Artist's images were brutal and full of integrity
Goya's "Disasters of War" series. Picasso's "Guernica." Leon Golub's images of the horrors of battle and gratuitous violence are in the same league and have the same tone -- bleak, despairing, offering little hope that humanity can crawl out of the hole it has dug itself into.
Golub -- who died on Aug. 8, at 82 -- was out of synch with the art world for most of his career. He began his career when Abstract Expressionism reigned, and lived through Pop and a succession of other styles, always steering his own course. His subjects included mercenaries torturing naked captives or stuffing them into coffins, soldiers attacked by napalm in Vietnam, and fighting giants. All these images were made even more gruesome by the technique he developed, adding and then scraping away layers of paint to make skin look burned, bloodied, or diseased. Some of his cast of thugs haven't any facial features: The "Boxers" of the 1960s are faceless mountains of flesh waiting to erupt. When Golub did do faces, he purposely made both anonymous brutes and high-profile dictators look especially stupid.
Although he questioned the values of an art world caught up in trends and celebrity painters, he also wanted acceptance from it, but not at the expense of sacrificing his integrity -- a word that comes up frequently when people talk about him. And so the art world ignored him until the 1980s, when figurative painting on a grand scale was back "in" -- and so was Golub. In 1984, he was canonized by a solo retrospective that toured to large venues, including Boston's Museum of Fine Arts.
In 1994, Katy Kline and Helaine Posner (then director and curator, respectively, of MIT's List Visual Arts Center) organized a huge exhibition of the work of Golub and his wife, Nancy Spero, for the inaugural year of the now-defunct American Center in Paris (Golub and Spero had lived in the French capital from 1959 to 1964).
Kline, now the director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine, praises Golub's "inviolable beliefs. He was an undeterred humanist. When I heard he was ill, I wrote him a long letter, telling him he'd taught me what it means to fight the good fight. I brought Leon to Bowdoin to speak two years ago, and we had to turn people away. It was the largest crowd we'd ever had at an art lecture. The audience was rapt. He was not a polemicist. Leon had a larger view of evil and brutality -- that it's lurking in all of us." At the time, Golub was part of a traveling show, "The Culture of Violence," that visited Bowdoin. It included his painting "The Arrest."
"It's hard," Kline says, "to tell whether the people being arrested deserved it or whether the authorities were abusing their power. That uncertainty is unsettling."
Among the younger artists Golub influenced is Paul Stopforth, also a painter of torture and war, and the director of the undergraduate art program at Harvard University. The two met in 1989. Stopforth is South African, and during the reign of apartheid he witnessed, and painted, its senseless inhumanity.
"Leon invited me to lecture to his students at Rutgers University," Stopforth says. "He recognized a relationship between our work. Even though he eventually became recognized, certain elements of the art community never accepted him. That's the problem with political art. He painted these raw, flayed-looking brutes meant for elegant museum settings. Some of those museums prefer to turn their backs on the world.
"Leon," Stopforth concludes, "certainly wasn't making art for art's sake."
Golub acknowledged in a 1995 interview that "there is no reason why people would want to live with my work." After a hard day at the office, "they don't want to be under attack from their art." Golub and Spero, who married in 1951, shared their professional as well as their personal lives. They occupied one big studio in New York's LaGuardia Place, with a wall down the middle. They didn't trespass on each other's turf without permission, or offer an opinion on each other's work unless asked.
Their hospitality to younger artists was legend. Rather than stewing in bitterness over their own lack of recognition early on, they went out of their way to see that younger artists dealing with tough subject matter didn't meet the same harsh fate.
"They were so diligent at bringing younger artists to the attention of curators and jurors," Kline says. "They picked out people whose purpose they admired and then championed them." Kline presented Golub and Spero with the Distinguished Service Award given by the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown last year. "They have consistently embodied the belief that the role of the artist is to challenge the organization of society," she noted on that occasion.
Deborah Frizzell, an art historian and curator who has written a great deal about Golub, was visiting him and Spero shortly before his final hospitalization. "They were watching a DVD brought to them by Australian filmmaker George Gittoes, `Soundtrack to War,' which followed soldiers of the Army's 1st Armored Division in Iraq from April 2003 to July 2004," Frizzell says. "Leon and Nancy were profoundly moved by it, but, of course, these realities of war and the soldiers' responses were all too familiar to them from the Vietnam years. And the subjects of the `trophy' photos from Abu Ghraib we had seen years earlier in Leon's paintings."
Golub and Spero immediately made it their mission to spread the word about the film (which airs on VH1 tonight at 9 p.m. and is reviewed on Page F1). "They discussed it with each other," Frizzell says, "chewed it over, watched it again, argued over it, and then called others in on the conversation and viewing. This was the end of a typical day with Leon and Nancy. And they probably stayed up into the next morning, talking and calling colleagues here and overseas, then returning to their studio spaces to draw and write down their thoughts."
Days later, Golub was dead. "Just before he went into the hospital," Frizzell recalls, "Leon was painting on a huge piece of unstretched linen nailed to his studio wall. He would sit in a chair to paint because he'd gotten weaker physically. On the raw linen were the outlines in black paint of two old lions striding and prowling, coming toward the viewer." The fiercest of beasts were the final subjects of an artist known for his personal gentleness -- but also for the ferocity of his painting.
