Text by Jon Bird, Jo Anna Isaak, Satish Padiyar, Serge Guilbaut.
Leon Golub (1922-2004) was one of postwar America's most politically engaged artists. His frieze-like figurations of human cruelty and the crimes of warfare kept political painting alive throughout the countless changings of the avant garde of the 1960s and 70s, and his vocal ethical stance and intransigent emphasis on content remains refreshing today. Golub addressed events as they unfurled, from Vietnam to South Africa to Iraq and Afghanistan, confronting chilling acts of brutality head-on, in a weathered, scratchy style synthesized from sources as various as Etruscan and Roman art, French history painting, pornography and sports photographs. This attractively designed full Golub overview accompanies a 2011 retrospective exhibition at the Reina Sofía. Including 150 color plates, it surveys paintings from the 1950s to the present, giving Golub's heroic life work its full due.
Featured image, In the Pink, 2002, is reproduced from Leon Golub.
STATUS: Out of stock indefinitely.
FROM THE BOOK
"Neither the individualism far removed reality of the New York School, nor the ironic distancing of Pop, nor the lubrications on the object of French Nouveau Réalisme, managed to seduce a man determined to bring high discourses to the fore. Opposed to the image of the artist in his ivory tower, at a time of dehumanization, of disenchantment, and of global conflicts, Golub found a place for himself, not in political activism, but from a much more interesting position, that of an attentive observer. In 1984, almost as a manifesto, he proclaimed: 'I want my paintings to be open to everything that goes on in the world. I want them to be porous--porous objects that absorb the present,…I want the artist to be like a radar.'"
FORMAT: Pbk, 7.5 x 9.5 in. / 208 pgs / 105 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $35.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $47.5 ISBN: 9788475069753 PUBLISHER: Turner AVAILABLE: 7/31/2011 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of stock indefinitely AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: NA AFR ME
Published by Turner. Text by Jon Bird, Jo Anna Isaak, Satish Padiyar, Serge Guilbaut.
Leon Golub (1922-2004) was one of postwar America's most politically engaged artists. His frieze-like figurations of human cruelty and the crimes of warfare kept political painting alive throughout the countless changings of the avant garde of the 1960s and 70s, and his vocal ethical stance and intransigent emphasis on content remains refreshing today. Golub addressed events as they unfurled, from Vietnam to South Africa to Iraq and Afghanistan, confronting chilling acts of brutality head-on, in a weathered, scratchy style synthesized from sources as various as Etruscan and Roman art, French history painting, pornography and sports photographs. This attractively designed full Golub overview accompanies a 2011 retrospective exhibition at the Reina Sofía. Including 150 color plates, it surveys paintings from the 1950s to the present, giving Golub's heroic life work its full due.
