2023半岛星空体育·(中国)官方网站英语：《经济学人》中英读译Day222

"Probably the only thing one can really learn", Philip Guston eventually concluded, "is the capacity to be able to change."The modern artist's fate, he said, was "constant change".As a painter he embraced that fate -- and in posterity his work has proved both an index of change and a challenge to it.A new show in Boston charts his restless genius; it is also the canvas for a struggle over art's freedom and obligations, and the contested balance between them.Twice Guston, who died in 1980, made a reputation and gave it up -- first as a figurative artist and muralist in the 1930s and 1940s, next by plunging into abstraction with his friend Jackson Pollock and other mid-century American pioneers.Boldly he returned to figuration in the late 1960s, dwelling on banal yet somehow uncanny objects: light bulbs, bricks, boots.He painted heads, distorted or half-submerged.And he made a series of paintings of triangular hooded figures that recall the Ku Klux Klan.When first exhibited in 1970, these caused an art-world scandal -- not because of the imagery, or Guston's right to use it, but over the brashly cartoonish technique.

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“或许一个人真正能学到的只有一件事，那就是能够改变的能力。”菲利普·古斯顿最终总结道。这位现代艺术家的命运，用他自己的话来说，是“持续不断的变化”。作为一名画家，他接受了这种命运——在后人看来，他的作品既是变化的索引，也是对变化的挑战。波士顿的一场新展览展示了他不安分的天赋；也呈现了关于艺术的自由与责任，以及两者之间相互争夺的平衡。古斯顿于1980年去世，他曾两度成名又放弃——第一次是作为20世纪30年代和40年代的具象艺术家和壁画艺术家，第二次是与他的朋友杰克逊·波洛克以及其他20世纪中叶的美国先驱者一起投身抽象艺术。20世纪60年代末，他大胆地回归到具象艺术，专注于画平凡却不知何故显得离奇的物品上：灯泡、砖块、靴子。他画异形的或半浸在水中的人头。他也画过一些三角形兜帽形象，让人联想到三K党。这些画作于1970年首次展出时在艺术界引发了一场风波——不是因为图像，也不是因为古斯顿使用它的权利，而是因为无礼的卡通画手法。

A retrospective staged in 2003-04 passed without uproar.But in 2020, in the ferment after the murder of George Floyd, the organisers of the then-upcoming new show quailed at Guston's motifs and themes.The director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, where it was due to open first, said he had "appropriated images of black trauma".The problem, implicitly, was both what Guston painted and who he was.Well, who was he?The son of Jewish refugees from Odessa, he changed his name from Goldstein to evade anti-Semitism.The Klan was active in the Los Angeles of his youth and his early work also evoked its crimes, alongside other fascistic atrocities.He turned away from abstraction in part out of an enduring sense of political duty."What kind of man am I", he felt in the 1960s, "sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a fury about everything -- and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue."

译文

2003-04年举办的一场回顾展没有引起骚动。但在2020年，在乔治·弗洛伊德被谋杀后的动荡中，当时即将举办的新展览的组织者对古斯顿的画作内容和主题感到畏缩。华盛顿国家美术馆的馆长称，他“盗用了黑人创伤的意象”，作品原定于该美术馆首展。隐含的问题既关于古斯顿画的是什么，也关于他是谁。那么，他是谁？他的父母是来自敖德萨的犹太难民，为了躲避反犹太主义，他改掉了自己原来的名字戈尔茨坦。他年轻的时候，三K党在洛杉矶很活跃，他的早期作品也描绘了三K党的罪行，以及其他法西斯暴行。他不再画抽象，部分是出于一种长久的政治责任感。“我是一个什么样的人”，他在20世纪60年代的时候觉悟到，“坐在家里，看着杂志，对一切都感到愤怒——然后走进我的画室，把红色调成蓝色。”