George Grosz: Politics and His Influence at David Nolan
September 8- October 22, 2016, 527 West 29th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, info@davidnolangallery.com

Sometimes merely to depict the world is to make a political statement. When Sue Coe draws Homeless Woman Dressed in Garbage Bags (1992) and Louis Lozowick’s lithograph depicts Hooverville (1932), both at St. Etienne, those images in themselves reveal injustice, and so should inspire responsive action. And, at David Nolan, the implication of the visual rhetoric of Nancy Spero’s F111- Victims in River of Blood (1967) is transparently clear. But sometimes the relationship between visual art and political ideals is more elusive, as with A. R. Penck’s Ubergang (1968/70), an ink drawing, and Marina Abramovic’s The Hero II (2001/2008), a silver print, both also at Nolan. Penck’s German title describes a ‘transition’, presumably towards a more just society—and Abramovic ironically shows herself as a hero with a white flag on a white horse. And Gerhard Richter’s print 14 Feb 45 (2001), so you can discover by Googling that date, is an aerial view of Dresden made right after the World War Two firebombing.

Galerie St. Etienne presents sixty-five drawings, lithographs, paintings and posters made by American artists associated with (or supportive of) the American communist party. Coe has an illustration NY Soup Kitchen—a Week Before Xmas (1992), George Grosz two works on paper, and Alice Neel a painting Longshoremen Returning from Work (1936). These figurative artists depicted poverty, racism and unemployment. One room at David Nolan shows a group of George Grosz’s iconic works from the 1920s through the 1940s. The rest of this exhibition, in three galleries on two floors, shows a marvelous variety of political artists. You see Leon Golub’s Mercenaries II (1975), Ian Hamilton Finlay’s installation The Revolution is Frozen—All Principles are Weakened. There Remain only Red Bonnets Worn by Intrigue (1991), and Martha Rosler’s photomontage Empty Boys (1967-72). And also Faith Ringgold’s narrative composition, Hate is a Sin Flag (2007); Jorg Immendorff’s painting Only when the rocks are flying we will be appeased (1978), and Robert Rauschenberg’s remarkable collage Untitled (Huey P. Newton, Arts Magazine, Nov. 1970) (1970).

These two exhibitions present a most instructive history of twentieth century political art. In a lengthy essay, which is on-line, St. Etienne traces the career of Grosz, who immigrated to this country when Hitler came to power in his native Germany, and the response of various American 1930s leftists to the Great Depression. And, after noting that the rise of Abstract Expressionism led to the marginalization of political art, it plausibly argues that now we have as much need for socially engaged art as in the 1930s. “Although the American establishment rejected political art in the latter part of the twentieth century,” it claims, “some collectors and dealers remained devoted to the genre.” In fact, for two generations the very influential critics associated with October, have argued that contemporary art should critique our social institutions. And a number of artists extolled in their pages are in the Nolan exhibition. What has changed, and this is an important development, is that the dominant style of political art has been radically transformed. The activist commentary of Jenny Holzer’s cold water (2013) and Glenn Ligon’s Introduction (5) (2004) needs to be being teased out. As also is true of Ciprian Muresan’s Communism Never Happened (2006), a vinyl label reproducing those words. The claims of Coe’s images are as direct as those of the drawings by Grosz, the one artist who appears in both exhibitions. But nowadays the statements made by fashionable political art are mostly elliptical.

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April 23 to July 23, 2010
35 Wooster Street, between Grand and Broome
New York City, 212-219-2166

A piquant pleasure of gallery-going is an encounter with unfamiliar and challenging work by an artist whom you thought you “knew:” had dealt with, figured out, mentally filed away. “Leon Golub: Live & Die Like a Lion?” on view at The Drawing Center through July 23, provides exactly that order of pleasure. The exhibition includes fifty drawings, primarily in ink and oil stick on 8 by 10 inch sheets of bristol or vellum, from the artist’s last six years. It is an object lesson in late, great stylistic surprises.

