation as Torpedoboy, to some degree a persona for Hancock himself, navigates a surreal universe of identity in which the rules are never clear.
Hancock’s color is almost entirely diagrammatic: primary colors, secondary colors, black, and white, mostly applied at full intensity inside of drawings inspired by underground comics. If he doesn’t stop himself, Hancock will render forms with monomaniacal detail, which is technically impressive but doesn’t always fulfill a compelling expressive purpose. He excises and appliqués text into his work, adding a literary or conversational element that’s often intriguing. Many of the paintings have colorful cups or plastic caps glued to them, which for the most part don’t feel necessary. Hancock has a strong sense of wallpaper, and I mean that in a good way: formal ideas that seem lifted from Pattern & Decoration painting enter his works at screaming volume and real urgency. Schlep and Screw, Knowledge Rental Pawn Exchange Service (2017, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 60 x 60 x 6 inches) typifies the effect.
His paintings would probably look better without the Gustons nearby. Guston’s Klansmen from the late 1960s came after more than two decades of serious and successful exploration of abstraction. Their simplicity and subtlety are a respite after looking at the Hancocks.
It’s in the Draw Them In catalogue that the exhibition most feels like a pre-October 7 production. Aside from the plates of the works, its three textual sections, in order of both appearance and increasing interest, are a curator’s essay by Rebecca Shaykin, an interview of the artist with Virginia Museum of Fine Arts curator Valerie Cassel Oliver, and a conversation moderated by Shaykin between Hancock and comics artist Art Spiegelman, of Maus fame. In the midst of recounting Guston’s and Hancock’s biographies, Shaykin repeats the dubious claim of the organizers of Philip Guston Now that showing Guston’s later Klan paintings was impossible in the early 2020s because “The Klansman — that ur-symbol of racial terror — painted in a satirical manner by a white Jewish artist might be misinterpreted.” After recalling the backlash from the decision, including from Mayer, Shaykin notes that Philip Guston Now “ultimately opened in May 2022, to great acclaim.”
That’s not exactly true. Even some critics who were committed racial progressives thought the MFA Boston’s handling of the show was absurdly patronizing. Shaykin remarks that against the background of the first Trump presidency, the disastrous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, and the manner in which “MAGA hats … blended with Confederate flags and swastikas,” it seemed like the right moment to bring Guston back to the Jewish Museum, for the first time since his solo exhibition there in 1966. “But instead of retreading the past, we sought to move the conversation into the present by giving a platform to a leading Black voice in the contemporary art world.” That of course was Hancock, and once again, we Jews were having an experience allowed by the institutionally bestowed grace of Black permission.
Hancock, by his own description in the Draw Them In catalogue, did not encounter racism growing up in Paris, Texas. The formative trauma of his youth occurred when his Christian fundamentalist family burned his collection of comics, Dungeons & Dragons manuals, and Garbage Pail Kids trading cards. It wasn’t until he was an adult and grew conscious of the sordid history of the town, including a lynching so brutal that the story made The New York Times in 1893, that race issues entered his work. This coincided with a politicization of the visual arts that ascended in the second half of the 1990s. Consequently he finished an MFA at the Tyler School of Art and almost immediately became one of the youngest artists ever to show in a Whitney Biennial exhibition, in 2000 and 2002. His career has gone from success to success ever since.
While I don’t thrill at his paintings, Hancock deserves credit for using this opportunity, afforded to a tiny sliver of artists, to pursue a body of work that’s thoughtful, respects its sources, respects the viewer, and employs his talents in a canny way. Kehinde Wiley, to whom the Jewish Museum gave a solo show in 2012, used a similar career path to churn out plodding realist oils for an apparently bottomless market for pictures of Black people. Hancock, in contrast, is enormously visually inventive and willing to subject his style to questioning. In his search for the image and his willingness to receive one, no matter how strange, he legitimately resembles Guston.
Much of Draw Them In is devoted to a representation of Epidemic! Presents: Step and Screw!, a 2014 series of comics panels in ink and excised lettering on mat board. Because of the syntax, it works better in book form than it does in a museum installation. The story tells of how Torpedoboy is lured into a house of Gustonesque Klansmen and tricked into putting his head through a noose. He escapes by requesting a last meal of ground beef, which transforms him into a superpowered football player, and he beats up his antagonists like a spinach-fueled Popeye. Under the overt theme of racial conflict is an exercise in dealing with Guston as an artistic ancestor, obliging Hancock to adopt the older artist’s style without succumbing to it.
Much of the concluding section of the catalogue — the conversation with Spiegelman — records an enthusiastic chat about comics history that aficionados will enjoy. It’s not widely appreciated, but Spiegelman art-directed the Garbage Pail Kids cards, and Hancock is so obsessed with them — having lost his as a child to what sounds like an overzealous purification ritual — that he has acquired some of the original artwork from Topps. The conversation also features a screeching detour:
Art Speigelman: [If you were to consider the Jewish psychiatrist and social crusader Frederic] Wertham, the first time he saw a comic book … he was horrified. His first initiative was against racism in comics, and it led him to do a book called Seduction of the Innocent [in 1954]. It became a bestseller, because everybody was beginning to panic about comics, the first medium aimed directly at children. And it led to the actual burning of comic books.
Rebecca Shaykin: So Wertham intended to fight against racism, a noble cause, but wound up starting a crusade of censorship with much broader implications?
Art Spiegelman: I hated Wertham just a little bit less than Hitler when I was growing up, because he was responsible for the literal burning of comic books.
No one answers Shaykin’s question, but yes, Wertham’s antiracist efforts turned of their own accord into iconoclasm, carried out in the name of protecting the public from its own misinterpretations. The interlocutors avert their eyes from this history before realization sets in that the same thing happened with Philip Guston Now. No lessons were learned from 2020, nor will be any time soon.
It’s not the fault of Hancock or the Jewish Museum, but this exhibition and catalogue would have been more palatable if they had come out prior to October 2023. It’s frustrating to witness Hancock’s art-world validation for excavating a 19th-century lynching, while an Israeli artist can’t present her own experience of October 7 without condemnations and attempts to silence her. High-profile creators now deny that Hamas raped anyone unto death in an attack that they documented themselves. The invocation of MAGA hats blending with Confederate flags has lost traction in a year in which we saw the keffiyeh blend with the Nazi salute. Exploding antisemitism is leading to assaults on Jews that would be in the nation’s opinion columns for weeks if racist whites had committed them against Blacks. Instead the pundits are failing to grapple with what’s going on, and so are the arts. We don’t need a Black artist to explain racism to us right now. Not to us Jews, and not at The Jewish Museum.
