← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
Artist Trenton Doyle Hancock Engages With Philip Guston at The Jewish Museum
00:22:08
The Jewish Museum is presenting Philip Guston's work alongside Trenton Doyle Hancock.
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Listener
Listener support WNYC Studios.
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Alison Stewart
This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. The Jewish Museum is presenting a show called Draw Them In, Paint Them Out. Trenton Doyle Hancock confronts Philip Guston. The late Philip Guston was a Jewish artist who depicted she Klu Klux Klan members as cartoons. Those works inspired a youngest Texas based artist, Trenton Doyle Hancock, who, like Gustin, loved comics growing up. Hancock was described Gustin as, quote, the artist I can't get away from. The show is on View through March 30, and Trenton Doyle Hancock is with me now. Hi, Trenton.
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Listener
Hi.
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Alison Stewart
Hi. We also have the Juice Museum creator, Rebecca Shakin. Welcome, Rebecca.
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Rebecca Shaken
Thank you so much for having me.
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Alison Stewart
So, Rebecca, you first got the idea to organize an exhibit of Philip Guston's work in 2017. Why did you want to present Gustin in conversation with Trenton?
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Rebecca Shaken
Yeah, well, 2017 was a pretty difficult year, as you may remember. That was the year of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. We were seeing just an unprecedented rise in both anti black violence as well as anti Semitic attacks as well. And as the Jewish Museum, we felt it was really imperative that we do something in our programming to reflect this kind of crisis of white supremacy that was upon us at the time. I mean, Philip Guston was an artist who was very much on our mind as someone who in the 1960s and 70s had done incredible satirical work on the Klan. But we wanted to find a way to make it feel more more current and more relevant for today. And so that's where Trenton's work comes in. I discovered that he had been making work not just about the Klan, but about Philip Guston's Klansmen in particular and really dealing with Guston's legacy directly. And I thought, what better way to bring us up into the current moment but that to bring Trenton's work into direct dialogue with Guston in our gallery spaces.
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Alison Stewart
Trenton, you said how much Philip Guston's work has inspired you since you were young. According to the catalog, you slept with his monograph under your little pillow. What did you see in his work that inspired you as a youngin?
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Listener
Well, I came to his work when I was in my early 20s. One of my professors had introduced me to his practice by giving me one of his catalogs. And I had at that point already been working with images of the Klan and starting to think about issues of. Of racism and white supremacy within my own work. And so it was great to see that there was this anchor, you know, in the art in art history that had Already kind of dealt with some of those issues in a way that, you know, I was already kind of working through in terms of it being this more cartoon based approach to the material, you know, coming at it from more of editorial cartoonist standpoint or a political cartoonist standpoint. And so there was that, but it was also the color and the shapes and the way that he was arranging those colors and shapes on the canvases that really, I think, hit me first and foremost.
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Trenton Doyle Hancock
Yeah, you and Gustin, they share a sense of humor in your work, even when dealing with dark, dark subjects. Trenton, why is humor useful to you?
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Listener
Humor is from an earth, like, from my early days, like being like a child. I saw the Wiz in the theater, and that was the first film that I ever saw at age 4. And it was at once very scary and kind of funny. And I think at that point, something fused for me that this idea of humor and fear could go hand in hand in kind of helping you or helping a person approach think, like difficulty or trauma. And, yeah, just throughout my life, I've kind of returned back to that idea of if you can dress something that's traumatic in a humorous outfit, then you can. You can hand. You can handle it, or you can better handle it that way.
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Trenton Doyle Hancock
Rebecca, I want to get this out of the way because in 2024, museums in the United States and the UK decided to postpone what was a planned traveling exhibition of Guston's work. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the Tate in London. Did you have any sort of similar conversations? Were there any hesitations?
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Rebecca Shaken
You know, obviously we talked about it. It was. We couldn't get away from that conversation. Right. It was. It was ever present everywhere in the art world. Everyone was talking about the Guston retrospective and the reasons for the delay. But I have to say that after that controversy of delaying the exhibition by about two years, in the end, it really, I think, made us more eager than ever to pursue the idea of this exhibition. We saw such a groundswell of support from the art world, and particularly from artists who are writing in and voicing their support of Philip Guston, of his vision, of what his satirical paintings were attempting to do at the time and what they could still do for us today. It just felt like he was exactly the right artist for this moment. So, yeah, I mean, we certainly. We took it very seriously. But I think also, you know, part of the concern over that exhibition was the lack of black perspective in that show. Among you know, the curatorial staff, the art that was on view, certainly the fact that Gustin was a Jewish artist and looking at the Klan from. From that understanding and experience of having been raised in a Jewish immigrant family is one that was very important and came to light in that show as well as in ours. But I think in this day and age, particularly post George Floyd, that was really important to us, too. And all the more reason for us to work with Trenton on this show.
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Alison Stewart
Trenton, any reference to the KKK is serious, but Gustin paints them as cartoons. You've done similar work in the work of your characters. Your characters have defeated the Klan. How does characterizing the cl. How does in art, has it changed how we perceive their power?
