Leon Golub: Works Since 1947
January 18 – March 30, 2003
Chicago Cultural Center
78 Easy Washngton Street
Chicago, IL 60602
From Expressionism to Activism: Leon Golub’s Eternal Return
A heavy pall of seriousness seems to permeate the exhibition room on the fourth floor of the Chicago Cultural Center. The paintings on the wall fill the room with a kind of silent sound and fury which hangs in the air like a disturbing vapor. This sense of gravity comes from Golub’s disturbing subjects, from his earliest drawing of a skull, to his scenarios of torturing interrogators, to his more current images of dissolute street life and predatory animals. This small but powerful retrospective which was exhibited January through March 2003 was joined by other local exhibits of Golub’s work at the Printworks Gallery, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, and the Chicago Athenaeum. Viewing such a concentration of work reveals how his expressionist intentions somehow transcended the difficulties of survival in what continues to be an ironically detached postmodern art world. It is still possible to trace his current work to a lineage of eccentric individualism and figural narrative which developed in Chicago in the 40’s and 50’s, going back to when he a seminal figure of the Monster Roster Group. In spite of the distance of time and place his work did not lose it’s particular identity to other art movements, and has survived with a kind of resolve which has defined a unique trajectory within the New York art scene. In a recent interview Golub offered many reflections on this situation.
Diane Thodos: You came from here, your roots start in Chicago. How does it feel being back, and is there something here you still feel a part of?
Leon Golub: Things have changed one way or another. I was actually eager to get out of Chicago. Living in New York for many many years, even today occasionally, I’m considered a Chicago artist, although I have not lived in any real sense in Chicago since 1957. Nevertheless sometimes it’s said negatively sometimes it’s said almost positively, and I was in a sense almost trying to escape Chicago. However my attitude has changed about that just recently. The people I knew and the attitudes we had were running counter to New York or so we thought, but then I decided I would try to join the enemy, at least the enemy’s territory, so I went to New York. At some point I became a New York artist but not totally. At this point again it feels good to be a Chicago artist, even if I’m not one.
Thodos: Is it because there is something about being outside the New York art world milieu in its present state that’s an advantage, because there are still some Modernist tendencies that are in your work?
Golub: Yeah.
Thodos: Which have a certain value now?
Golub: Maybe, but maybe it’s just the way things get kicked around, and suddenly you say to yourself hey, this is O.K.
Thodos: Why would you feel more comfortable being a Chicago artist now?
Golub: Being a Chicago artist (I’d only be partially that because of the life I’ve led) because Chicago has a certain kind of image. It’s more raw and it’s more clashing in terms of its cultural aspects. It has the irritable tension of not being New York. This is very romantic stuff, but Chicago is a place where you can move your muscles around a little differently.
Thodos: Is that because because here an artist can have more irrelevance to trendiness but also more autonomy? You can make your own choices and you don’t have to be beholden to the current art world?
Golub: Certainly that’s one way to put it. Of course the problem of relevance is very tricky. What’s relevant to whom and how and so forth. What’s relevant at this moment.
In Gerald Marzorati’s 1990 book A Painter of Darkness: Leon Golub and Our Times the artist describes his early years as a School of the Art Institute Student following his his release from the army in 1946. Golub wanted to make paintings which expressed his emotional reaction to what he saw going on in the world “my recognition of estrangement, of domination and violence , of existential fatality.” Golub describes where these feelings were coming from.
Well, I guess there was no way to know for sure. But the war. I’d been in Europe. And then the concentration camps - when those pictures started coming out. I’m a Jew. Many of my friends were Jews. It was a shocking, incredible thing. But that’s not all of it. It also had to do with this sense of myself as estranged - as marginalized. Why? I’m not sure...It may have been something I recognized only when it began to appear in my work. (1 )
During his student days the Field Museum of Natural History and its collection of ethnographic art, ritual objects, masks, figures, inspired much in Golub’s earliest works. The expressionist art of key Modernist figures as Edvard Munch, Emil Nolde, Max Beckmann, Alberto Giacometti, Chiam Soutine and Jean Dubuffet were also important. Dubuffet’s emphasis on the importance of of Art Brut was seminal to Golub’s interest in direct expression of feeling and primal unrefined handling of materials. There is more than a little existential angst in Golub’s drawing Skull 1947, as well as his nearly abstract painting In-Self IV 1954, both which depict faces which exude an inner state of violence. Later on this same sense of violence becomes embodied in the male gargantuas of his Gigantomachy series from the 1960’s.
