Leon Golub: Paintings, 1950–2000
Brooklyn Museum of Art
May 18 - August 19, 2001
Leon Golub: Paintings, 1950–2000, an exhibition of some thirty-five works depicting the effects of individual and institutional power, is presented at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the final venue of an international tour. These expressive political paintings, many of which are mural-sized, explore issues of race, violence, war, and human suffering.
Leon Golub, who has always painted in a unique figural style, draws upon diverse representations of the body from ancient Greek and Roman sculpture, to photographs of athletic competitions, to gay pornography; often pulled directly from a huge database he has assembled of journalistic images from the mass media. He has likened his painting process to sculptural technique and employs a method of layering and scraping away paint, sometimes using a meat cleaver, leaving varying amounts of canvas untouched.
Born in Chicago in 1922, Leon Golub received his B.A. in Art History from the University of Chicago in 1942. From 1947 to 1949 he studied, under the G.I. Bill, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he met the artist Nancy Spero, to whom he has been married for nearly fifty years. In Chicago he became involved with other painters, known as the Monster Rostergroup, who believed that an observable connection to the external world and to actual events was essential if a painting was to have any relevance to the viewer or society. This is a view that has informed Leon Golub’s work throughout his career.
Included in the exhibition are works from the 1950s that are based on a single totemic figure and were intended to portray the post-war sensibility and systems of power and conflict. These figures refer to classical mythology and portray kings, warriors, and shamans, as well as hybrid man-and-beast monsters, among them The Bug (War Machine) (1953); Prince Sphinx (1955); and Birth III (1956); a part of a series inspired by Leon Golub’s becoming a father. An extended trip to Italy in 1956 deepened his interest in Roman and Etruscan art and influenced works such as Fallen Warrior (Burnt Man) (1959) and Gigantomachy II (1966), which reference the warriors of classical art.
From 1959 through 1964 Leon Golub and his family lived in Paris, a move occasioned in part by the belief that Europe would be more receptive to his figural style. During this period Leon Golub’s work increased in size because of larger available studio space and the inspiration of the French tradition of large-scale history painting. He also switched from using lacquer to acrylics, turned leaving more of the surface unpainted, and began to grind the paint directly into the canvas.
When Leon Golub returned to New York, the Vietnam War was escalating, and he responded with his two series: Napalm and Vietnam, which are represented in the exhibition by Napalm I (1969), which marks a transition in the artist’s work from generic to specific social issues, and the wall-sized Vietnam II (1973), which depicts the bodies of civilians under attack.
In the mid-seventies Leon Golub was beset with self-doubt. He destroyed nearly every work he produced during this period and nearly abandoned painting. In the late seventies, however, he produced more than a hundred portraits of public figures, among them political leaders, dictators, and religious figures. Leon Golub: Paintings 1950–2000 includes several portraits of Nelson Rockefeller and Ho Chi Minh, along with images of Fidel Castro, Francisco Franco, Richard Nixon, and Henry Kissinger.
In the 1980s Leon Golub turned his attention to terrorism in a variety of forms, from the subversive operations of governments to urban street violence. Killing fields, torture chambers, bars, and brothels became inspiration and subject for work that dealt with such themes as violent aggression, racial inequality, gender ambiguity, oppression, and exclusion. Among the work produced in this period are the series Mercenaries, Interrogation, Riot, and Horsing Around, examples of which are included in the exhibition. Horsing Around III (1983) and Two Black Women and A White Man (1986), containing images that resonate with racial and sexual tension, have broad cultural and psychological meanings.
From the nineties to the present, Leon Golub’s work has shifted toward the illusionistic, with forms now semi-visible, and appropriating graphic styles from ancient carvings, medieval manuscripts, and contemporary graffiti. As an older person now considering mortality, he has moved towards themes of separation, loss, and death. Text appears in many of the paintings and is combined with a series of symbolic references, including dogs, lions, skulls, and skeletons.
Leon Golub’s work has been seen in solo exhibitions throughout the world, among them World Wide (1991), a Grand Lobby project at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. For World Wide the artist created a process, repeated in exhibitions at several other museums, by which he enlarged images and details from his paintings and screened them on transparent sheets of vinyl, hung so that they surround the viewer. He has also been represented in many group exhibitions and was one of the few white artists included in Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Artat the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1994.
Leon Golub: Paintings 1950–2000 was organized by the Irish Museum of Modern Art, where it was curated by Jon Bird. The presentation of this exhibition at the BMA has been organized by Associate Curator, Brooke Kamin Rapaport, Department of Contemporary Art .
Text by Jon Bird
Published by Reaktion Books, August 2000
210 x 275 mm, 224 pages, 148 illustrations, 113 in full colour
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, Leon Golub: Echoes of the Real, by Jon Bird, published by Reaktion Books. Jon Bird is Professor of Art and Critical Theory at Middlesex University and a tutor in the Theory Department at the Jan van Eyck Acadamie, Maastricht.Publisher presentation: "Now in his late 70s, Leon Golub is a leading exponent of history painting – painting as a narrative, symbolic expression of global, social and political relations and of the realities of power. In this book, published to accompany a major retrospective exhibition travelling to Ireland, England and the United States, Jon Bird examines the artist's work from the classically influenced early paintings through depictions of conflict and masculine aggression to compelling images of the last two decades. Despite the widespread critical attention his work has received, the range and extent of his practice and its complex interweaving of the iconographic traditions of both high and popular art have not been properly examined. As a history painter, Golub is acutely aware of the antecedents to his own imagery and symbolism; part of Jon Bird's critical project is to track and define the artist's relationship to modernism. Making a case for Golub's practice of 'critical realism' that also takes account of the unconscious, Bird focuses on two themes that dominate Golub's work: how his art figures the body as a sign for social and psychic identity, and what might be termed the symbolic expression of social space."
BROOKLYN MUSEUM OF ART
200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY
