Featured White Papers
- 9 critical reasons to automate performance management (SuccessFactors, Inc.)
- The secret to effective, no-hassle performance reviews (SuccessFactors, Inc.)
- Aug. 28th: Delivering Online Presentations That Result in Higher Sales (Citrix Online)
Content provided in partnership with
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
As he approaches 80, Golub seems to be relaxing some of the long-held austerities of his art. The new work, for example, is somewhat autobiographical, a self-indulgence that once he would not have allowed himself. In the Vietnam War years and after, Golub was rigorously devoted to portraying something out there, something not constructed from subjectivity. That is why his pictorial mode remained so basically realistic, in order to underline the convincing nature of what was portrayed, to suggest, or even allow, no escape into the self. Now many of the works indicate that he has reached a point in his life where he feels it appropriate to express at least a bit of his own subjectivity and, with characteristic self-deprecating humor, to communicate some feeling about what he has gone through.
The most obvious example of this new tendency is The Blue Tattoo (1998) in which he portrays an aging lion--perhaps himself--resting in its lair as if fatigued by long battle. In its forepaws the feline holds a pink-lettered sign that says, "Getting old sucks!" The animal looks slightly decrepit. He would still like to be on the front lines, but for the moment is reflecting somewhat grumpily on how tiring the struggle has become. The title refers to a blue rose tattooed on the lion's right rear thigh, suggesting membership in some occult society or devotion to some secret cause. In the ironic Bite Your Tongue II (2001), a wall hung with grafittilike sketches bears a quote from Adorno, "In the history of art late works are the catastrophes." Here Golub seems to be suggesting that he himself disapproves a little of this late-career relaxation and is still sticking by his earlier work.
The "Prometheus" paintings of the late '90s also seem to have autobiographical shadings. The figure in Prometheus H (1998) who comments, "Fuck, I didn't expect this," as the liver-tearing eagle descends, could be referring to the travails of old age, but this might also be a reference to an earlier Golub who had not yet clearly seen the price to be paid for becoming an dissident artist. A still more recent painting, This Day ... (1999), seems to be about an old activist reflecting on the passing of years and wondering whose day it is, really, and who exactly is the "we" implied by the scene. In this picture, at opposite ends of a banner bearing the phrase "this day is ours," are a figure who looks like one of Golub's mercenaries from the '80s--he waves a weapon while dogs (of war?) leap about him--and a darker-skinned man who raises a fist in what used to be called the Black Power salute. Who is celebrating? Whose day is it to be? Perhaps, viewed in context of other works, it is to be the dogs' day, or maybe that of the painting's other presences, some celebrating skeletons who preside over the encounter. Dogs also appear in Snake Eyes (1995), roaming and snarling in an indeterminate nightmarish space while the Latin words "inevitabile fatum" float in the air. Golub seems to be warning us that the destiny of humanity is for its best intentions to be devoured by the dogs let loose by irrational passions.
Find Research Guides for:
Find Featured Titles for: Health
- AAACN Viewpoint
- ABNF Journal, The
- AIDS Treatment News
- AMAA Journal
- Aboriginal Nurse, The
- Adolescence
- Adolescent Psychiatry
- Advances in Skin & Wound Care
- Age and Ageing
- Alabama Nurse
- Alberta RN
- Alcohol Research & Health
- Alternative Medicine Review
- American Family Physician
- American Fitness
- Men's Fitness
- Psychology Today
- Shape