In some respects the Gigantomachies are, in my opinion, the most important paintings I have done in their extreme austerity, fatality - to me they are unrelenting.... the metaphoric nature of these more generalized figures is something I still think is valid. People continue to understand symbols. (2)
These bruised, flayed and eroded titans enact scenes that could be anyman’s war; cyphers of the corrupting aspects of power and violence that inevitably link to suffering in a timeless cycle that is as old as Babylon and as new as the current exigencies of the 21st century. Golub’s well know Mercenaries and Interrogation series from the 1980’s reappoints these existential symbols of power and suffering into a more specific activist role, predominately by depicting horrific torture scenes of death squads from Nicaragua and El Salvador who were supported by the American government in the 70’s and 80’s. They are images of immense trauma, heightened by the sadistic pleasure which the torturers take in subjugating and destroying their victims. The final works in the retrospective make something of a return to the use of symbols and mythology combined with contemporary settings of violence and crisis often taking place on urban streets. In the painting Like Yeah 1994 delinquent adolescents, one depicted with a rageful screaming face, are accompanied by the disturbing images of a hanging skeleton, graffiti, and vicious dogs, adding much to the sense of the pictures own abstract dissolution into violence. In another painting Prometheus, Heretic’s Fork and The Green World 1999 Golub’s uses of myth and symbol to confront the current crises of the loss of the natural environment and the violation of human rights using cruel devices of torture. Several series of small drawings exhibited at Printworks and Rhona Hoffman reflect many of the same themes in images of vicious dogs, thugs, torture victims and grotesque nude burlesque dancers. When asked about the violence in his imagery Golub replied
[I paint this way] because the society is so violent...violence is a huge part of the world...it may turn out to be the biggest part of the world in the next couple of months...Then of course obviously I have an interest in it that’s personal...You have a sense that this is not only within you, it’s out there. Here you are and here this is...how do you go from where you are to this larger scene? Violence is now part of the very movement of society. There are all kinds of violence being perpetrated all the time: some are more immediate and some are long lasting.
Consciously or not this very concern itself seems to hearken to what Franz Schulze had stated in his 1972 book Fantastic Images about the development of Chicago art and it’s interest in dark emotional states of mind. Images of psychological intensity and gut level feeling were explored, expressing the existential mood of a world that had lived through the Second World War, the Holocaust and Hiroshima. It seems the expressionist development of Golub’s art has a renewed relevancy to the present world, particularly since the tragedy of 9/11 which Golub had personally witnessed in New York.
What happened that day was Nancy thought she heard a plane flying very low. I didn’t sense it. So she went outside and I guess the first one struck but you couldn’t tell at the moment. So she went back in the house. Then I went down out of curiosity and I saw the big red flower glowing from the second hit where the plane came in from another direction so you couldn’t see it. The streets were full of people....The envelope [of our sense of security] was pierced because Americans, despite the fact that American’s lost lives in wars, had never experienced this [attack] at home. So suddenly Americans became aware of this. For most people their attitude changed. Nobody knows the era we are getting into.
The curator for the retrospective Lanny Silverman explains the fact that Golub turning 80 was another important consideration in arranging to have his work shown in Chicago. “It seemed important to us that in the twilight of his years we have a homecoming for him.” The most recent works by Golub have something of particular personal and reflective side for the artist. “He’s dealing with his own mortality” in the artworks, states Silverman, “and relating them to apocalyptic visions of the world.” While the themes of Golub's art have come full circle as images of violence that clearly reflect on today’s world, so has his work come back to us full circle in reinforcing the independent attitude and tough minded expressiveness that shaped him as an artist in Chicago over fifty years ago.
1. Gerald Marzorati A Painter of Darkness: Leon Golub and our Times Viking Penguin publishers 1990, p.164.
2. ibid. p.237.
Diane Thodos is an artist and art critic who lives in Evanston, Illinois.
