Philip Guston, an Ashkenazi Jew, and Trenton Doyle Hancock, a Black artist with a strict Southern Christian upbringing, got here from vastly completely different backgrounds. However a present present on the Jewish Museum in Manhattan reveals that their views and sensibilities mix seamlessly. Each have been maligned for his or her figurative, comedian book-influenced kinds: Guston by the elite artwork world that was scandalized by his abandonment of abstraction for figuration, and Doyle Hancock by the Satanic Panic of the Nineteen Eighties, when his mom burned his assortment of Rubbish Pail Children playing cards and Dungeons and Dragons supplies, believing that she was saving him from everlasting damnation. In truth, when Doyle Hancock first got here into contact with Guston, he had not too long ago discovered the liberty he wanted in school, away from his stringent residence life, to discover new worlds of artwork. He advised Hyperallergic that, on the time, he noticed Guston “as another comic book artist.” As he honed his craft to turn into an editorial cartoon illustrator, he felt a kinship with Guston’s zany caricatures — and shortly noticed how he might proceed his legacy of utilizing comedic aesthetics to spotlight the darkest features of American racism.
Left: Philip Guston, “The Studio” (1969), oil on canvas (© The Property of Philip Guston; Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, New York, promised present of Musa Mayer; picture courtesy The Jewish Museum)Proper: Trenton Doyle Hancock, “Schlep and Screw, Knowledge Rental Pawn Exchange Service” (2017), acrylic and blended media on canvas (Assortment of Hedy Fischer and Randy Shull, Asheville, North Carolina; picture courtesy the Jewish Museum)
Each additionally confronted white supremacy in numerous methods all through their lives: Guston, a proud antifascist, lived via the KKK’s reign of terror in Los Angeles; Doyle Hancock would be taught that the fairgrounds of his residence in Paris, Texas, the place of many pleased childhood recollections, have been as soon as crowded with onlookers who craned their necks to view the lynching of a teenage Black boy. Additional, each query in the event that they themselves are complicit: Guston via his depiction of himself as an artist sporting the Klan hood, and Doyle Hancock via his host of surreal characters who’re concurrently perpetrators and victims of supremacy tradition.
On this episode of the Hyperallergic Podcast, Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian and Trenton Doyle Hancock come along with poet and critic John Yau, who has been writing about Guston for many years. Together with his deep data of Guston’s life and work, Yau illuminates what virtually looks as if a cosmic connection between the 2 artists.
Trenton Doyle Hancock, “Step and Screw Part Too Soon Underneath the Bloody Red Moon” (2018), acrylic and blended media on canvas (Assortment of Mandy and Cliff Einstein, Los Angeles; picture Shulamit Nazarian; picture courtesy the Jewish Museum)
In 2020, Guston’s work got here into query over whether or not it was applicable to indicate throughout a interval of reckoning with racist imagery. It will be removed from the primary time that Guston’s work has been coated up or censored, whether or not it was by establishments making an attempt to keep away from legal responsibility, the Catholic Church in Mexico being cautious of standing as much as authoritarianism, or anti-communist Los Angeles police items destroying his antiracist work. With fascism on the rise in America and across the globe, Doyle Hancock’s “confrontation” with Guston’s work reveals the facility of addressing white supremacy head-on, with all of its vile truths in view — after which, their energy deflated, via comedian aid.
Left: Philip Guston, “Drawing for Conspirators” (1930), graphite pencil, ink, coloured pencil, and wax crayon on paper ( © The Property of Philip Guston; Whitney Museum of American Artwork, New York, Buy, with funds from The Hearst Company and The Norman and Rosita Winston Basis, Inc.; picture courtesy the Jewish Museum)Proper: Trenton Doyle Hancock, “The Boys in the Hoods are Always Hard” (2023), acrylic and graphite on canvas (Assortment of Amanda and Donald Mullen; 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 and East 92nd Avenue, Higher East Facet, Manhattan) via March 30.
Subscribe to Hyperallergic on Apple Podcasts, and wherever you take heed to podcasts. This episode can be out there with photographs of the paintings on YouTube.
Trenton Doyle Hancock and John Yau (picture Hrag Vartanian/Hyperallergic)