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Listener
Well, a. I think any representation of the Klan as a terror organization kind of, it puts. It puts them in a visible place. You know, it's like this idea of terror organizations hiding behind the scenes or doing things in the shadows is kind of how we have come to understand how, you know, decisions get made in, you know, organizations like that. So I think any representation of that in art is putting it out there and therefore helping people remember that this is. This is something that exists. This is something that needs to be addressed. And so I think art is sometimes the last place people, you know, expect to go and be educated in that way. But I think it's a wonderful thing, actually.
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Trenton Doyle Hancock
We're speaking about an exhibition at the Jewish Museum called Draw Them, Paint Them Out. Trenton Doyle Hancock confronts Philip Guston.
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Alison Stewart
It's on view through March 30th. My guests are Rebecca Shaken, a curator.
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Trenton Doyle Hancock
And Trenton Doyle Hancock.
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Alison Stewart
He's an artist.
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Trenton Doyle Hancock
He's a guest curator on this as well.
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Alison Stewart
So, Trenton, you share a love of comics.
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Trenton Doyle Hancock
You had a weekly comic strip in college. We see your influence everywhere in your work.
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Alison Stewart
In this particular show, what did comics offer to you?
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Listener
Comics. Well, coming from a small town, Paris, Texas, there were no museums close by. The closest museum in Dallas, and since we had family there, we would travel there a few times a year when I was a kid. But it wasn't to go to the museums. It was be with the family or we'd go to the mall. And so it wasn't. Art wasn't in my life in that way, but comics were. You could go to the local gas station in Paris and get these beautifully drawn things, and I could take that home and study it and redraw the images that I saw, and it would spark my own imagination. And we also had encyclopedias at home, thankfully, because my folks are all educators. So we had those handy, and I was able to look through those quite often and see master paintings and see how people were approaching figuration, abstraction, imagery, and kind of cross reference that with the comics. And so in some ways, I was able to cobble together this understanding of a greater art world in my imagination. But, yeah, comics helped in terms of access to that.
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Alison Stewart
Rebecca, Philip Gustin had a difficult childhood. He was the one to discover his father's suicide when he was just 10 years old. We see some imagery that points towards that. What do you think drawing provided him as a child? And what did art provide him as a child?
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Rebecca Shaken
I think it was a refuge for him, I think, for a lot of people. I think, Trenton, you've spoken about this too, that as a child, you know, so much is outside of your control, and particularly trying to process a trauma like that, the grief of losing one's father at a very young age, that's. That's a really difficult thing. And so what we. What we know about his early life, so he was 10 years old when that happened to him. And that was also right around the time he started drawing. And he would kind of retreat into a closet in his family home and. And draw by the light of a spare light bulb, which is a recurring image in his work, would become one for the whole rest of his career, really. So that, yeah, being able to create a world of your own on the page, in a way, and have control over what that looks like, I think was really important for him, as it's been for other artists, too.
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Trenton Doyle Hancock
Rebecca, we learned that he changed his name in 1935, dropping one L&Philip and changing his last name from Goldstein to Gustin. Do we know why he changed his name?
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Rebecca Shaken
You know, we can really only speculate. He never said exactly why, but that was, you know, mid-1930s. Think about what's happening over in Europe. The rise of Nazism, another time of just rising and rampant antisemitism here in the United States. So many Jewish Americans were changing their names, Anglicizing them, or in his case, making it sound somewhat French. It was a means of self preservation, self protection, perhaps a way to get ahead in life, you know. He also was about to marry A woman, Musa McKim, whose family was not Jewish. And perhaps he may have changed his name to maybe placate them or allay their fears for their safety as well. So, yeah, any. Any number of reasons. But it's. It's certainly, you know, that story of Jewish assimilation is one that not just his.
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Trenton Doyle Hancock
I wanted to Ask, you know, Trenton in the New York Times article. I'm hoping I'm remembering this right. Muse MacKenzie said that people have wanted to do collaborations with her father's work, but that they didn't really understand his vision. But she felt that you did. Do you. Can you explain that vision?
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Listener
Well, kind, sort of.
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Trenton Doyle Hancock
I know it's hard to ask you that.
