The Fact of Brutality: on Leon Golub's Barbaric Realism
- cmil1167
- Sep 11, 2024
- 10 min read
Updated: Mar 24
“To represent terrible and questionable things is, in and of itself, an expression of the artist’s instinctive desire for power and glory; he does not fear them.”
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
The post-war period, with its constant global conflicts, was a rich one for history painting, and the genre dominated American art of the 60s and 70s from the onset of the Vietnam war. Leon Golub (1922-2004) was the foremost history painter of the late twentieth century. After depicting the war in Vietnam, he moved on to the smaller proxy, so-called ‘dirty wars’ that continued around the globe through the 1980s, in the tradition of the dispassionate witness-bearing inaugurated by Jacques Callot’s 1633 series of prints, The Miseries and Misfortunes of War. Callot’s prints documented the first ‘total war’, the Thirty Years’ War, one characterised by countless atrocities. It’s the absence of heroism or valour in his etchings, his detachedly documenting and merely bearing witness, that made Callot the first modern in the depiction of conflict. Golub’s paintings are in this tradition, and the activist impetus of peers such as Wally Hendrich, his wife Nancy Spero, the Art Worker’s Coalition, and Ed Kienholz, is absent in his work.
Western painting through the ages is full of images of battles and violence. Mimesis and violence are both so fundamental to human beings that we can say that they are things of inherency, rather than mere ubiquity. However historically specific a depiction of human brutality may be, it will always have ant odour of the eternal. This eternality of brutality is foregrounded in Golub’s paintings throughout his career, from the early Gigantomachy, Burnt Man, Napalm and Vietnam series, to his later Interrogation and Mercenaries series.
By 1966 Golub had begun to use scale as a rhetorical mode. Gigantomachy II is a monumental 9 x 24 ft. The oversized figures on this large canvas tower over and menace us, an effect achieved in part by hanging his unframed, unstretched canvases at floor level. His works of this period were still informed by the same iconographical repertoire of images and styles as his work of the fifties, such as Classical sculpture, ‘Outsider Art’, shamanic masks, and Expressionism, giving them an air of primitivism, but this melding of styles crossing history and geography also expresses the historical continuity of war.
Gigantomachy II depicts a group of naked men engaged in murderous hand-to-hand combat. Its main source was the frieze of the Great Altar of Zeus at Pergamon, c.180-160 BCE, so there is little suggestion of depth, and just enough recession for the figures to fit before and behind each other, with the back figures stuck to the ground, Fuzzy Felt fashion. The bodies are clumsily posed and ugly, as bodies are when engaged in physical violence.
Although the title refers to a battle between the Olympian Gods and the race of giants from Greek mythology, there is nothing to differentiate the two warring enemies in the painting. The only suggestion that there are different “sides” is given by the ground, which is split almost equally into two, with a darker, excremental ground on the left, and a lighter brown on the right. The darker ground continues across the lower left-hand side of the painting to suggest a floor, although where floor and wall meet is indeterminate, a characteristic of Golub’s grounds generally.
Golub is not depicting the oppression of the weak by the strong but making a generalized, essentialist statement about male aggression. Strong vertical and horizontal gouges and thick stripes of paint evoke scar, bruise, wound, and blood, dried and fresh, in a violently expressionistic style he dubbed “barbaric realism”. The faces of the figures in Gigantomachy II are barely discernible, abbreviated and schematic, and the battling bodies seem like one enormous writhing mass of human flesh, at war with itself, forever.
By the time of Vietnam II, in 1973, Golub had abandoned these hieratic, classically influenced figures and was using photographic resources, as he began to amass what grew to be an enormous archive of images. Its sources were eclectic – anything from tv news stills, press and official war photography, boxing and football magazines, and Soldier of Fortune magazine – but its subject matter was monotonous: conflict and violence.
With the Vietnam series, Golub for the first time addressed a specific war, and in Vietnam II he aimed also for specificity in his depiction of weaponry and uniforms, to anchor the paintings in their historical moment. Of this painting’s clumsy, awkward-looking figures, Golub said that he wanted them to be “gross, vulgar, clumsy as war”. This clumsiness was achieved, and a suggestion of a “constructed” self was enhanced by combining many photographic sources to form aggregate, almost collaged figures, implying that the modern human subject is an aggregate of sources, mostly from mass media. In an interview with David Levy-Strauss he said, “I virtually sense myself as made up of photos and imagistic fragments jittering inside my head”, contrasting his paintings to the ‘crystalline slice’ of a photograph, adding that his ‘aggregated figures’ are ‘more liquid, they flicker’. This though is problematic, as he depicts the victims in the same style as the perpetrators, yet it cannot be argued that a Vietnamese peasant’s subjectivity was formed by the Western mediascape of the time.
There’s a tension in Vietnam II between humanism and anti-humanism, and the pathos of the scenario portrayed is at variance with the manner of its depiction, particularly the figures’ eyes. These cancelled eyes evoke an almost Sadean materialism, suggesting an ultimate impersonality and savage determinism at the core of the human. The figure of the Vietnamese boy, inspired by the iconic photo by Nick Ut, is at the very edge of the picture plane, and seems to be running to the arms of the viewer for succour, a futile entreaty to be forever frustrated. This was the last of his paintings in which a victim’s eyes would look out at the viewer. Following this, he cast aside self-deluding liberal pathos for what could be seen as a deterministic nihilism.
Vietnam II is the largest of Golub’s paintings – 10 x 40 feet. Like his other large paintings, it is unframed and hung at floor level. Golub may have been influenced by the size and landscape format of the cinema screen and using such scale to distance his depiction of the war from that on the small, square television screen (although he was a great admirer of the large-scale history paintings he saw by Gerome, David, and Delacroix when he lived in Paris between 1969-64).
With its dour palette of the quasi-khaki of raw canvas, dried-blood reds, blacks, and browns, there is a refusal of the pleasurable haptic qualities of brighter colours and their powers of stimulation, a reaction against the bright palettes of Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism, as well as the blandishments of advertising, a deliberate making-ugly. These are the colours of the squalid, ugly, smelly mess of violent death, and suggest, too, an inner “lifelessness” and lack of affect.
The specificity of the uniform and gun that Golub attempted in the Vietnam paintings make the painting no less essentializing than his Gigantomachy paintings: this historical accuracy in weapon and uniform depiction is lost on most viewers of the paintings. Even on close examination, Golub’s rendering of these items makes them seem generic. But his ‘failure’ in this regard was serendipitous. Vietnam II does not refer to a particular atrocity in the Vietnam war; the incident, like the figures in it, is an aggregate. However much a painter may want to communicate with his contemporaries, historical specificity in a painting is illusory, and any depiction of specific brutalities can be read as exemplifying the whole bloody nightmare of history.
After the burnt and peeling flesh of his Burnt Man and Napalm paintings, Golub never again depicted wounds and injuries, blood, corpses or gore. This eschewing of gore may have been an ethical decision, and another indirect influence of the mass media on his work: by the time of Vietnam II almost all taboos regarding the depiction of violence had been broken, and brutality and torture in popular cinema had become mere jokey fun (some critics lay this at the door of the Bond films, David Thompson at that of Psycho). Violence is always imminent in Golub’s paintings - it may have been a granting of respect to victims that stopped him from showing them as corpses or damaged bodies, but this imminence makes his paintings all the more menacing.
From the mid-1950s, using a meat cleaver, Golub had been scraping his painted canvases, in places going right down to the nap. This abrasion of the surface gives the paintings an ancient, ruinous look, universalising the barbarity portrayed. He may have been violently attacking the scenes represented, attempting a kind of sympathetic magic, but could also have been enjoying a vicarious acting out of violence. This hints at an identification with his violent, domineering, and destructive protagonists. The primitive artist, according to ethnologists, sought power by creating images of power. Leon Golub’s relationship with the soldiers, mercenaries, and interrogators in his paintings is complex and troubling, and something of Palaeolithic artists' relationship with the figures they portrayed is present in his portrayals of violent men.
Mercenaries V (1984) is based on an AP Press photo taken in Rhodesia by J. Ross Baughman. Golub made significant changes from the original photograph, the most obvious being the addition of colour, the men under interrogation being clothed, and their number reduced to three, all done for the sake of balance and elegance of composition. The source photograph, with the man’s head touching the top of the frame is, by conventional aesthetic standards, badly composed. The figures in the painting, by contrast, are evenly spaced, the limbs, including those of the interrogator, contrapuntally arranged. Legs, torsos, and the figure of the interrogator divide the painting into three equal parts. Whilst in the photograph the ground is clearly sand, in the painting we cannot tell where floor meets wall, giving the impression that the action is taking place in a blueish void.
