Such imagery becomes the instrument of his self-recognition, a recognition more crucial in the last analysis than public recognition. 1. by power, as distinct from violence, and is therefore always in danger from the combined force of the many. Four years his junior, Spero's quiet and introverted character provided seeming contrast to Golub's voluble demeanour. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Viking, 1954, p. 593. Such public imagery is never there entirely for its own sake, and however much the artist borrows its authority he means merely to establish his own authority over it. The New York Times / 179, 182. While their might does not make them seem personally right, they never seem socially wrong. With Golub, the viewer moves from victim to voyeur to participant, all while seemingly remaining partial war and excessive abuses of power are atrocious. Terms & Conditions. They culminate in movement and energy. Leon Golub: Echoes of the Real: . All rights reserved. . In clips, we can feel Golubs intensity as he attacks the canvas. Then comes the long, slow, seeping guilt that coincides with consciousness, a recognition that we are complicit, either directly or indirectly, in these atrocities. Interrogation I. Leon Golub. The Mercenaries deal with the moments of dubious rest and recreation in the war zone; the Interrogations deal with the backrooms of modern violence, the rooms where the big decisions are made on the basis of extracted information. The scrap of her clothing, perhaps a bra, left on the wooden bench beside her is a telling and horrid detail. It also makes reference to the transience and non-containable quality of life, like pictures painted as frescos or murals in graffiti, there is a sense to this painting that it is not to be separated as 'art' in a gallery, but rather that it is somehow more and intended to be part of everyday existence. The artists will to power is embodied in realism, which is the only alternative to helplessness. Golub makes paintings that also have sculptural, drawing, and tapestry-like qualities and thus challenges the viewer's perception of what makes a painting. Yet we are seven months into a campaign against ISIS and the US Congress has yet to debate its validity. 0. During that time the couple had three sons: Steven, Philip, and Paul. Referencing classical antiquity, these bodies often resemble kings, warriors, and shamans. What youre doing is, you are trying to make some kind of report. This is a terrific exhibition. But this is a submissive reconciliation with society that makes individual strength superfluous even while revealing it. Between 1976 and 1979 Leon Golub worked on a series called The Political Portraits. Mercenaries V. Leon Golub. Ive tried to deal with situations of stress, and violence, and so on. Departing from material such as photographs of the body in motion or images from art history, Golub depicted scenes of torture chambers, aggressive interrogation, oppression, and racial inequity to name but a few. x 230 1/2 in. These pictures, I believe, are finally about private, heroic survival as an artistallegorical investigations of the meaning of being an artist in the modern worldnot gratuitous demonstrations of the artists ability to stretch a canvas beyond expectations, to give us an oversized image catering to the publics desire for greatness.. All Rights Reserved, Leon Golub: Images of the Real: Echoes of the Real, A Painter of Darkness : Leon Golub and our Times, Leon Golub: Mercenaries and Interrogations, AT THE MET WITH: Leon Golub and Nancy Spero;2 Artists Always Prowling For Ideas To Use Again, Watch Leon Golub's anti-Vietnam war art come to life, In tune with his roots, Golub cleverly incorporates his work into the trajectory of European figurative painting. Working in a distinctive figural style influenced by classical and primitive art, photography, print and broadcast media, Golub depicts scenes of private and public conflict to investigate the frequent and complicated ways in which power is abused. Feature and Body: Mercenaries IV by Leon Golub, 1980. Light sinks into their harsh surface, confirming the density of their presence: they block our view, exhaust our seeing with their monstrousness. The second gallery (at center-back) groups pieces from the early 1980s and include Mercenaries IV (1980), Interrogation III (1981), and White Squad IV (El Salvador) (1983). But it is hard to find a movement with real resonance. The provocative perverse glance of two of the mercenaries on the right hand side, combined with the warning background color of red, dare the viewer to maintain eye contact with this frightful, unaccountable, and unnatural scene. Assyrian art, for example, does not show the urbane sensibility of Renaissance art; its depiction of ritual and hieratic power is more raw. Here they are at the National Gallery, almost all at once, all those modern artists we came here to see, those we have come here to report having seen later. She was the inaugural art editor for the literary and art journal Mud Season Review. PDF Leon Golub: Paintings Leon Golub (January 23, 1922 - August 8, 2004) was an American painter. (294.64 x 473.71 cm) His works challenge the stereotypical polarities of victim and aggressor, while balancing an investigation of modern-day political problems with timeless and universal human issues. What gives? There is no soft introduction to the Met Breuer's exhibition of the work of Leon Golub (1922-2004). Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1959, pp. White Squad (El Salvador) IV. "Leon Golub: Bite Your Tongue" exhibits the work of the prolific American painter whose career spanned from 1950 until his death in 2004. She now writes about art and culture for several publications. He rubs your nose against an image, just as he rubbed and scraped the images themselves into the canvas. The US media was already fairly homogeneous in the early 1980s: some fifty media conglomerates dominated all media outlets, including television, radio, newspapers, magazines, music, publishing and film. Seems like a golden age compared to just six corporations dominating the U.S. media as of 2000. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a 1996 recipient of the Hiroshima Art Prize (jointly with his wife, artist Nancy Spero). Stemming from his acknowledgment and disdain for the fact that men ruled the world, whilst simultaneously looking at classical statues and popular athletic poses, writing frieze-like scenes of masculine struggle emerged. Furthermore, the textural quality of Golub's style endows his figures with a three-dimensional 'life' beyond the flat canvas, and as such his technique bears reference to the paintings of Anselm Kiefer. It is a face composed for a rolling camera, someone elses death, for our complicity. In works from his Mercenary series such as Mercenaries IV (1980), Golub portrays the professional soldiers who are hired to carry out state-sanctioned acts of violence. Leon Golub: Bite Your Tonguecontinues at the Serpentine Galleries (Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA) through May 17. As such, Golub made optimum use of public material as a means to engage with political reality. His case is almost exemplary, in fact, because his product, not always being of clear use, is abused as much as used, which is the process by which it comes to be accepted by society. Their rawness reflects the rawness in life, and in society itself. He seems inured to the feminist impulse. The influence of his paintings, with regard to the male body fighting and more generally the dark side of humanity, can be seen in particular in the work of contemporary LA based artist, Cleon Peterson, and in the paintings of the London based, Marcelle Hanselaar. Golub began to paint images of men, specifically heroes, in classic moments of extreme glory and demise. Golub transitioned from depicting generalized or universal combat scenes. Golub is like the last Goya of modern art, bringing it full circle back to its romantic originsa rebellion that borrows its authority from the unspoken will of the people but takes an aristocratic, self-glorifying, self-exploratory form. No longer alone on his quest, this was the moment when many other artists also began to reject Minimalism and focus attention on the figurative once more. [Internet]. The Interrogations are the reality which stands behind and completes the revelation of reality begun by the Mercenaries, the way flesh stands behind and submits to the uniform, and is revealed all the more convincingly as one strips the uniform from it. MCA - Leon Golub | Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago Once in view, the white figure frisks and arrests a Black man at gun point. The mercenaries serve; they victimize in the name of causes that they do not originate, but of which they are the indisputable master, to which they have the secret inner keywhich they catalyze by their willingness to act: to go to war. Acrylic on linen - Ulrich & Harriet Meyer Collection. Golub said of this work and others from the same series, "I think of the political portraits as skins or masks". Golub worked in what he called a "universalizing mode". He was born in Chicago, Illinois, where he also studied, receiving his BA at the University of Chicago in 1942, and his BFA and MFA at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1949 and 1950, respectively. DuBuffet, like Golub had been making such figurative work for many decades and is famous for founding the art movement, Art Brut, also influential for Golub. It is the most colorful painting in the Hall exhibition, suggesting a recreational respite sandwiched between moments of violence. This modernist surface was given mural potential by Jackson Pollock, and in what Clement Greenberg called American-type (field) painting its potential seems to have been realized. Densely hung and at times claustrophobic, the Serpentines new exhibition of Golubs art brings you up close and personal with battles of naked gods and men. Growing up in a small town in the south of FL this was my first exposure and it hit me in the gut. Artforum is a registered trademark of Artforum Media, LLC, New York, NY. Or you might end up coerced yourself. And even when, as in some of these pictures, they turn smiling to their masterthe public in whose name they fight (the spectator who blankly accepts them as necessary)they have already mastered him, by their willingness to show him his own tendency to violence, his own desire for dominance and power.