The Patronizing Censoring of Philip Guston

When Earl “Rusty” Powell announced his retirement in 2017 after 25 years as director of Washington’s National Gallery of Art, he was applauded by the Wall Street Journal for having preserved that national jewel, in an era when so many other museums were becoming increasingly politicized, as “a determinedly art-for-art’s-sake institution.” But the Journal’s editors feared that the gallery’s trustees might now seek a replacement who, in the guise of making it “more relevant,” would make it overtly political. And there, the paper warned, lay “the road to ruin.”

A year and a half into the tenure of Kaywin Feldman, Powell’s successor, the Journal’s fears have been realized. In turning to Feldman, the museum’s board had to know of her record as the director and president of the Minneapolis Institute of Art. There, as she would report in the art magazine Apollo, she had once told a worried trustee that the museum deserved to be an object of protest, since its aesthetic offerings were the products of “imperialism, colonialism, war, oppression, discrimination, slavery, misogyny, rape, and more.”

All of this is background—relevant background—to the latest art-world cause célèbre: namely, the convoluted path taken by four of the world’s leading museums to mount a joint traveling retrospective devoted to the work of the prominent American artist Philip Guston (1913-1980). The first stop on the planned tour, the fruit of five years of curatorial labor, was slated for this past June at the National Gallery, to be followed by stays at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts, then the Tate Modern in London, and finally Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, with the closing scheduled for October 2021.