The shanda of censoring Philip Guston
Four eminent museums, particularly Washington’s National Gallery of Art, owe Jews an apology.
It gives me no joy to state that four of the world’s most distinguished art museums—including my hometown Washington favorite—need to undergo anti-Semitism sensitivity training. The good news is they needn’t enlist outside consultants; they just have to schedule time for their directors and boards to listen to their curators.
My latest article in Mosaic magazine, “The Patronizing Censoring of Philip Guston,” addresses a major exhibit which the pandemic delayed initially. To adapt Joel 1:4: What natural disaster left, the National Gallery of Art devoured. Not only did the museum censor an exhibit which promised to be one of the most exciting in recent memory to explore the thinking of a Jewish artist, but the museum silenced the late artist’s work in a way that says very troubling things about what kinds of voices it believes Jews ought to have.
Here’s a selection:
As for the sum and substance of her instruction—that the white Jewish Philip Guston in his art illegitimately and unforgivably “appropriated” the imagery of black trauma—it is at once ironic and repellently nonsensical. Visitors to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam can watch a video in which Whoopi Goldberg asserts she was able to understand what the famous Jewish teenager endured in Nazi-occupied Holland because of her own background as a black woman in America. Did Whoopi Goldberg “appropriate” Jewish trauma? Do Gentile cartoonists who depict Donald Trump as Hitler? Has it escaped Feldman’s attention that the Klan, the hate group satirized by the Jewish artist she brands as having looted someone else’s trauma, was not only virulently anti-black but no less virulently anti-Semitic?
The point can be applied to Feldman’s own museum without much effort. Take “Zim Zum” (1990), a painting in the National Gallery by the German artist Anselm Kiefer (born 1945). Commending and celebrating the work on its website, the museum cites the title’s use of the kabbalistic concept of tsimtsum (contraction), connecting it obscurely to Kiefer’s determination in his art “to confront the nature of evil and, specifically, the evil of the Holocaust.” Did the National Gallery misspell “appropriation of Jewish trauma” here?
The full piece appears here, and I encourage subscribing to Mosaic.