Perpetual motion: The many incarnations of Philip Guston
Charles Darwent, Times Literary Supplement
About Philip Guston, Hilton Kramer wrote in 1970: “He was a colonizer rather than a pioneer.” This searing remark—all the more scathing in 2023, when a colonizer is apparently the vilest thing someone can be—is at odds with the current assessment of the artist. As Pat Lipsky pointed out last year, many in the art world insist that Guston’s legacy outshines that of Jackson Pollock or any other twentieth-century American painter. This revisionist criticism is motivated more by political considerations than aesthetic ones. A traveling retrospective of his career, reviewed here by Charles Darwent in the Times Literary Supplement, just landed at the Tate, where it was supposed to have appeared three years ago: the show was initially planned for the summer of 2020, but the death of George Floyd compelled the planners to put the exhibition on hold. They reasoned that it would be insensitive to display Guston’s Klu Klux Klan sendups at the time, as if mere representation of a subject implies endorsement. This story contains one of the many rich ironies at the heart of politicized art and criticism: the very thing that triggered Guston’s critical revival—its politicization—is what led to his show being delayed.
Rekindling the Sparks of the Spirit
Daniel J. Mahoney, Law & Liberty
For those college-aged Americans tempted by the counterfeit promises of communism, a simple prescription is recommended: the first chapter of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. This single chapter exposes the Soviet Union as a place of such profuse fear that it cannot but warn off any attentive reader from communism for a lifetime. For more severe cases, the entire trilogy is recommended. But Solzhenitsyn’s work, as Daniel J. Mahoney points out in Law & Liberty, is not simply one of dread and negation. Instead, Solzhenitsyn identifies the sources of light capable of cutting through the regime’s veil of darkness. For more on the Gulag-survivor’s triumph, look forward to Gary Saul Morson’s examination of the man and his work in an upcoming issue of The New Criterion.
An Exemplary Tiffany Stained-Glass Window Is Coming to The Met
Elaine Velie, Hyperallergic
Sandwiched between the Met’s first and second floors in the corner mezzanine is the often-overlooked “American Glass and Ceramics” gallery. This little space contains some of the most delicious artifacts in the entire museum: sumptuous ceramic vases and delicate porcelain china populate its vitrines, but a stained-glass triptych of windows by Frank Lloyd Wright is the space’s masterpiece. Soon, though, Wright’s windows will have competition for that title: the Met recently acquired a set of Tiffany windows, Garden Landscape (1903), designed by Agnes Northrop. This dreamy set of windows—which make glass look like watercolor—will go on display next year.