At the height of his visibility, Golub (1922-2004) painted on a grand and public scale in global if didactic terms. Among art-world observers in the 1980’s, Golub might have been known as “the Interrogations guy” for his depictions of brutal, blasé torturers and their hooded and helpless victims. The work touched a nerve at the time of the Iran-Contra affair and the American public’s mushrooming awareness of our country’s “dirty little wars.” Closely related canvases featured similarly monstrous groups of leering mercenaries and screeching white trash. Golub’s politics of human rights is unassailable but, unlike the more open-ended of that decade’s Neo-Expressionism (e.g., Francesco Clemente’s kitchen-sink, fetishistic symbolism) his polemics stipulate a narrow path of approach. He illustrated sources of outrage without illuminating their psychic blood and guts.

Later, Golub’s profile waned. His work was increasingly weird and elliptical. In the measured words of Thomas McEvilley’s April 2002 Art in America feature, the canvases of the 1990’s “consistently show less resistance to the sensual aspects of the painterly tradition.” Oh, and he started drawing like a sonovabitch.

No Escape Now (2002) reprises the theme of the torture victim, here tethered to a post and slumped forward, unconscious or left for dead. Scratchy ink and oil stick suggest stressed, exhausted musculature. In Blue Movie and Blue Movie II (both 2004), passionless couples strenuously copulate. Sex is more fun in Satyr Love II (2004), in which a male of that species lifts his hirsute partner’s shapely hoof and guides himself into her. Satyrs abound in Golub’s late oeuvre, as do licentious women, guys with oxymoronic tattoos (“think HATE”), hyperventilating lions, and inscrutably gesticulating skeletons. Often, image vies with lettering for primacy; “FUCK DEATH,” screams a skull in FUCK DEATH (1999).

Taunting the viewer, the skeevy couple in Bunnie & Quyde (2003) pull at their underwear and fondle a gun. The work is based on a newspaper photograph on display in a vitrine among other source material culled from fashion magazines, straight porn, and the sports pages. Drawing as ever from his pool of print-media images, Golub loosened his grip on message, on meaning, and allowed it to become diffuse. In the catalogue accompanying this exhibition, Curator Brett Littman quotes the artist: “I want to throw drawings in all directions. That’s my ultimate intent: to have them be political, to have them be erotic, to have them be neurotic, to have them be just rotten.”

That rottenness is everywhere, and economically expressed. Each drawing is two or three colors, rarely more, and looks like it took maybe ten minutes to do. Sure, into his eighth decade Golub was getting tired. But what the aging artist might have lacked in physical stamina he made up for in pictorial smarts. The diminutive scale and material modesty of these droll, sour little icons of discontent contribute mightily to their punch. Funny and morbid, they track the efforts of an old man, a lion of our tribe, to deal with his own extinction. Dreamlike and inward-looking, they might be confessional in tone if they were not so ferocious.

A second vitrine houses a number of “unfinished drawings,” inchoate smears or stains of color that divulge the works’ procedural origins in abstraction. Golub valued image above form, having denounced Abstract Expressionism in its heyday, so it is amusing to think of him relishing the triumph of his iconography quite literally “over” the abstract. In fact, the distinction between figure and ground, ever clear in his epic canvases, is artfully scrambled in most of these late works. When it is not, the artist’s title sounds the alarm, as in a 2002 work depicting a steely-eyed, grinning contractor kicking back among blood-colored, Hans Hofmannesque rectangles, titled GUNMAN CAUGHT IN RED ABSTRACTION! SITUATION COULD BE SERIOUS!

