In 1997, when Trenton Doyle Hancock was in his senior yr at Texas A&M College–Commerce, he wrote on a scrap of clean paper in giant outlined letters, amid homophonic phrase associations (“eggs stinked”) and drawings: LIKE GUSTON BUT BLACKER AND WORSE. This observe marked the start of his lengthy engagement with Philip Guston’s cartoonish depictions of hooded figures. That connection is the main focus of the very good exhibition Draw Them In, Paint Them Out: Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Philip Guston on the Jewish Museum, curated by Rebecca Shaykin.
A star of the present is one in every of Hancock’s graphic alter-egos, Torpedo Boy, a pot-bellied, balding Black superhero who wears white briefs and black boots over a brilliant yellow bodysuit. By his schlubby character, who possesses extra brains than brawn, Hancock takes on his model of Guston’s doltish Ku Klux Klan determine.
Philip Guston, “Courtyard” (1969), oil on canvas; Corridor Assortment (© The Property of Philip Guston)
The exhibition units the stage for this central encounter by offering documentation of a mural Guston painted for the John Reed Membership in Los Angeles in 1931 that was later destroyed, in addition to a fresco that he labored on in Morelia, Mexico, with Reuben Kadish, and Jules Langsner (“The Struggles Against Terrorism,” 1935), and “Drawing for Conspirators” (1930), one of many few surviving works from Guston’s early explorations of racism and state-sanctioned terror.
Guston’s personal artwork and life have been haunted by the trauma of his father’s suicide; on the age of 10, he found his father’s physique hanging within the household shed. He thought that if he assimilated by denying his Jewish heritage, the ache would reduce and maybe even go away. He developed his cartooning expertise as a member of a youth group that produced The Junior Occasions, a Sunday complement in The Los Angeles Occasions, and later made work for the John Reed Membership. In 1936, he adopted his good friend Jackson Pollock to New York and by 1950 he had moved away from figuration and towards abstraction, changing into an Summary Expressionist.
Guston deserted the Summary Expressionists when he realized that being a part of a bunch introduced no consolation for his despair, anger, and frustration; he knew he was censoring himself with the intention to be accepted and he had taken cowl in an orthodoxy. Guston teaches us a tough lesson: We should embrace our inescapable solitariness wherever it takes us.
Set up view of Draw Them In, Paint Them Out: Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Philip Guston on the Jewish Museum, New York. Left: Trenton Doyle Hancock, “The Former and the Ladder or Ascension and a Cinchin’” (2012); proper: Philip Guston, “The Ladder” (1978).
Hancock has additionally all the time adopted his personal trajectory with grace and humor, proving that one needn’t be part of any membership. In Epidemic! Presents: Step and Screw! (2014), which Shaykin calls “a surreal graphic memoir,” the artist presents 30 panels with two narratives, a graphic pictorial one above an episodic one composed of reversed embossed letters pressed into matte board. The pictorial narrative tells the story of Torpedo Boy. Whereas watching tv, he receives a telephone name asking him to exchange a light-weight bulb. It’s a set-up by members of the Ku Klux Klan, who intend to lynch him. Beneath every drawing is a self-contained, episodic fragment. The primary, dated 1878, is in regards to the Yellow Fever epidemic killing the mother and father and siblings of “ex-slave and abolitionist, Ida B. Wells.” Wells went on to develop into a journalist investigating lynchings and extensively accepted discriminatory practices in opposition to the Black neighborhood and people. Hancock’s written narrative particulars totally different information of her life, in addition to Guston’s and his personal.
In “The Studio” (1969), Guston depicts a hooded Klansman earlier than his easel, smoking a cigarette and portray his self-portrait. Above the easel is a naked gentle bulb and a clock with one hand. Guston implicates himself in a racist system, quite than dividing the world into “us” and “them.” Hancock’s “Globe Trotters” (2023) is a grid of 16 rectangles, every one displaying Torpedo Boy in profile. By the final panel, he has utterly morphed right into a hooded Klansman. These works are humorous, unhappy, bizarre, unsettling, and, most significantly, each direct and opaque. I’m reminded of the cartoonist Walt Kelly’s anthropomorphic possum, Pogo, asserting: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
Philip Guston, “The Studio” (1969), oil on canvas; Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, New York (© The Property of Philip Guston)
Guston described “The Studio” as a self-portrait. In making an attempt to find what was important to his character, he acknowledged that he was implicitly the Different that he condemned. Hancock has talked about being raised in a fear-based faith, the place the enemy was capable of come into his life via the issues he possessed. In his use of synthetic fur and bottle caps, which he collects and types by colour, and his love of motion figures, Hancock shares a bond with Guston, who liked to color objects he had in his studio: tubes of paint, previous irons, books, ashtrays, cigarettes, paint cans, and enormous iron nails. Their celebration of random objects as talismanic presences underscores their mutual need for defense. With this stuff round them, they’ve each created areas for themselves to exist, within the face of inhospitable societies.
Within the worlds they’ve constructed, the place a jalopy is held in by the canvas’s edge, and a crimson ouroboros encircles a portray, Guston and Hancock can have a look at what’s outdoors with out turning away. With beneficiant, sharp humor, they present us how venial and self-deceiving we’ve got develop into. That is what makes their work so pressing and essential right this moment.
Trenton Doyle Hancock, “Globetrotters” (2023), acrylic and artificial fur on canvas; assortment of the artist (courtesy James Cohan, New York, picture Matthew Herrmann)
Philip Guston, “Untitled” (1971), ink on paper; Personal Assortment (© The Property of Philip Guston)
Trenton Doyle Hancock, “It Takes Three or Four to Even the Score” (2022), acrylic, graphite, ink, paper, canvas collage, and plastic bottle caps on canvas; assortment of the artist (courtesy James Cohan, New York and Nazarian / Curcio Gallery, Los Angeles)
Philip Guston, “Drawing for Conspirators” (1930), graphite pencil, ink, coloured pencil, and wax crayon on paper; Whitney Museum of American Artwork, New York (© The Property of Philip Guston)
Trenton Doyle Hancock, “Step and Screw: The Star of Code Switching” (2020), acrylic, artificial fur, graphite, plastic bottle caps, and paper collage on canvas; The Jewish Museum, New York (picture courtesy The Jewish Museum)
Draw Them In, Paint Them Out: Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Philip Guston continues on the Jewish Museum (1109 Fifth Avenue, Higher East Aspect, Manhattan) via March 30. The exhibition was curated by Rebecca Shaykin, in partnership with Trenton Doyle Hancock.