Golub, Leon

Golub, Leon (1922–2004). American painter. He was born in Chicago, where he studied art history at the University, graduating in 1942. After serving in the army during the Second World War, he studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago, 1946–50, and he had his first one-man exhibition at the Contemporary Gallery, Chicago, in 1950. Subsequently he taught at various colleges in the USA (in Chicago, New York, and elsewhere) and spent two periods in Europe, living in Italy, 1956–7, and Paris, 1959–64. His work has been widely exhibited in Europe as well as the USA and he has won numerous awards.

At the beginning of his career Golub experimented with abstraction, but he soon turned to figurative painting and became an outspoken opponent of the Abstract Expressionism that dominated American art in the 1950s. One of the earliest and strongest influences on him was Picasso's Guernica, which was exhibited in Chicago in 1939. His work has mainly been concerned with themes of stress and violence; often it is very large in scale, and his handling of paint is expressively raw, increasing the emotional impact of his images. In the 1950s many of his paintings depicted monster-like creatures, but thereafter his work became more naturalistic and more politically orientated, dealing with themes such as the Vietnam War, the activities of mercenary soldiers, and interrogation and torture by brutal guards (Interrogation II, Art Institute of Chicago, 1981). Matthew Baigell writes that ‘Golub has explored the condition of man in an ongoing sequence of burnt, flailed, flawed, and brutalized figures … Refusing to paint specific events or to place his figures in specific locations, Golub is not a belated Social Realist, but a realist whose subject matter is human savagery’ (A Concise History of American Painting and Sculpture, 1984).

In 1951 Golub married the painter Nancy Spero (1926– ), who had been a fellow-student at the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work, much concerned with political and feminist issues, has included long scroll compositions incorporating texts and collage elements.