The most haunting of these images are not the heartless couples, the skulls or lions, not even the abandoned corpses, but Golub’s dogs. They roam this exhibition, pacing its perimeter, snarling at the sky, dumbly staring down the viewer. Bones (2002) is the best of these wickedly strange postcards from the edge. A skulking mutt approaches a crumpled human skeleton, sniffing for meat. The joke’s on him: nothing doing! It’s a desiccated archeological dig, no juicy corpse. After decades confronting the void of the empty canvas, Golub enlists man’s best friend to help him confront the void of his own bodily demise. The possibly feral dog that lopes across A Sentimental Story (2003) looks a bit beaten down. He shoots the viewer a baleful glance, and you just know that this lunatic hound will soon find something to howl about.

cover image: Leon Golub, Live & Die Like a Lion?, 2002.  Oil stick on Bristol, 8 x 10 inches. Collection of Anthony and Judith Seraphin, Seraphin Gallery Philadelphia © Estate of Leon Golub/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Photograph by Cathy Carver

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“Sandy Walker: Large Ink Drawings” at Wooster Arts Space until February 14 (147 Wooster Street, between Houston and Prince Streets, 212-777-6338). Prices: $2,000-$5,000.

“Jacque Rochester: Paintings” at N3 Project Space until TK (85 North 3rd Street, 2nd Floor, Williamsburg, between Whythe and Berry Streets, 718-599-9680). Prices: $500-$18,000.

A trademark Leon Golub depicts agents of repression at their brutal business: torture, pillage, execution. But Mr. Golub’s familiar imagery is an absent presence at the octagenarian’s current exhibition. Instead, Ronald Feldman has brought together two groups of works that thematically and chronologically sandwich this subject.

Mr. Golub’s Graeco-Roman Colossi from the early 1960s predate his political thug narratives, which (appropriate image) kicked in during the Vietnam era. His “Erotica, etc.” series, from the last few years, shows another side of this “existential/activist” painter, as one critical champion, Donald Kuspit, described him.

If your politics are Mr. Golub’s politics, then everything is political. But you don’t need to share his avowedly leftist stance to see that politics is the prime mover in his painting. His political views energize or enervate his art in almost direct proportion to the viewer’s own.

This is not to say that Mr. Golub is a propagandizer. He wears his allegiances on his sleeve, but his art is charged with an indignant humanism. It invests every surface and every mark with pathos and grandeur. His violence is mythopoeic, mixing specific historical references with a sense of the perennial. Mr. Golub makes art, not agitprop.

Ironically, his early work is shot through with the character of “late style” Old Master painting: a telling fusion of bravura awkwardness in drawing and lovingly invested impasto that puts you in mind of, say, late Titian or Rembrandt. (More specifically, the Colossi series recalls French painters of the postwar period – Dubuffet, Fautrier and Eugene Leroy.)

The impasto would soon be jettisoned by Mr. Golub, sometime after the Colossi series, when he started to take a meat cleaver to his canvases to scrape away and distress his surfaces. Even in these earlier works, though, with their flickering, glowing accretions of paint, there is a sense that to make the work dark and heavy was a categorical imperative as weighty for the artist as a party dictum.

There is nothing elegaic in Mr. Golub’s appeal to the classics: His colossi are appropriately chthonic. The half-dozen suitably gargantuan canvases know how to pack a punch, generating power in both the what and how of depiction.

In the touchingly enigmatic and disturbingly raunchy erotic works in the second gallery, the personal becomes political. The sexual encounters depicted and the poses struck are as much about power play as any other kind. These small drawings actually renew the moral charge that had begun to become rather stylized in Mr. Golub’s more familiar thug narratives. The overt sensuality mixed with brutalism brings George Grosz to mind. In these works he ups the ante of the moral ambiguity at the heart of painting bad things.

And yet, standing amidst the Colossi, and then wandering through Mr. Golub’s erotica, an irreverent association sprang to mind. In one of the Austin Powers sequels, a wacky interlude dwells on the private life of one of Dr. Evil’s henchmen, who gets wounded. It is a spoof on the mortal expendability of extras in action movies: The evil henchman turns out to be just a regular guy doing his job. To make the point, we see the henchman in a burger joint with his wife and friends.