The paint for the victim’s faces has been evenly applied and hasn’t been attacked with solvents and cleaver in Golub’s customary way, in contrast to that of the domineering tormenter, whose face looks diseased, the external acting as metonym for a rotten and corroded interior. Another obvious difference between source photo and painting is that the interrogator in the photograph wears military fatigues, whilst in the painting he wears civilian clothes: a uniform would inhibit the viewer’s uncomfortable identification with this tormentor, which is why Golub has eschewed it.
The interrogator points his gun at a head, and his outspread left hand theatrically presents the scene as if it were a grotesque tableaux vivant laid on for the viewer’s delectation. His eyes look directly into the viewers, and he smirks in rueful triumph, in a kind of ‘so it goes’ and ‘how do you like that’ look. Few painters have their protagonists look directly at the viewers in a way that incorporates them into the situation viewed. This effect is compounded by the closeness of protagonist to picture plane, his life-size scale, and the painting being hung at floor level.
In Interrogation II, we again see an elegant patterning of verticals and diagonals, and there are similar theatrical, pointing hand gestures. The smiles of two of the interrogating figures are directed at the viewer; this disquiets, as when one smiles at someone, one expects the smile returned, and so a complicity is created between the viewer and these characters. The third figure on the right points at the genitals of the man being interrogated, whilst the man beside him points with both hands at his own genitals. This could be a jeering indication that something gruesome is about to happen to the genitals of their prisoner, or pointing to the ultimate source of male aggression. There is almost no recession to Interrogation II, and we feel that the characters are almost in our space, whilst the furnace-red ground gives a hellish feel of the scene taking place in a no-space, no-time, all-time.
As in all of the Mercenary, White Squad and Interrogation paintings, we don’t see the victim’s face – in this case it is hooded. This lack of a face confirms the distance not only between the oppressor and oppressed within the painting, but also that between viewer and victim. There is a refusal to foster any feeling of identification, and therefore of pathos, and the viewer experiences the act of objectifying a victim. This, and the fact that torturers are given a face, and that their eyes that meet ours, brings us closer to the perpetrators than to the victims. In a piece of emotional and moral realism, they are more ‘human’ for us than their anonymised victims. The torture victim is also naked, and is central to the canvas, and our looking at his vulnerable nakedness augments our objectification of him.
In Interrogation III the female victim, whose naked body is the cynosure of the canvas, has had her eyes and mouth taped over, and her nipples and genitalia form a primitive schematic face as we look, one that seems to eerily to stare out at us, as we vainly search for a face to meet ours to resist our complicity in objectifying her. Leon Golub’s art gives a voice to suffering, but he also gives one equally to cruelty. He once commented that his oppressors are just “guys on the job, maybe even taking pride in a job well done”. In an interview with Martha Rosler, he denied that his paintings were activist, commenting,“The basic thing I want is a kind of reportage. It is similar to Renaissance paintings in whose figures you see the customs of the time, the power relationships between people”.
He went on to connect his own feeling of power as an artist to that of the violent figures depicted, and to the global power of America:
“I am an American artist. I think that a powerful society, generally speaking, has powerful art … The implications of confidence and the use of force are implied by these figures … The circumstances which permit me to record this kind of art are part of American confidence”.
Golub repeatedly claimed to be a mere recording witness and was reluctant to condemn the perpetrators of violence in his paintings. For instance, the original collective title of the Vietnam paintings was Assassins, which he judged to be too condemnatory and changed, explaining, “you can’t blame the GIs for the guys who were initiating this”. It is such statements that led Peter Schjeldahl to describe Golub as “a citizen of the left but classically conservative: convinced of human wickedness to a degree almost beyond caring”.
Making violence the subject of art necessarily aestheticizes it, even when attempting to capture its squalid quiddity, and to render it abhorrent. Golub’s art is a cruel art in the sense not of delighting in suffering, but of a refusal of complacency, and of a courageous tarrying with the cruelty of reality. Few painters have produced such dispassionate disquisitions on political violence, militarism, and brutality. E. M. Cioran once wrote that only a monster can see things as they really are: Golub exhibited this monstrous strength.
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