What the furor over Philip Guston—and the demand for Black American superstar artists—tells us about performative progressivism

It was just announced that the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York would receive a gift of 96 paintings and 124 drawings of Philip Guston’s from the personal collection of his daughter, Musa Mayer—a collection spanning the entirety of his storied four-decade and multi-style career. The gift was made on the condition that the Met would permanently exhibit about a dozen of his works at any given time. While museums are often reluctant to accept gifts with these curatorial caveats, the Met’s director, Max Hollein, eagerly claimed the prospect of being the premier institutional custodian of “one of the important artistic figures of the 20th century.”

The gift is, no doubt, a sensational acquisition of the oeuvre of a path-charting artist whose experimentation and disregard for convention has produced a constellation of (belated) admirers and aesthetic successors. But there remains a deep dissonance between the celebration of this “provocative artist” and the institutional anxieties around—really, a profound inability and refusal to contend with—the political themes in this work beyond easy ascriptions of “anti-racism.”

Considering how the hullaballoo around the initial postponement of the Guston survey revolved heavily around his Ku Klux Klan paintings from the 1960s and ‘70s, the eventual and largely defanged presentation of the artist’s apparently self-evident “challenge” to whiteness was weakly taken up through the traveling exhibition’s failure to robustly contend with the very “anti-racism” they purported to appreciate about his work.

The first iteration of the exhibition failed to take seriously that Guston was not only standing in solidarity with Black people (as with his vandalized mural in support of the Scottsboro Boys or in the ominous lynching scene in Drawing for Conspirators, which he created as a teenager), he was also considering and confronting his own implicated positionality in white supremacy as a white Jewish man.

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