Mr. Golub’s colossi and prostitutes almost ask to be read similarly: as peripheral characters in the lives of his usual dramatis personae. The ur-thug colossi are icon-heroes of his mercenaries and torturers, while the “whoroscope” of his erotic drawings present their pin-ups.

***

For further colossal depictions of bodies at play, albeit of a comparatively innocent nature, check out Sandy Walker’s impressive ink drawings a couple of blocks away at Wooster Arts Space. Mr. Walker, 20 years Mr. Golub’s junior, looks to New York School action painting, Matisse, and oriental calligraphy in his sparse, fluent, energetic paeans to movement.

Mr. Walker’s figure studies bring together a heavily loaded brush, bravura confidence, an openness to chance, and perceptual acuity. His bold, easy humanism offers action painting without angst. He favors five-foot square pages, sometimes doubling them up to five-by-10 foot, and draws from dancers and Aikido practitioners.

Mr. Walker’s line veers from the voluptuous and balletic to the nervous and awkward. There is skilful play between brushmarks that are drying out and ones that artfully blotch up. Sometimes, especially where lines accumulate in dense overlays, his markmaking can be a bit too happy with itself, but generally he is a model of economy.

The most satisfying work in the show was the smallest and slightest, “‘EF’ #1” (2003), in which an enigmatic, dislocated mark, illegible but charged with a sense of observation, pulsates like a difficult pose heroically held.

***

Jacque Rochester (b.1952) has something of Mr. Golub’s scratchy touch and muted palette, but neither his angst nor his agenda. She is showing at N3 Project Space, the offbeat gallery run since 1998 by artist James Biederman in the front half of his Williamsburg studio. Ms. Rochester’s half-dozen paintings are more striking for their diversity than unity, but the energy level is consistent.

The main event in terms of space and effort is “The Other Side” (2003-04), a 15-foot wide abstraction made up of a dense patchwork of painterly scribble that recalls both Jasper Johns’s maps and Sisley’s snowscapes. But this highly worked piece lacks the verve of the diminutive, almost insolently perfunctory pictures, the real marvel of this show.

Next to the big canvas is “Missing” (also 2003-04) a quirky, inscrutable, nonchalant little panel, a smudge in blacks and grays packed with spatial ambiguity and a sense of enigma.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, January 22, 2004

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“Every virtue resides or is symbolized in the flesh together with all humiliation, threat and squalor”. So wrote the British art critic Adrian Stokes in his 1967 Reflections on the Nude. And although no discernible virtue is symbolized in flesh as Leon Golub paints it, humiliation, squalor and threat are present, in abundance. This is Art Brut on a monumental scale. The people he creates are monsters, unable to escape the confines of a claustrophobic stage setting. Many critics and curators have noted how Roman and Greek sculpture influenced Golub’s male figures, particularly those found in the Gigantomachy series. Golub also shares a leading theme with Roman art; the contrast between authority and submission. The imperfections found in his paintings are reflections of our own. Not only is the artist’s view of humanity bleak, however, but the range of emotions expressed by his flattened-out figures is severely limited.

The typical Golub painting succeeds at reminding us of the ugliness within, the failures of the species as a whole. Skin is agony, scraped paint. Smug, sneering and gloating mercenaries and soldiers prepare prisoners for torture or set innocent people within the sights of their guns. Victims’ eyes are turned away, covered with tape or closed. Like an Expressionist set designer, Golub provides a minimal amount of details to suggest a specific environment. His distorted and cartoonish figures cannot compete with the images of violence which inundate us on a daily basis. The later works, filled with bits of text, pornography and allegorical objects such as skulls and wild dogs, remind me of pictures high school-age illustrators might paint on the back of their denim jackets. Heavy-handed symbolism replaces politically tinged nihilism. Women are portrayed in mourning (Threnody I) or as victims (Interrogation III) in this heartless, macho universe. The late allegories are either too obscure or just plain hokey. Golub is a stoic and a nihilist, and this is strongly reflected in the work done from the 1960s to the present.

