Leon Golub: : Existential/Activist Painter : by Donald Kuspit (Rutgers: $40; 220 pp., illustrated)

Not since the 1960s has a living American painter aroused the enthusiasm that Leon Golub has aroused this year. During the past months, Golub has had major retrospectives in Paris, London and New York. He has been on the covers of two major art journals. He has been the subject of a major story in Time. And the list goes on.

Yet just nine years ago, Golub, already in his 50s, savagely destroyed several of his paintings. Rejected for so long, he had begun to lose faith in himself.

Golub’s paintings, which kept the artist in European self-exile for much of 30 years, violate all modernist canons. They are not decorative. They are not pleasant. They are not, in Arthur Danto’s memorable phrase, “the transfiguration of the commonplace” (Warhol’s soup cans, Flavin’s fluorescent lights, etc.).

Then what are they? They are what Giotto might have produced had Giotto seen Gauguin’s colors. In La Jolla, when the New York retrospective moved there, art patrons almost cowered before a painting 12 feet high of two uniformed Third World operatives torturing a naked, blindfolded woman.

We cower before Golub’s work because his torturers, typically, notice us. They salute us with the proud look that a cat has when he brings in a slaughtered robin. They smile fraternally, as if we’re in on their game, as if they’re following our orders. Do we avert our eyes, or do we acquiesce in all that is implied? To what foreign or domestic policies, what left-wing or right-wing errors, does Golub allude? Are we to judge what we see? Dare we?

In his “Horsing Around” paintings, we join the mercenaries at Miller Time. A holstered black man sits with a leering blonde on his knee. They pose happily for our camera (so to speak): She shows us her tongue, he sticks his fingers possessively down the front of her jeans. They’re stupid, innocent, murderous, vulnerable, infinitely dangerous, and painted in the vehement colors of one of Gauguin’s Tahitian spirits.

Donald Kuspit’s book on Leon Golub should be of as much value to those interested in literature and music as it is to those interested in art. Kuspit, already a winner of the prestigious Mather Award for criticism, takes the late triumph of Golub as occasion to explain the collapse on all fronts of the old avant-garde and the birth of a new one.

A spectrum of critics, from Stanley Cavell to David Antin, have now written of the transfigurationist avant-garde’s demise. That “obsolete aesthetic revolution’s” hallmark, Kuspit explains, was a naive “optimistic materialism” that is now exhausted. (Think of the Futurists’ 1909 worship of the automobile--”more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace”--recently, alas, re-enacted by the museum that we are fond to call “Contemporary.”)

The new avant-garde to which Golub belongs, Kuspit argues, turns its attention from things to man. Its power is “revelation”; its shock, “self-recognition.” Like Golub, this new art does not hesitate to perform the “brutal revelation of brutal reality,” even through “brutal techniques.”

Richard Kuhns has called Golub’s art “spiritual metabolism,” saying, “we can no more give up real art than we can give up physical metabolism.” Donald Kuspit’s landmark book, like Golub’s paintings, will assist us in that essential process.