Art Movements

Philip Guston, an Ashkenazi Jew, and Trenton Doyle Hancock, a Black artist with a strict Southern Christian upbringing, came from vastly different backgrounds. But a current show at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan reveals that their perspectives and sensibilities blend seamlessly. Both were maligned for their figurative, comic book-influenced styles: Guston by the elite art world that was scandalized by his abandonment of abstraction for figuration, and Doyle Hancock by the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, when his mother burned his collection of Garbage Pail Kids cards and Dungeons and Dragons materials, believing that she was saving him from eternal damnation. In fact, when Doyle Hancock first came into contact with Guston, he had recently found the freedom he needed at college, away from his stringent home life, to explore new worlds of art. He told Hyperallergic that, at the time, he saw Guston “as another comic book artist.” As he honed his craft to become an editorial cartoon illustrator, he felt a kinship wi