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

In Western painting, if the figure is solidly separated from the ground, it is usually understood to have a more or less consistent inner self. To show the figure with ragged edges, so that the ground begins to infiltrate the boundaries of the figure, suggests that the self is less than integral and more subject to invasion from and control by the surrounding context. In the "Mercenaries" and "Interrogations" paintings, as in many other works of that period, Golub's figures are always clearly and firmly marked off from the ground, in order to underline the artist's presumption that they are individually guilty of their acts and cannot slough them off onto a context that will bear the blame for them. By contrast, the figures in the more recent paintings seem often to be coming apart. (Golub, in conversation, describes his motivation in this shift as coming from a desire to engage "an even more ragged edge of things.") The gun-wielding man in Inevitabile Fatum, for example, seems unable to bear the weight of his responsibility; his selfhood is dissolving into the surround of inevitable fate, which, it now seems, bears at least part of the burden of causative impulse. This is a leading distinction between modernism and postmodernism, the so-called decentering of the self. Other changes in the paintings of the '90s similarly show Golub accepting postmodernist ideas that he seems once to have avoided because of their association with moral relativism.

The paintings of the recent period in the three shows all feature the new compositional aspects that would have been out of place in Golub's earlier work. Patches of language coexist with quasi-realistic representational scenes, and there are overlays or transparencies where different images lie in a semantic stack whose meanings are complexly manufactured. Laughing Lions employs a postmodernist fragmentation or splintering of the image along with a big modernist Adolph Gottlieb-like solar burst of red scribbling. Inevitabile Fatum breaks into two upright rectangles like so many postmodern diptychs, one more or less black on the left, the other more or less red on the right. Each implied panel contains representation, but the overall color tonality is atmospheric rather than imitative. Strut has several layers of imagery, one in front of the other, combined with floating expressionist scribbles of red or black paint which texture the empty space somewhat in the manner of Twombly. In Mission Civilisatrice (1996), whose ostensible subject is a dog in a cemetery, three-fourths of the canvas is occupied by nonrepresentational brushiness.

Skull and dog imagery such as that of Mission Civilisatrice permeates the new work. The human skull is familiar from the tradition of vanitas paintings where it serves to indicate the futility of human aspirations by stressing the ephemerality of human life. In Golub's work, the skull has gained an added apocalyptic tonality: it evokes the approach of the end of civilization. The dog, often in conjunction with the skull, points in different directions. On the one hand, the dog is the species most obviously cut adrift from its moorings in nature and converted to a human wannabe. Yet, Golub's paintings seem to imply, in the end the dog will revert to nature and devour the flesh of its former master. Mission Civilisatrice may be based on ancient Greco-Roman headstones that portray the faithful dog hanging around its master's grave, but in Inevitabile Fatum, the dog in the red right panel lifts his leg to urinate on a human skull, evidently having forgotten its tender feelings already. And in Strut, two vicious-looking dogs occupy a vague terrain in which a pair of skulls suggest a boneyard where the dogs have eaten their fill. This theme culminates in Scratch (1999), which shows a postapocalyptic dusk in which lupine creatures materialize out of darkness and move in predatory ways around a little isolated box where a dog is hunched up, perhaps knowing he is the next prey. Inscribed in a yellow streak across the darkness are some famous lines from W.H. Auden's "In Memory of W.B. Yeats": "In the nightmare of the dark / All the dogs of Europe bark."