In 1997, when Trenton Doyle Hancock was in his senior year at Texas A&M University–Commerce, he wrote on a scrap of blank paper in large outlined letters, amid homophonic word associations (“eggs stinked”) and drawings: LIKE GUSTON BUT BLACKER AND WORSE. This note marked the beginning of his long engagement with Philip Guston’s cartoonish depictions of hooded figures. That connection is the focus of the superb exhibition Draw Them In, Paint Them Out: Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Philip Guston at the Jewish Museum, curated by Rebecca Shaykin.
A star of the show is one of Hancock’s graphic alter-egos, Torpedo Boy, a pot-bellied, balding Black superhero who wears white briefs and black boots over a bright yellow bodysuit. Through his schlubby character, who possesses more brains than brawn, Hancock takes on his version of Guston’s doltish Ku Klux Klan figure.
The exhibition sets the stage for this central encounter by providing documentation of a mural Guston painted for the John Reed Club in Los Angeles in 1931 that was later destroyed, as well as a fresco that he worked on in Morelia, Mexico, with Reuben Kadish, and Jules Langsner (“The Struggles Against Terrorism,” 1935), and “Drawing for Conspirators” (1930), one of the few surviving works from Guston’s early explorations of racism and state-sanctioned terror.
Guston’s own art and life were haunted by the trauma of his father’s suicide; at the age of 10, he discovered his father’s body hanging in the family shed. He thought that if he assimilated by denying his Jewish heritage, the pain would lessen and perhaps even go away. He developed his cartooning skills as a member of a youth organization that produced The Junior Times, a Sunday supplement in The Los Angeles Times, and later made work for the John Reed Club. In 1936, he followed his friend Jackson Pollock to New York and by 1950 he had moved away from figuration and toward abstraction, becoming an Abstract Expressionist.
Guston abandoned the Abstract Expressionists when he realized that being part of a group brought no comfort for his despair, anger, and frustration; he knew he was censoring himself in order to be accepted and he had taken cover in an orthodoxy. Guston teaches us a hard lesson: We must embrace our inescapable solitariness wherever it takes us.
Hancock has also always followed his own trajectory with grace and humor, proving that one need not join any club. In Epidemic! Presents: Step and Screw! (2014), which Shaykin calls “a surreal graphic memoir,” the artist presents 30 panels with two narratives, a graphic pictorial one above an episodic one composed of reversed embossed letters pressed into matte board. The pictorial narrative tells the story of Torpedo Boy. While watching television, he receives a phone call asking him to replace a light bulb. It is a set-up by members of the Ku Klux Klan, who intend to lynch him. Beneath each drawing is a self-contained, episodic fragment. The first, dated 1878, is about the Yellow Fever epidemic killing the parents and siblings of “ex-slave and abolitionist, Ida B. Wells.” Wells went on to become a journalist investigating lynchings and widely accepted discriminatory practices against the Black community and individuals. Hancock’s written narrative details different facts of her life, as well as Guston’s and his own.
In “The Studio” (1969), Guston depicts a hooded Klansman before his easel, smoking a cigarette and painting his self-portrait. Above the easel is a bare light bulb and a clock with one hand. Guston implicates himself in a racist system, rather than dividing the world into “us” and “them.” Hancock’s “Globe Trotters” (2023) is a grid of 16 rectangles, each one showing Torpedo Boy in profile. By the last panel, he has completely morphed into a hooded Klansman. These works are funny, sad, weird, unsettling, and, most importantly, both direct and opaque. I am reminded of the cartoonist Walt Kelly’s anthropomorphic possum, Pogo, announcing: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
Guston described “The Studio” as a self-portrait. In trying to discover what was essential to his character, he recognized that he was implicitly the Other that he condemned. Hancock has talked about being raised in a fear-based religion, where the enemy was able to come into his life through the things he possessed. In his use of artificial fur and bottle caps, which he collects and sorts by color, and his love of action figures, Hancock shares a bond with Guston, who loved to paint objects he had in his studio: tubes of paint, old irons, books, ashtrays, cigarettes, paint cans, and large iron nails. Their celebration of random objects as talismanic presences underscores their mutual desire for protection. With these things around them, they’ve both created spaces for themselves to exist, in the face of inhospitable societies.
In the worlds they have built, where a jalopy is held in by the canvas’s edge, and a red ouroboros encircles a painting, Guston and Hancock can look at what’s outside without turning away. With generous, sharp humor, they show us how venial and self-deceiving we have become. This is what makes their work so urgent and crucial today.
Draw Them In, Paint Them Out: Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Philip Guston continues at the Jewish Museum (1109 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through March 30. The exhibition was curated by Rebecca Shaykin, in partnership with Trenton Doyle Hancock.
