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| Philip Guston, Close-Up, 1969. Whitney Museum |
Just opened is one of the Skirball Cultural Center's more engaging art exhibitions, presenting Philip Guston's Ku Klux Klan paintings alongside the work of Trenton Doyle Hancock, a contemporary Black artist deeply influenced by those paintings. "Draw Them In, Paint Them Out: Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Philip Guston" was organized by Rebecca Shakin for New York's Jewish Museum, an institution with a much stronger history of art exhibitions than the Skirball. Not all of the works in the New York showing have traveled, but what's here is unprecedented for Los Angeles.
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| Trenton Doyle Hancock, Step and Screw: The Star of Code Switching, 2020. Jewish Museum |
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| Installation view of Hancock's Epidemic! Presents: Step and Screw!, 2014 |
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| Photo reproduction of Philip Guston's Mural for the Los Angeles Headquarters of the John Reed Club, about 1931 |
Actually, the story begins in Los Angeles, and not in a good way. In the 1930s the Ku Klux Klan was a powerful force in L.A. politics. Philip Guston (1913-1980) was a Jewish, leftist, muralist in the mode of Diego Rivera. He painted a fresco of a Klan lynching for L.A.'s John Reed Club. The mural was vandalized in 1933 by members of the LAPD, American Legion, and Ku Klux Klan. It's shown here in B&W reproduction.
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| Philip Guston, Riding Around, 1969. Promised gift of Musa Guston Mayer to the Metropolitan Museum |
Guston's high-school classmate Jackson Pollock encouraged him to move to New York. He did so and went abstract, becoming a linchpin of the New York School's second generation (though he was only a year younger than Pollock). In the turbulent 60s Guston grew bored with abstraction and switched to cartoony figuration. 60s critics hated it, but the late figurative works have since eclipsed Guston's abstractions in esteem. His quintessential subject was hooded Klansmen. "They are self-portraits," said Guston. "I perceive myself as being behind the hood."
The Klan paintings are also funny. Hancock notes "the whimsy of Guston's line. There's the language of Krazy Kat in those eyes. Those cartoons revolve around pathetic characters, so there's something within the line work itself that culturally we understand as a kind of failure."
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| Trenton Doyle Hancock, Properties of the Hammer, 1993. Gelatin silver print. Collection of the artist, courtesy of James Cohan, New York |
Three generations younger than Guston, Hancock encountered Guston early. His earliest work in the show is a remarkable photographic self-portrait at age 19. He imagines himself behind the hood, with a noose around his neck and glasses over the missing eye holes. He holds a hammer, a symbol of justice that would figure in later paintings.
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| Small detail of Trenton Doyle Hancock's Epidemic! Presents: Step and Screw!, 2014 |
The protagonist of Hancock's cartoon universe is Torpedoboy, a schlubby, middle-aged Black guy in tights. He battles versions of Guston's Klansmen, domestic terrorists who are also con men. In
Schlep and Screw, Knowledge Rental Pawn Exchange Service the hooded figure is Eve offering an apple. Words and thoughts are carved into the figures, who double as cartoon balloons. A devilish ouroboros/snake frames the picture. |
| Trenton Doyle Hancock, Schlep and Screw, Knowledge Rental Pawn Exchange Service, 2017. Collection of Hedy Fischer and Randy Shull |
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| Trenton Doyle Hancock, The Boys in the Hoods are Always Hard, 2023. Collection of Amanda and Donald Mullen |
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| Philip Guston, Aegean II, 1977. Promised gift of Musa Guston Mayer to the Metropolitan Museum |
Hancock's
Last Big Hurrah paintings build on Guston pictures such as
Agean II. In lieu of the Klan we witness primal war at the dawn of civilization. Arms of various pink shades brandish trash can lids in an eternal battle. Hancock finds in these paintings an "atmosphere of paranoia, or hiding, or running for your life." In his
The Fourth to the Last Big Hurrah: Reclamation Approximation Black hands form warp and weft of a red, white, and blue fabric. The orbs are plastic bottle caps collaged onto canvas |
| Trenton Doyle Hancock, The Fourth to the Last Big Hurrah: Reclamation Approximation, 2024. Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation |
"Draw Them In, Paint Them Out" is at the Skirball through Mar. 1, 2026. So is another unusually strong
exhibition of comic book ("narrative") artist Jack Kirby. If you've been meaning to see or go back to the Skirball, this fall/winter would be a fine time to do so.
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| Installation view |
Comments
> Jackson Pollock encouraged him
> to move to New York. He did so
> and went abstract...
The understandable need for an income (and a roof over one's head) - or what's generally known as capitalism (even starving, idealistic artists eventually prefer living large rather than poor) - is at the heart of where people choose to live, have to move to or have to move away from.
The art world over 100 years ago was more a dynamic of Paris-Europe than New York City-North America. Then that slowly started changing.
In terms of LA's movie industry, it was inspired in the early 1900s by people on the East Coast trying to get away from the watchful eyes (and legal team) of Thomas Edison. He claimed that patents on film equipment meant people in motion pictures had to pay him a royalty.
Decades later, another form of economics (and politics too) is causing the entertainment industry to increasingly leave LA. Some of what has long been labeled "Hollywood'" now has its most renowned (or successful) parts identified with London or the UK.