BOOK REVIEW : Frame of Reference for Artist’s Quest

In its most significant aspects, contemporary art is ugly . . . a threat to the ordering of society and man’s concept of himself.

--Leon Golub Gerald Marzorati first viewed Leon Golub’s work in January, 1982, at the Susan Caldwell Gallery in Soho. He was drawn in by a sign on the door: “Please be advised that the current exhibition at Susan Caldwell Inc., may be inappropriate for viewing by children.”

Marzorati’s gut reaction to the “theatricality” of the sign was both cynical and skeptical. What child today, he wondered, could be shocked by a work of art in a Soho gallery? Obviously this was a clumsy attempt at public relations.

Six large portraits of mercenaries, torturers and their victims (entitled “Mercenaries” and “Interrogation”) filled two rooms, dissipating Marzorati’s initial skepticism. In describing his initial reaction to the work, Marzorati recalls their morbid beauty and a “sense that they were not simply stunning, but true. . . . These men, Golub was saying, are us.”

This initial visit to the Susan Caldwell Gallery sets off the narrative of “A Painter of Darkness.” The book records events that took place between 1982 and 1988, and focuses on visits to Golub’s studio as well as on the Iran-Contra hearings (July, 1987) and the presidential election of November, 1988. Because of these perspectives, it is simultaneously a critical commentary on the politics of the time as well as on creativity and social responsibility.

Leon Golub’s paintings depict a world dominated by violence. In the series of works he has produced steadily since 1950, his images of suffering and torture draw upon an historical understanding of the human condition. Committed to exploring the dimensions of the underbelly of humankind, Golub has consistently ignored the fleeting trends and fashions of the contemporary art scene.

During the dominant years of Abstract Expressionism, when social commitment was passe, he probed the “horrors” of the world through a figurative style that drew on both the Expressionist and Realist traditions. Golub evokes Goya, Nolde, Munch, the Picasso of the “Guernica” and Bacon on the one hand, and continues the tradition of Edward Hopper, Carl Sandburg and the American Realist School on the other.

In this book, Marzorati, a senior editor for Harpers magazine and a regular contributor to ARTnews and Vanity Fair, chronicles Golub’s role in American contemporary art. It is a curious book in that it has few illustrations. Marzorati combines art history and social commentary, biography and interview to re-create the historical events of the last 30 years that were reflected (and reflected on) in Golub’s work. The book is at once a good read and a stimulating study on the scholarly question of art and social commentary.

Golub’s artistic journey to a large degree reflects the Midwestern experience of the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s. His father, born in the Ukraine, wanted to study drama but instead became a public-health doctor; his Lithuanian-born mother was descended from a long line of rabbis. Born in Chicago in 1921, Golub was just 12 when his father died, leaving his mother with a small pension. An older sister was the main wage earner.

Yet from an early age, Golub was encouraged to pursue his own interests, notably art classes through the Depression W.P.A. programs and at school. At Wright Junior College and later at the University of Chicago, he studied art history, but World War II interrupted his studies. He enlisted in the Army and served in Europe, returning to the States in 1946. Uncertain about his future as an art historian, he changed his course of study, enrolling at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His feelings about the world around him, his “recognition of estrangement, of domination and violence, of existential fatality,” led to his making art that expressed those realities.

Those beginnings marked a career that has never wavered from an uncompromising commitment to investigating the relationships between art and society. Golub’s participation in the touring exhibition, “A Different War: Vietnam in Art” (which comes to UCLA in March of 1991), for example, is not limited to his own works on display. He played a seminal role in the Artists Protest Committee in the mid-1960s, the first organized group of artists to take a stand against the war.

A strength in Marzorati’s work is that he never limits himself to an analysis or critique of the images. Instead, by reflecting on the concept of the painter’s place within his time, he succeeds in shedding light on Golub’s lone quest during those years when American art looked inward and away from society. In so doing, he also offers a new paradigm of interpretation applicable to the understanding of American contemporary art.

Next: Jonathan Kirsch reviews “The False Prophet: Rabbi Meir Kahane, from FBI Informant to Knesset Member” by Robert I. Friedman (Lawrence Hill Books).

A PAINTER OF DARKNESS

Leon Golub and Our Times

by Gerald Marzorati Viking

$19.95, 265 pages