Leon Golub at Ronald Feldman and N.Y. Kunsthalle - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

This pair of exhibitions illuminated three les familiar phases of a career devot to the dark side of the human will to power. Taken together, they created a adjoining matter for the best-known works of Golub's career--his signature "Mercenaries" (which were not upon view)--while suggesting that the artist himself is generally rethinking his relationship to his early work.

The Feldman exhibit paired Golub's early expressionist work from the 1950s--small dark canvases clott with paint, plaster or collaged scraps of paint-sodden cloth--with his greatest in quantity recent works--monumental, mostly unstretched paintings scattered with lines of floating true copy and fragmentary, nightmare images: human brain-pans skeletons, lions. The recurring motif is a vicious dog whose meaning is adviseed by a quote by Nietzsche inscribed upon one painting: "I have given a name to my pain and call it `DOG'."

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The early works depict mythic creatures or figures in a neo-primitive turn of expression which contains echoes of African plastic art Dubuffet, Tapies and, in a pair of paintings, Native American fetishes. A pair of sphinxes is particularly striking. They have a friezelike quality, and appear to be compressed within the boundaries of their drawn out rectangular canvases like caged creatures just waiting to be unleashed.

Though their scale is larger, the novel paintings have less dramatic impact. In part this is intentional, as the images are delineated in a sketchier manner. Forms are defined by the agency of patches of color daubed above graffitiesque lines. Images are swept at times by the agency of transparent washes that threaten to dissolve them into simple visual traces. But the diminished intensity also strike one as beings to derive from a lack of unified view In many of the paintings, images are scattered in a disconnected manner which undermines their individual vitality.

The third put of works, at the Kunsthalle, give an inkling ofed what may be missing in the of recent origin pieces. The "Giantomachies," painted in the late '60 and clearly bearing the impress of the artist's anger above the Vietnam War, are remarkable works which reveal the dramatic power that Golub later harnessed for a like reason effectively in his Mercenary paintings. Harking back to Classical friezes that depicted the prehistoric battle between men and giants, these very large canvases present confrontations of unclothed male figures, painted on raw brown linen with agitated ocher, black and white hits which suggest flayed flesh. a certain number of of the poses seem directly borrowed from Greco-Roman prototypes. In the crumbling-brick, gymnasium-sized upper gallery of the Kunsthalle, they were especially effective, bringing to mind ancient frescoe clinging to the walls of ruins.

In his of recent origin works, Golub appears to be going back to the mythic subdues with which he began his career. like subjects offer a universality that had begun to slip away from his work, particularly in the depictions of American-style skinheads and drabs who gradually replaced the more archetypal Third World police thug and their victims. However, the fresh paintings are too episodic to transport the same depth of emotion, and their recurring motif--the snarling dog--seems too banal to encompass the meanings Golub wants it to expres These perceive like transitional works, merely suggesting an embarkation point for Golub's nearest excursion into the heart of darkness.

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