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Listener
I can. It's kind of going back to the beginning for him. You kind of look at his. The arc of his career in three different. Three parts. It's like there's the social realist, WPA muralist version of Gustin, and that's, you know, the first, you know, part of his life, you know, just from a teenager, you know, up until, you know, the mid-30s or around 1940 perhaps. And then he started to kind of break away from figuration and break down the figures until they actually became abstract. And. And then there's that middle part of his career that's. That's abstraction. And it's sort of like him, in a way, going undercover, you know, this artist that's on this search for a kind of essence or truth in imagery. Abstraction was a way for him to address ideas of purity as they were in the modernist era, Greenbergian era, I say, of abstraction. So he aligned himself in some ways with that movement, but then he, as he quotes, he got tired of all of that purity, and he was longing for something that was more tangible and more real. And so the images came back from, you know, and so it was a process, you know, of kind of transitioning to the imagery. But once the images came back, you could see evidence of that first part of his career where, you know, everything was quite clear because it had to be legible for the public to understand the thing, you know, the murals. But later in life, it was so much more personal. And you could see that personal quality in the way that he was approaching the line work and the fact that the comics that he loved as a child came back the. George Herriman came back in his hand in that later work. So I think. But it was also the evidence of the abstraction was there, too. You were seeing kind of these forms that were almost morphing into other forms. And that's, I think, something that was learned through abstraction for him. And so I think that may be what Musa is talking about is kind of my love of his arc and what that means.
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Alison Stewart
We're speaking about an exhibition at the Jewish Museum called Draw Them In, Paint Them Out. Trenton Doyle Hancock confronts Philip Guston. Rebecca, There's A piece, the studio, and it's a self portrait. When Gustin represents himself as a KKK member and he says, quote, I perceive myself as being behind the hood. What do you think he meant by that?
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Rebecca Shaken
Yeah, another one of these enigmatic statements. Well, I think he was really interested in the nature of evil, in the psychology of that. And while in going undercover, as we were talking about in a different way this time of kind of thinking of what that might be like to be part of that organization, I think also in thinking about, you know, the conversation around his name change and assimilation, you know, by the late 1960s, American Jews were in a pretty different place from where they had been in the 30s. And it's possible that he was thinking about that in that time, about what it meant for him to take on a white identity or a whiter Persona than he had had in his youth. And what would be the most extreme form of that or variation, while it might look like a KKK member. So for me, when I see these Klansmen paintings and you see him and his buddies, you know, riding around in cars or, you know, banging around in the studio and painting self portraits, there's a bit of a self indictment there, I think, and a kind of warning maybe to others to think about their position in society and their relationship to privilege and what they feel they need to do about that.
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Alison Stewart
In thinking about Philip Guston's work today, as presented in dialogue with Trenton's work, I'm going to ask you both this. I'll let you go first, Rebecca, is why do you think the art and ideas in this exhibition are important as we begin the year 2025?
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Rebecca Shaken
Yeah, I mean, more important now than ever. You know, we opened this exhibition the night after the election, and, you know, there was a bit of a time capsule feel to the show. I think that it really kind of brings together the sort of thinking about where we've been as a country in these last couple of years. And we had hoped maybe that it would be a kind of like, period at the end of that sentence. But now, you know, we're facing another pretty difficult road ahead. And I think it's. This show becomes more important now than we could have ever imagined in continuing this dialogue about. About white supremacy, about what that means for both the Jewish and the black community and for all other folks who find them ourselves affected by that. And hopefully it helps us forge a path ahead.
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Alison Stewart
Trenton, why do you think it's important.
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Trenton Doyle Hancock
To reckon with these ideas the beginning of 2025?
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Listener
Well, you know, what Gustin was dealing with in the 60s was in the, you know, America and the world, frankly, dealing with this idea of a coming off demagogue. Demagogue or demagogues and evil and how, you know, characters can come to power that are evil. And, you know, he was thinking about this and trying to talk about it in his paintings. And part of that voice was quieted for decades in his work because the work that he was making, especially the harder imagery, the Klan imagery in academia, people weren't. They were addressing the paintings because they loved them, but they only talked about the formal qualities. How beautiful is this paint? Oh, my goodness. These forms are just so provocative. But the actual content was never addressed, not in the greater art world, in any important dialogue. So there were voices, I think, that were there that were ready to speak about these things and speak about his work in that context, but it was just never addressed until rather recently. And I think the idea of quieting ideas of white supremacy and the fact that these, this is an organism that just won't die. It doesn't want to die. It wants to stay in power and work its magic is something that has to be taken on head on. And so that conversation needs to stay alive. And whether it's through art, through other channels, it just needs to stay visible.
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Trenton Doyle Hancock
Trenton Doyle Hancock and Rebecca Shaken. We've been speaking about Draw Them In, Paint Them Out. Trenton Doyle Hancock confronts Philip Gustin. Thank you so much for your time today.
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Listener
Thank you. Appreciate it.
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Rebecca Shaken
Pleasure.
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Trenton Doyle Hancock
Coming up, a new exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York traces the rise of graffiti from trains to galleries. We'll hear from the creator, Sean Corcoran and Ars Leak and Jonas. That's next, right after the news.
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Ira Flatow
This is Ira Flato, host of Science Friday. For over 30 years, the science Friday team has been reporting high quality science and technology news, making science fun for curious people by covering everything from the outer reaches of space to the rapidly changing world of AI to the tiniest microbes in our bodies. Audiences trust our show because they know we're driven by a mission to inform and serve listeners first and foremost with important news they won't get anywhere else. And our sponsors benefit from that halo effect. For more information on becoming a sponsor, visit sponsorship.wnyc.org.