Leon Golub, a former Chicagoan known for commitment to heroic figure painting and political content, died Sunday in New York from complications after surgery. He was 82.
Although Mr. Golub had not lived here for almost 50 years, Chicago ardently continued to claim him not only as a native son but also as one of its most important painters after World War II. Even in the 1960s and 1970s, decades when abstraction and conceptual art dominated internationally, local taste did not turn away from Mr. Golub’s humanistic expressionism.
A sign of the allegiance he inspired is the presence of 26 of his paintings and works on paper in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and Museum of Contemporary Art.
“It is sad to lose a voice like his in these times,” said Lanny Silverman, curator of exhibitions in the Department of Cultural Affairs of the City of Chicago, who in 2003 organized Mr. Golub’s last local retrospective.
“I consider him to be the most successful political artist of our time,” Silverman said, “and it was a difficult role to take on. I think the best art is open-ended, but politics is often about black and white, formed opinion. Golub succinctly managed to explore in an open-ended way the psychological nature of abuse of power, showing what we’re all capable of.”
Those characteristics as well as an adherence to figuration gave Mr. Golub the reputation of working outside the New York mainstream, despite 40 years of living in the city. Only in the 1980s, at the rise of Neo-Expressionism, did his painting begin to find a wide audience, which has further widened internationally since the 1990s, owing to his tenacity and exploratory spirit.
“There are very few artists who get so much better as painters as they continue to work into their 80s,” said Lynne Warren, curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art. “The fruits of a long life, strong viewpoint and technical proficiency come together in astonishing ways in his late paintings. The level of political engagement and awareness was high to the end.”
Mr. Golub was born in Chicago in 1922. His defining moment occurred at the Arts Club of Chicago at age 15, when he first saw Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica.” It was then he decided to become an artist, though he did not immediately act on the decision.
“You experience something,” Mr. Golub said in 2003. “You have thoughts about it. And maybe 10 years later some of that emerges in another fashion that’s somehow related and even impelling because, in a way, certain art objects set standards. They set goals for you.”
Political content crept into his paintings slowly, indirectly, through a “core of beliefs” formed by the kind of work he looked at–Northwest coast American Indian art, Pre-Columbian art, German Expressionism, Greek and Roman art–while studying at the University of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute.
An early painting, “Fallen Warrior,” was a political statement because it showed violence and inferred the social attitudes that cause violence. Decades would pass before Mr. Golub became more specific, in paintings that took on Vietnam. Instead, much of his work was primal and general, addressing eternal conditions. The approach found early acceptance in the five years (1959-64) Mr. Golub and his wife, artist Nancy Spero, lived in Paris.
The scarred surfaces that were characteristic of Mr. Golub’s work came about partly by accident. To get away from the glossy and finished look of oils, he painted several canvases with porch paint, which started to crack. By additionally scratching them with a dental tool, he arrived at an abraded look that he also achieved in prints by eating away the worn surfaces of lithographic stones with excess acid.
“I am still trying to give a picture of our time,” Mr. Golub said. “You do it directly. You also have to do it indirectly. My more recent paintings are more indirect than my earlier paintings were. But my attitude is the same. I’m trying to go after whatever is out there.”
He is represented in the collections of many museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Tate Gallery in London.
His legacy in Chicago includes the Contemporary Art Workshop, one of the oldest artist-run spaces in the United States, which he co-founded in 1949 with Cosmo Campoli, Ray Fink and John Kearney.
Mr. Golub is survived by his wife; sons Stephen, Philip and Paul; and six grandchildren.
