Leon Golub was an
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
painterPainting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...
. He was born in Chicago, Illinois, where he also studied, receiving his
BAA Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...
at the
University of ChicagoThe University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
in 1942, his
BFAIn the United States and Canada, the Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, usually abbreviated BFA, is the standard undergraduate degree for students seeking a professional education in the visual or performing arts. In some countries such a degree is called a Bachelor of Creative Arts or BCA...
and
MFAA Master of Fine Arts is a graduate degree typically requiring 2–3 years of postgraduate study beyond the bachelor's degree , although the term of study will vary by country or by university. The MFA is usually awarded in visual arts, creative writing, filmmaking, dance, or theatre/performing arts...
at the
Art Institute of ChicagoThe School of the Art Institute of Chicago is one of America's largest accredited independent schools of art and design, located in the Loop in Chicago, Illinois. It is associated with the museum of the same name, and "The Art Institute of Chicago" or "Chicago Art Institute" often refers to either...
in 1949 and 1950, respectively.
He was married to and collaborated with the artist
Nancy SperoNancy Spero was an American visual artist.-Life and work:Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Spero lived for much of her life in New York City. She was married to, and collaborated with artist Leon Golub....
(1926 – October 18, 2009). Their son, Stephen Golub, is an economics professor at
Swarthmore CollegeSwarthmore College is a private, independent, liberal arts college in the United States with an enrollment of about 1,500 students. The college is located in the borough of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, 11 miles southwest of Philadelphia....
.
Early life
Born in Chicago in 1922, Golub received his B.A. in Art History from the
University of ChicagoThe University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
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 was married for nearly fifty years. In Chicago he became involved with other painters, known as the
Monster RosterThe Chicago Imagists is the name of a group of representational artists associated with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who exhibited at the Hyde Park Art Center in the late 1960s. Their work was known for grotesquerie, surrealism and complete uninvolvement with New York art world trends...
group, which 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 informed Golub's work throughout his career.
Career
Golub, who always painted in a figural style, drew 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 assembled of journalistic images from the mass media. He likened his painting process to sculptural technique and employed a method of layering and scraping away paint, sometimes using a
meat cleaverA cleaver is a large knife that varies in its shape but usually resembles a rectangular-bladed hatchet. It is used mostly for hacking through bones as a kitchen knife or butcher knife, and can also be used for crushing via its broad side, typically garlic....
, leaving varying amounts of canvas untouched.
From 1959 through 1964 Golub and his wife
Nancy SperoNancy Spero was an American visual artist.-Life and work:Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Spero lived for much of her life in New York City. She was married to, and collaborated with artist Leon Golub....
opted to live in Europe, a move occasioned in part by the belief that Europe would be more receptive to their work dealing overtly with issues of power, sexual and political. During this period 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
lacquerIn a general sense, lacquer is a somewhat imprecise term for a clear or coloured varnish that dries by solvent evaporation and often a curing process as well that produces a hard, durable finish, in any sheen level from ultra matte to high gloss and that can be further polished as required...
to
acrylicsAcrylic paint is fast drying paint containing pigment suspension in acrylic polymer emulsion. Acrylic paints can be diluted with water, but become water-resistant when dry...
, left more of the surface unpainted, and began to grind the paint directly into the canvas. While in Italy, both Golub and Spero were profoundly influenced by the figurative works of
EtruscanEtruscan art was the form of figurative art produced by the Etruscan civilization in central Italy between the 9th and 2nd centuries BC. Particularly strong in this tradition were figurative sculpture in terracotta and cast bronze, wall-painting and metalworking .-History:The origins of...
and
Roman artRoman art has the visual arts made in Ancient Rome, and in the territories of the Roman Empire. Major forms of Roman art are architecture, painting, sculpture and mosaic work...
, whose narratives addressed ancient themes of power and violence.
When Golub returned to
New YorkNew York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
, the
Vietnam WarThe Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
was escalating, and he responded with his two series: Napalm and Vietnam.
In the mid-1970s Golub was beset with self-doubt. He destroyed or cut up many works he produced up to 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 RockefellerNelson Aldrich Rockefeller was the 41st Vice President of the United States , serving under President Gerald Ford, and the 49th Governor of New York , as well as serving the Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower administrations in a variety of positions...
and
Ho Chi MinhHồ Chí Minh , born Nguyễn Sinh Cung and also known as Nguyễn Ái Quốc, was a Vietnamese Marxist-Leninist revolutionary leader who was prime minister and president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam...
, along with images of
Fidel CastroFidel Alejandro Castro Ruz is a Cuban revolutionary and politician, having held the position of Prime Minister of Cuba from 1959 to 1976, and then President from 1976 to 2008. He also served as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba from the party's foundation in 1961 until 2011...
,
Francisco FrancoFrancisco Franco y Bahamonde was a Spanish general, dictator and head of state of Spain from October 1936 , and de facto regent of the nominally restored Kingdom of Spain from 1947 until his death in November, 1975...
