What Trenton Doyle Hancock Learned From Philip Guston
The Jewish Museum pairs the Texas artist with a 20th-century master. Together they confront racism with horror — and humor.When Trenton Doyle Hancock discovered the artist Philip Guston, it was a revelation. Hancock had just transferred from junior college in his hometown, Paris, Texas, to nearby East Texas State University. He was taking a printmaking class and working with a haunting photograph he’d made of himself partially cloaked in a white sheet with a noose around his neck. The rope wound around his body, including his semi-bare right arm, which holds up a hammer. Titled “The Properties of the Hammer” (1993), it probed the dark contradictions of being a Black man in America.Hancock’s printmaking teacher, Thomas Seawell, asked if he knew about Philip Guston, the New York School artist. Guston had (very controversially) left behind Abstract Expressionism in the 1960s to make figurative, cartoonish paintings of objects like books and shoes, which hearkened back to the Holocaust, as well as hooded Ku Klux Klan figures. Seawell saw a kinship between Guston’s work and Hancock’s, but Hancock had never heard of Guston. So Seawell lent him a book, and the student fell in love.“The forms were so rich, bulbous and tangible,” Hancock, 50, recalled recently. “When you put a colorful toy in front of a child, they want to eat it. That’s how I felt about those paintings: I just wanted to eat them. I didn’t even know you could make work that looked like this. It was totally new to me.”In “The Studio” (1969), Philip Guston’s hooded protagonist is an artist painting his own effigy. The artist was exploring “what would it be like to be evil?” Trenton Doyle Hancock recalled: “The forms were so rich, bulbous and tangible.” The Estate of Philip Guston; via Metropolitan Museum of Art, New YorkIf you’ve never had the urge to eat a painting, you’re not alone, but meeting Hancock or seeing his art helps make that impulse understandable. He is a voracious consumer of culture, and his work has an intense physicality — in the bodies that are forever bending, stretching and breaking in his images, and in the cutout and collaged surfaces of his paintings. Hancock’s world is a profusion of colors, of media, of characters in his ever-expanding multiverse.His studio in a Houston suburb bears this out. Rooms of the two-story house are devoted to various collections, including sketchbooks dating back to childhood, scraps and detritus (literally dirt swept off the floor of past studios), and plastic bottle caps sorted by color.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
