Banal Viewing of Philip Guston’s Painting

Philip Guston, the American painter (1913–1980) made several paintings depicting hooded masks worn by the Ku Klux Klan members. KKK members would wear these masks while persecuting blacks and other minorities.

Guston’s painting titled ‘Courtroom’ immediately reminded me of Hannah Arendt’s accounts of the Eichmann trial, when I recently saw the painting first time at the exhibition in the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. The temporary exhibition is titled ‘Philip Guston Now, A major retrospective’ at the NGA.

Hannah Arendt covered the Nuremberg court trial of Otto Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi official from the Hitler regime. Eichmann had organized the logistics of the mass deportation of Jews to extermination camps. He claimed during the court trial that he just followed orders from his superiors and was incapable to do anything otherwise. Arendt, therefore, termed his actions and arguments as the ‘Banality of Evil’ in her accounts.

Before I go any further, I must admit that the parallels between Eichmann’s case and Philip Gaston’s paintings with hooded masks are already pointed out earlier. I found at least two separate instances of this discussion on the internet search. I am therefore not the first one to notice it, even though I was not aware of these earlier discussions when I saw the painting. Nonetheless, the parallels between Eichmann’s case and this particular painting are stunning to me.

In Guston’s painting, the Judge’s hand on the right side of the painting is accusing the KKK clansman of killing the victim stuffed beside the hooded clansman, in the painting. A more shocking revelation of the painting comes in its closer examination. The viewer realizes that the accused clansman is the painter himself. Pieces of the easel and the dashes on the clansman’s hood in the painter’s favorite crimson color reveal his identity.

I don’t have any information on how much the Eichmann case Guston had on his mind when he made this and other paintings with KKK hoods. But I don’t think that is as important. What I find more important is that both cases raise the question of self-judgment of one’s own actions or inactions. Eichmann justified his inaction on the ground of his incapacity to alter the course of action and his desire to follow his superiors’ orders. He relied on his superiors for making right or wrong moral decisions. Guston on the other hand is accusing himself of being complicit in the killing in his painting.

Both these cases, therefore, raise this uneasy question for me. How much should I hold myself responsible for the cruel and immoral acts that I see and don’t do anything about, or even worse, inadvertently or mechanically participate in, out of a sense of helplessness?

I don’t know which is a better solution, is it just not to visit the art galleries and museums, since they are making me so uncomfortable, or make more visits since I feel more alive as a human being!