,
Richard NixonRichard Milhous Nixon was the 37th President of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. The only president to resign the office, Nixon had previously served as a US representative and senator from California and as the 36th Vice President of the United States from 1953 to 1961 under...
, and
Henry KissingerHeinz Alfred "Henry" Kissinger is a German-born American academic, political scientist, diplomat, and businessman. He is a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. He served as National Security Advisor and later concurrently as Secretary of State in the administrations of Presidents Richard Nixon and...
.
In the 1980s 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.
From the nineties to his death, Golub's work shifted toward the illusionistic, with forms semi-visible, and appropriated graphic styles from ancient carvings, medieval manuscripts, and contemporary
graffitiGraffiti is the name for images or lettering scratched, scrawled, painted or marked in any manner on property....
. As an older man he began to consider his own mortality, and moved toward themes of separation, loss, and death. Text appeared in many of the paintings combined with a series of symbolic references, including dogs, lions, skulls, and skeletons.
Golub's work was 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 was represented in many group exhibitions and was one of the few white artists included in
Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art at the
Whitney Museum of American ArtThe Whitney Museum of American Art, often referred to simply as "the Whitney", is an art museum with a focus on 20th- and 21st-century American art. Located at 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street in New York City, the Whitney's permanent collection contains more than 18,000 works in a wide variety of...
in 1994.
In 1996 Golub was given a commission to design a set of stained glass windows for Temple Sholom in Chicago, the four windows depict the life of Joseph. These would be the only stained glass windows Leon Golub ever did. They were fabricated in New York by Victor Rothman and Gene Mallard.
2001: renaissance
While Leon Golub's later works from the 1990s offer more fragmented (in his words "left-over") reincarnations of his early messages, it is his larger, carved works, vividly depicting power relations that have re-gained attention with the U.S.'s involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. These powerful images have remained staid and timeless in their relevance and commentary on current geo-political affairs.
In 2003, Golub revisited his 1959 painting,
Reclining Youth, part of a series of paintings inspired by
friezethumb|267px|Frieze of the [[Tower of the Winds]], AthensIn architecture the frieze is the wide central section part of an entablature and may be plain in the Ionic or Doric order, or decorated with bas-reliefs. Even when neither columns nor pilasters are expressed, on an astylar wall it lies upon...
s at the
Great Altar of ZeusThe Pergamon Altar is a monumental construction built during the reign of King Eumenes II in the first half of the 2nd century BC on one of the terraces of the acropolis of the ancient city of Pergamon in Asia Minor....
in
PergamonPergamon , or Pergamum, was an ancient Greek city in modern-day Turkey, in Mysia, today located from the Aegean Sea on a promontory on the north side of the river Caicus , that became the capital of the Kingdom of Pergamon during the Hellenistic period, under the Attalid dynasty, 281–133 BC...
. Working with
Magnolia EditionsMagnolia Editions is a fine art studio in Oakland, California. Founded in 1981, Magnolia Editions publishes fine art projects, including unique and editioned works on paper, artist books, and public art...
, the artist translated the painting into a large-scale [14 feet (4.3 m)]
Jacquard tapestryTapestry is a form of textile art, traditionally woven on a vertical loom, however it can also be woven on a floor loom as well. It is composed of two sets of interlaced threads, those running parallel to the length and those parallel to the width ; the warp threads are set up under tension on a...
, his first and only textile work.
Selected public collections
Amon Carter MuseumThe Amon Carter Museum of American Art is located in Fort Worth, Texas. It was established by Amon G. Carter to house his collection of paintings and sculpture by Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell. Carter’s will provided a museum in Fort Worth devoted to American art.When the museum opened...
, Fort Worth, TX
Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth
Art Institute of ChicagoThe School of the Art Institute of Chicago is one of America's largest accredited independent schools of art and design, located in the Loop in Chicago, Illinois. It is associated with the museum of the same name, and "The Art Institute of Chicago" or "Chicago Art Institute" often refers to either...
, IL
Australian National Gallery, Canberra
Baltimore Museum of Art, MD
Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris
Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA
Cincinnati Art MuseumThe Cincinnati Art Museum is one of the oldest art museums in the United States. Founded in 1881, it was the first purpose-built art museum west of the Alleghenies. Its collection of over 60,000 works make it one of the most comprehensive collections in the Midwest.Museum founders debated locating...
, OH
Corcoran Gallery of ArtThe Corcoran Gallery of Art is the largest privately supported cultural institution in Washington, DC. The museum's main focus is American art. The permanent collection includes works by Rembrandt, Eugène Delacroix, Edgar Degas, Thomas Gainsborough, John Singer Sargent, Claude Monet, Pablo...