The abstractions and paintings of heads that he did in the 1950s are brimming with connotations, and in my opinion, are more interesting. Although his attempt at realism was inspired by the cruelty and violence in the world, he failed to turn moral outrage into great art. Artists who reject pure abstraction, and decide to paint what is actually seen, whether in life, films or photographs, still need to think long and hard about how to transform all aspects of the pictorial surface into an interlocked and cohesive whole.

In the 1950s Golub was an interesting abstract painter. In the ugly and profound painting The Bug (War Machine), 1953, smears of off whites and dark browns, black line drawing, and highlights in an institutional (think lavatory walls) green coagulate and become a central spine shape with lashing tendrils. There are patches of shiny lacquer and dry, scraped paint. Colors are spread around this grotesque surface like slabs of butter. The abstract shapes exude aggressiveness and generate ripples of collective violence. Ambiguous forms, they suggest many things. Prince Sphinx, 1955, lacquer and oil on masonite, is filled with moody violets, greens and deep red browns. Golub returned to this theme later in life. The mythological subject matter is augmented by the complex application and layering of pigment. Golub evokes a sense of the primordial, by blending together animal and human forms. The sphinx is in a pouncing position; it threatens us and is a symbol of the inevitability of death. Birth III, 1956, another interesting early abstraction, has an architectural flavor to it. Severed limbs and a distorted face transform into a weird building. The human anatomy is wood-like; the earth tones, red browns, black outlines, and thin washes of pigment suggest the natural world and artifice. Human beings are the building blocks of civilization, even when progress means tearing limb from limb.

Gigantomachy II, 1966, an orgy of violence, a swirling mass of naked men pouncing on one another, is colored feces brown. The men seem to be composed of earth, the soil. The notion that violent impulses are inherent to the species isn’t startlingly original. The monumental scale increases the distortions and the naked forms seem speckled like rocks. The flesh is nuanced but made of putty. The sensuality is removed but at what cost? Painters like Philip Pearlstein, Lucian Freud, and Gustave Courbet manage to remind us of our mortality, the fleshy casing we carry through life and the perpetual longing for the other, but Golub’s figures do not capture our gaze, attention or thoughts with their carnality. If he wanted to desensitize us and use the human figure to play a clever game in which the viewer becomes either victim or accomplice he has succeeded.

The acrylic on linen painting, Napalm Flag, 1970, is really two separate triangular fragments stuck together to form a rectangle. Without mentioning any political content, the museum label next to the painting emphasizes how the work is reminiscent of Abstract Expressionist canvases. Smearing a sloppily made simulacrum of the American flag with gobs of blood red pigment, isn’t the most sophisticated way to express your disagreement with your country’s foreign policy. Perhaps Golub, who did not conceal his negative feelings about the New York art scene, was flipping his finger at the most famous flag painter of all, Jasper Johns. The image of an American flag, torn in half and splattered with blood is undeniably powerful. This is an angry and heavily textured painting.

According to the artist, the Vietnam War transformed his imagery. Army fatigues and automatic weapons began appearing and the paintings became didactic. He felt the need to include elements of the contemporary world. Mythological references and traces of ancient art began to fade, but would eventually return. The people in the paintings done in the 70s and 80s are composed of exposed tendons and muscle. Their skin is scaly. The innards are all gushy. The painting process is labored. Golub paints flesh in a staccato style, and his marks look like they were made with colored pencils or magic markers. Most of the male figures hold their guns as if they are trophies or aim them at other people, grab their crotches, or beat or get beat by other men. Items of clothing look pasted on, like Colorforms, a toy first marketed in the 1950s. This toy consisted of a Colorform playboard that children could press paper-thin plastic decals on to and peel off at will.

