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Outside the comfort zone: combining images of global brutality with attacks on the painterly surface, Leon Golub's work has long been a disturbing presence. New York recently played host to a traveling retrospective and two smaller shows of the artist's mordant "late" paintings
Art in America, April, 2002 by Thomas McEvilley
While participating in a panel years ago, Leon Golub was asked by a curator in the audience, "Have you ever been to the Louvre?" The question seems to have meant something like: "Have you ever seen a real painting? Do you know what a real painting should look like?" What apparently provoked this arrogant query was Golub's practice, maintained from around 1960 to 1990, of first painting the surface of his canvases, then, when the paint had partially dried, scraping it off with a blade (a meat cleaver turned out to be the most convenient tool). The pristine surface of the paint was violated as the color was ground into the weave of the distressed fabric. This scraped and scarred surface, on which the original image lay in irregular patches, might have been regarded as a proposal for a new mode of the quality of "touch" that formalist critics of the Greenbergian era cherished as the essence of painterliness. But if so, it was not a friendly proposal. To anyone formed in the Greenbergian mold, it seemed, rather than a new mode of touch, a rejection of the quality of touch altogether and of the sensibility that had promoted reverence toward it.
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This issue was called up again by the recent Golub retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, which covered his work of 50 years in 25 large paintings and 28 small "portraits" drawn from mass media imagery. It must be said, en passant, and with no offense meant to the Brooklyn Museum, that it is disgraceful that Golub has not received a full-scale retrospective at an uptown Manhattan museum. The founding mandate of the Whitney Museum of American Art, in particular, would seem to necessitate attention to such a mature and important artist, whose extensive oeuvre has influenced both his contemporaries and those who came after. One suspects that it has been primarily the artist's persistent refusal of the "Louvre look" that has kept him on the outside--that and his insistence on directly confronting some of the most difficult public images of his time. As he has been known to remark, his work is not in the comfort zone and thus has been acknowledged primarily in out-of-the-mainstream venues.
Golub had a small retrospective at New York's New Museum for Contemporary Art in 1984, a larger one in Sweden's Malmo Konsthall in 1993 and a still larger one, curated by Jon Bird, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin in 2000; it was a reduced version of this Dublin show that traveled to the Brooklyn Museum in 2001. Fortunately, considering its smaller size, the Brooklyn exhibition occurred in close conjunction with two smaller New York shows, at Ronald Feldman Gallery and at Cooper Union, in each of which a half dozen or so of Golub's most recent works were exhibited. This trio of shows should have brought an end at last to that irksome question, "Have you ever been to the Louvre?" Golub has rounded out his work by incorporating painterly elements without losing the integrity of its message. (For the record, Golub lived in Paris in the late 1950s and has indeed ventured into the Louvre.)
The exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum moved somewhat too quickly through the stages of his long career. One room was filled with the "Gigantomachies" of the 1960s, paintings of naked classical figures in seemingly endless battle, which may go down in history as the works that most essentially define his oeuvre. They showed Golub focusing on his central theme of human destiny as irrevocably bound to unreasoning violence. The "Gigantomachies" were followed by a small but impressive selection of the "Vietnam" works of the early 1970s, pictures of Western soldiers intimidating or torturing Asian peasants. By cutting unpredictably shaped pieces out of these canvases, Golub rendered them like blown-apart documents. The small portraits of the late-'70s pilloried a range of public figures from Francisco Franco to John Foster Dulles. Then the viewer confronted what is perhaps Golub's most difficult work, the "Mercenaries" and "Interrogations" series of the 1980s, in which Third World people are treated sadistically by figures from some military underworld. The classic selections from these bodies of work underlined Golub's importance in the 1970s and 1980s as what Donald Kuspit called an "activist artist."
Finally, in the two concluding rooms, one saw the very different paintings of the last decade or so. It was at the end of the 1980s, in works like Blue Sphinx (1988) and Night Scene II (1989), neither of which was in the show, that unfamiliar new elements began to appear in Golub's paintings, signaling a change in style that has carried on through to the present. The recent work is a rivetingly important addition to Golub's oeuvre. Though surely not his final testament, it still seems like a capstone to a long and distinguished career.
Golub's apparent attack on the painterly surface (with a meat cleaver no less!) was in part an anti-painting gesture, like Yves Klein's flame-thrower blasts at the canvas. Klein had attacked the painterly surface on the grounds that he felt it did not allow open access to a kind of spiritual freedom that went beyond the satisfactions of esthetic feeling; he sought contact with a void of pure spirit and attempted to break through with a blast of fire. Golub's motivation was different. His work implies that the traditional touch-inflected surface of the modernist painting was a cultural sign suggesting complicity with the surrounding society's political agendas. (The carefully nuanced surface characteristic of American painting was, as Jasper Johns implied in 1955, a disguised form of the flag, a covert evocation of the idea of the triumph of American culture.) Golub sought to arrive at a level of image that was prior to, or rawer than, the exquisite texturing of the esthetic touch. In the recent works, however, the scraping is much less dominant, and much of the paint still stands with its skin unbroken.