, Washington, DC
David and Alfred Smart Gallery, University of Chicago
Des Moines Art Center, IA
Fogg Art MuseumThe Fogg Museum, opened to the public in 1896, is the oldest of Harvard University's art museums. The Fogg joins the Busch-Reisinger Museum and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum as part of the Harvard Art Museums....
, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence
Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture GardenThe Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is an art museum beside the National Mall, in Washington, D.C., the United States. The museum was initially endowed during the 1960s with the permanent art collection of Joseph H. Hirshhorn. It was designed by architect Gordon Bunshaft and is part of the...
, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
Honolulu Academy of ArtsThe Honolulu Academy of Arts is an art museum in Honolulu in the state of Hawaii. Since its founding in 1922 by Anna Rice Cooke and opening April 8, 1927, its collections have grown to over 40,000 works of art.-Description:...
, HI
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX
Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington
Indianapolis Museum of Art, IN
Israel MuseumThe Israel Museum, Jerusalem was founded in 1965 as Israel's national museum. It is situated on a hill in the Givat Ram neighborhood of Jerusalem, near the Bible Lands Museum, the Knesset, the Israeli Supreme Court, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem....
, Jerusalem
Jewish MuseumThe Jewish Museum of New York, an art museum and repository of cultural artifacts, is the leading Jewish museum in the United States. With over 26,000 objects, it contains the largest collection of art and Jewish culture outside of museums in Israel. The museum is housed at 1109 Fifth Avenue, in...
, New York
Kent State University, OH
Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana
Los Angeles County Museum of ArtThe Los Angeles County Museum of Art is an art museum in Los Angeles, California. It is located on Wilshire Boulevard along Museum Row in the Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles, adjacent to the George C. Page Museum and La Brea Tar Pits....
, CA
Madison Art Center, Madison, WI
Metropolitan Museum of ArtThe Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...
, New York
Miami Art Museum, FL
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Quebec
Musei Civici di Udine, Friuli
Museum of Contemporary Art, ChicagoThe Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago is a contemporary art museum near Water Tower Place in downtown Chicago in Cook County, Illinois, United States. The museum, which was established in 1967, is one of the world's largest contemporary art venues...
, IL
Museum of Modern ArtThe Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
, New York
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
National Museum of Fine Arts, Hanoi
Nelson-Atkins Museum of ArtThe Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art is an art museum in Kansas City, Missouri, known for its neoclassical architecture and extensive collection of Asian art....
, Kansas City, MO
Norton Simon Museum of Art, Pasadena, CA
Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, IL
Tate GalleryThe Tate is an institution that houses the United Kingdom's national collection of British Art, and International Modern and Contemporary Art...
, London
Tel Aviv Museum of ArtThe Tel Aviv Museum of Art is an art museum in Tel Aviv, Israel. It was established in 1932 in a building that was the home of Tel Aviv's first mayor, Meir Dizengoff. The Helena Rubinstein Pavilion for Contemporary Art opened in 1959. The museum moved to its current location on King Saul Avenue in...
Tennessee State Museum, Nashville
Toledo Museum of Art, OH
University of California at Berkeley
University of Massachusetts at Amherst
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Austin University Museum, University of Texas
Vancouver Art Gallery
Whitney Museum of American ArtThe Whitney Museum of American Art, often referred to simply as "the Whitney", is an art museum with a focus on 20th- and 21st-century American art. Located at 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street in New York City, the Whitney's permanent collection contains more than 18,000 works in a wide variety of...
, NY
Selected private collections
Saatchi Collection, London
Gene R. Summers, Chicago
Ulrich Meyer and Harriet Horwitz, Chicago
Films & videos
- Golub / Spero, DVD from Kartemquin Films, Chicago, IL, 2006 (which includes Golub: Late Works are the Catastrophes; Woman As Protagonist: The Art of Nancy Spero; Artemis, Acrobats, Divas and Dancers: Nancy Spero in the NYC Subway)
- Golub: The Late Works Are the Catastrophes, a film by Kartemquin Films, Chicago, IL, 2004
- Golub, a film by Kartemquin Films, Chicago, IL, 1988 (previewed New York Film Festival, 1988)
- State of the Art: Ideas & Images of the 1980s, Program 5, TV Film Channel Four, London, England, 1987
- Victims, Media Environment with Nancy Spero and Werner Wada, Rod Rodgers Dance Company
- The Mercenary Game, a documentary film by Alain d'Aix et al., The RadioTelevision du Quebec, 1983
Quotes
- (June 2001) Too many people have a sort of protective attitude about art. You know, Don't touch. It's valuable. I'm trying to be more in your face, like when you walk down the street and suddenly you encounter a situation. I'm trying to invite you into scenes where you might not want to be invited in.
- (2000) If I had to give a description of my work I would say it's a definition of how power is demonstrated through the body and in human actions, and in our time, how power and stress and political and industrial powers are shown.
- (1987) I'm not on the frontlines of anything. This is studio work. At the same time I want it to have an aggressive impact.
External links