Vietnam II, 1973, a large scale political cartoon includes figures which are flattened out by excessive white highlights. The distorted facial features and misshapen anatomies undercut the seriousness of the subject matter. The images of Asian civilians and American soldiers are a strange blend of abstraction and specific detail copied from photographs. Most of the figures in Golub’s work are amalgamations of details taken from any number of photographs in the artist’s personal archive. Without having seen the photos the artist makes partial copies of, he appears to be “quick at seizing a characteristic trait without seeking much empathy.” Some of the figures have no necks, are stubby, and have arms as thick as thighs. Feet are cut off at the bottom of the picture. These rigid emblems of the atrocities of war are placed on the opposite sides of a large area of unmarked linen. The bad guys, the American soldiers backed by a tank, take up the left side of the picture, and unarmed Asian civilians take up the right side. The gulf between the two groupings will not be bridged. Social Realism and overwrought modeling make strange bed fellows. The torn bottom edge does nothing to complicate this obvious political statement. An Asian man’s head, with the mouth gaping wide, looms in the foreground and confronts the viewer. Although we might wonder if he is screaming or in shock, what is about to happen to him and his companions is not a mystery. We can easily imagine the death and carnage that ensues, but that is as far as this painting will take us. More complex examinations of the Vietnam War have been presented in Hollywood films. There is no dynamic between oppressed and oppressor, and representation of the power struggle is simplistic.

I agree with Donald Kuspit when he writes: “The problem with Golub’s work is that it implies that there is no socially feasible alternative to the all-powerful, totalitarian figure.” Golub presents human relationships in an ugly light, in an emaciated language of form. The two blue collar males in Try Burning This One, 1991 are stereotypes. Two contemptible white males with no redeeming qualities, stand in front of a yellow brick wall. Although the leering and crotch grabbing white trash might inspire the average college educated museum/gallery goer to have feelings of superiority and contempt, this painting as a whole, is little more than a joke.

The portraits Golub painted of political figures and the wealthy and powerful, Nelson Rockefeller and Ho Chi Minh among others, in the late seventies were meant to bring these figures down to earth. The artist said that he painted these famous/infamous people in order to knock them off their pedestals. It is a relief to see these portraits, because we finally have the opportunity to gaze at human faces without being spoon-fed reactionary politics or stilted allegory. Although Golub displays delicate handling, from a technical standpoint these works do not rise above the typical output of street portraitists, who help tourists spend their vacation money. Also, the opposite of what the artist intended has occurred. These portraits cannot escape a particular context, they will always be very dear art objects on display, and Golub’s tribute helps to deify these figureheads instead of deconstructing them. It makes sense that Golub was destroying older works and searching for a new direction during the period in which these portraits were made. It is unfortunate that he did not see any value in the looming and mysterious heads he painted in the 1950s. These lunar landscapes deserve further exploration.

Bits of writing appear in the later works (The Blue Tattoo, 1998 and Prometheus II, 1998). The phrases Golub incorporates into a number of later works are shallow and smart-ass. The artist is daring us to make more of them. I admire Golub for going against the grain and making figural art when Minimalism and Conceptual Art was all the rage. Golub, not unlike Giacometti, pecks away at surfaces. Both artists express existential angst, but Golub fails to imbue his figures with any dignity or grace. The effects of his expressiveness are transitory because they are not, to quote Adrian Stokes once again, “richly integrated throughout the formal relationships on view”. We suffer trauma in isolation, something Giacometti was well aware of, and the aftermath of violence is complex. The element of ambiguity and mystery is missing from many of these paintings. We know that the torturer will start torturing the prisoner again, and we know that the murderer will slam the car trunk down on the crumpled corpse (White Squad IV (El Salvador), 1983). We are prevented from reading into the actions in terms of inner emotions, and cannot project more intensity into the gestures. Golub unsuccessfully tries to create images that are historical and universal simultaneously.

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