Philip Guston Exhibition: A Look Into The Banality Of Evil

This exhibition at Tate Modern chronicles Philip Guston’s works over his entire career, taking visitors through the politically charged content from his early years, experiments on form and abstraction in the 1950s, to the cartoonish hooded figures that Guston is perhaps most known for towards the end of the 1960s.

Although not all of Guston’s works are overtly concerned with socio-political issues such as racism, antisemitism, and fascism, it’s clear from this exhibition that Guston remained incredibly socially engaged throughout his life.

Born in 1913 Montreal as Philip Goldstein to Russian Jewish parents, he moved to Los Angeles in 1919. In 1935, he changed his surname to Guston in 1935 like many in the Jewish community at the time in response to the rising tide of antisemitism in the years before the Second World War. He was an early supporter of the Civil Rights Movement, having raised funds to support the defendants of the Scottsboro Boys Trail in 1932, in which nine Black teenagers were falsely accused of a rape and sentenced to death in Alabama. In 1966, he served as co-chair for Artists for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a group that providing legal aid and funding for activists during the Civils Rights Movement.

Indeed, he was committed in his belief that as an artist, it was his responsibility to confront and expose some of mankind’s worst self-inflicted horrors. Guston’s murals, paintings and illustrations are full of raw imagery linking centuries of persecution and hatred to each other- from depicting figures of the Spanish Inquisition as the Ku Klux Klan in ‘The Struggle Against Terrorism’ to haunting scenes of Nazi concentration camps in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War.

Guston’s socio-political works are so scattered with symbolism and allegories that one cannot help but search for the same patterns in his abstract art in the 1950s. His masses of colour and prominent brushwork in many of his abstract paintings, for example, do not combine to make a recognisable object. But it is the way they morph and collide into each other that creates a narrative of characters and plot that capture our attention.

Philip Guston, "The Studio" (1969) @ Tate Modern

But Guston’s most well-known works are still perhaps of the Ku Klux Klan transformed into white triangular shapes. Indeed, these painting were what likely caused the exhibition to postpone its transatlantic tour in 2020 during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement. Galleries were concerned that the collection could be misinterpreted and not understood by viewers as a criticism on ‘racism, anti-Semitism and bigotry’ as it was intended.

But these art galleries needn’t worry; it is remarkable how Guston is able to depict each hooded triangle with such human casualness, showing evil in its most mundane form. From Klansmen on a classroom blackboard, Klansmen on a road trip, to Klansmen smoking, Guston’s portrayal of the banality of evil is chilling in its everydayness. In these cartoonish and benign characters, Guston highlights how hatred and prejudice can exist unchallenged in all corners of society. These paintings remain -as they were first displayed in the early 1970s- a prescient reminder of how we must constantly interrogate our own worldviews however comfortable we may now feel.

Don’t miss this searing exhibition at the Tate Modern before it ends on 25 February 2024.