The Human Clay in Extremis

By ROBERT HUGHES

In California, paintings of power and torture by Leon Golub

There is a lot of political art around in America today, but few political artists of real weight. When bad art is busy defending the exploited, does it place one with Pinochet to speak of taste? Most political artists offer values that seem hardly more nuanced than the New Masses cartoons of the 1930s: Manichaean Punch-and-Judy shows of good and evil, projecting ideological stereotypes onto schematically experienced realities. But one striking exception is Leon Golub.

Golub is 62 this year and, beyond question, the leading engage in American painting. Yet it was not until a one-man show in 1982, his first in a New York City gallery in 20 years, that his fortunes changed. Up to then he was conventionally seen as a "Chicago artist," living in New York but tucked away on his own atoll of social irritability, far from the mainstream, best known for his activism in the Viet Nam years and for his earlier paintings of thick, eroded, archaeological figures in wounded repose or lumbering combat. But when the art world turns, peripheral artists have a way of moving to the center, and the decade's renewed interest in figure painting helped this happen with Golub, especially since it coincided with some of the best work of his career.

His new canvases were documentary. They were about power and torture on the fringes of Western politics in Latin America: "White Squad" killers, interrogators, mercenaries, the seedy and deadly emissaries of order. The paintings were huge, some of the figures nearly twice lifesize. Tacked unstretched to the wall like tapestries or (as Golub prefers to think of them) like skins, they resembled, in their stark silhouetting and red earth-colored backgrounds, Roman frescoes whose surfaces had been corrupted by the blackening breath of the late 20th century.

Their paint was like no one else's. Coat after coat was laboriously scraped back with the edge of a meat cleaver and then scumbled again until it looked weirdly provisional, a thin caking of color in the pores of the canvas. The works were gripping yet strangely distant, scratchily insistent rather than speechifying, and their scale was utterly convincing.

Though there is no lack of American painters who confuse eloquence with elephantiasis, the size of Golub's figures seems justified and necessary. Only by monumentalizing their documentary content could he give it the kind of fixity and silence it needed, and only that way could he achieve his peculiar balance between the sacrificial and the banal and so get rid of the sour whiff of pornography that attends images of extreme violence.

A retrospective of Golub's work, seen this fall at Manhattan's New Museum of Contemporary Art, is now on view at the La Jolla Museum in La Jolla, Calif. The show will also travel to Chicago, Montreal and Washington. It is not a show to miss, partly because it has so much to say about the problems of being an "engaged" painter in America today. At root, they come down to how painting can operate in the realm of ideas about violence and power when its audience's sense of the terrible has been so largely pre-empted by photography, film and TV.

This was not a problem for earlier painters of the human clay in extremis, like Goya. It became visibly acute a half-century ago when Picasso in Guernica set forth contemporary carnage in terms of a ferocious rehash of classical rhetoric: dying horse, broken sword, frantic weeping Niobe. Picasso thus "universalized" his image in a way that neither realism nor photography could, while at the same time sowing the enormous canvas with black-and-white references to modern media, including newsprint.

Golub is likewise doubly haunted by classical diction and by mass imagery. His early paintings quote freely from antique prototypes like the Capitoline Dying Gaul. Especially he liked the swollen, corroded forms of Roman official art. The idea of power revealing itself in a "fuzzy or paradoxically discernible way" at the edges of empire matters a great deal to Golub, partly because his own marginal position as a painter made him interested in other margins. Hence, eventually, his 1980s paintings of mercenaries and interrogators.

The presence behind them is not so much Picasso as Caravaggio, with his groups of massive figures in plain underground rooms, theatrical and claustrophobic at once, and linked in various degrees of implication with martyrdom. Golub takes Caravaggio's preoccupation with anticlassical poses to an extreme that pertains to photography. No one in Golub's scenes stands like a Renaissance figure. The poses are mobile, awkward and "modern," the stances and gestures of men at work, with clubs, Uzis and M16s.

But this threatening lightness is frozen by the exaggerated size, and the result is a degraded monumentality far more subtle than the literal reference to monuments in earlier Golubs. Golub has an eagle eye for banality. The good-ole-boy smirk on the face of the "interrogator" in Mercenaries V, 1984, as he flips a dumb "Hi!" to his accomplice--the viewer--sets one's teeth on edge; and yet it anchors the sense of the picture, against the massive but hopelessly vulnerable arches of his victims' backs, with an awful precision. In the end, there are some tasks that painting can do and photography cannot. No camera is allowed in the basements of power that Golub has made peculiarly his own.

--By Robert Hughes