Art - Michael Glover talks to Leon Golub
A major touring exhibition of the work of the Chicago-born painter Leon Golub has just closed at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. Now it's London's turn to host the show - except that the one you can see at the South London Gallery is barely one-third of the size of Dublin's.
Why is London selling Golub short? I ask David Thorp, the director of the South London Gallery, why only the later canvases are on display. "Well, it was as much as our limited space could accommodate," he tells me, hedging just a little. But was there no other public space in London that would have had the exhibition? "It is a great missed opportunity, in my opinion."
When I speak to Golub, he suggests that the galleries are actually afraid to show his work. "I've had an enormous amount of critical stuff written about my work, perhaps more than any other contemporary artist," he tells me. "And I've also had 60 museum shows, but I don't have collectors - and the big galleries are wary, too."
It is almost 20 years since Golub last had a big show in London, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. The Tate doesn't own a single painting by him. "I know the Tate was approached, and they made it clear, indirectly, that they didn't want it." Nor did a major public museum in New York City - until four years ago. And that sale, according to Golub, was made easier by a tax break.
Golub, now 78 years old, still works from the home cum studio space in La Guardia Place, Manhattan, that he shares with Nancy Spero, a fellow artist and veteran of many bruising radical-feminist encounters. Golub has had an adversarial career as a painter and political activist. As a young painter from Chicago in the early 1950s, his interests ran directly counter to the dominant orthodoxies of abstract expressionism. The images of abstract expressionism are what you choose to make of them, conceived in an era when figuration was thought to be a dead issue. Golub, out of tune with both the times and fashionable notions of New York City, disagreed. Their claim, he says, was ultimately transcendental. "They were in the business of aestheticising reality." Golub, on the other hand, was concerned with the real - human beings and their place in a shared world.
What especially excited Golub were new ways of figuring the body. He had a passion for Roman wall paintings and Greek sculpture - their articulation of the human figure, the revelation of man intervening in space. This preoccupation with the body - in movement, or in raw conflict with other bodies - developed into an impassioned political art during the 1960s. Vietnam radicalised Golub, turning his art into a kind of brutish, direct social commentary. To some, the images he created were, at best, repulsive. At worst, they were downright unpatriotic.
"What is it about the work of Leon Golub that frightens away the col- lectors?" I ask him. We are sitting, marooned on two chairs, in the middle of an empty South London Gallery, staring up at 13 huge canvases, hung in two tiers. They are all hanging loose from the walls - like tapestries. That's how he likes it. He hasn't stretched a big painting since the early 1960s.
"Well, just look at them," he says. "They're too aggressive, too political." I stare back over his head. Over the entranceway hangs a canvas from 1981 called White Squad (El Salvador). A vicious brute in military uniform, pistol in hand, is turned toward us. Behind him, a body has been bundled into a box. The human figures have been represented with a crude, dehumanising violence. The painting's surface looks pitted, scarred, scarified. The background is painted in a red oxide - Pompeian red, Golub calls it. It's a colour he often uses - in partial homage to Roman art. "People aren't comfortable with these images, you see. Most of the people who buy art are investment bankers, that type. Do they want to live with an image of three black women mourning in the street?"
He laughs - a tiny hunchbacked man in a green cardigan - and his whole body shakes. There is a lot of sardonic, humorous resignation in Golub. "Do you mind if I take off my shoe?" he asks. "It's pinching."
"Why do you hang the paintings like that, unframed and unstretched?" I ask him. "Well, it became kind of attractive to me to let them hang loose. It's like a skin on the wall, you see. And did you notice the way I cut holes in my paintings?" he asks me. I nod. "I like that, too. You see, it can be 20ft long, but it's still a fragment. You can't stretch a canvas that's had a piece cut out of it, not in a million years. Now, frames are something different. I don't like frames. Frames are protective devices, psychological devices. They're saying things like: 'This is valuable! Don't touch! Show some respect!' I prefer a certain directness." And how valuable are his paintings? A touch of anxiety creeps in now. "Well, the most expensive is $175,000, which is nothing compared to the big guys like Lucian Freud. But I'm not bitching. I've been very fortunate. I'm here in London, exhibiting my work in this lovely gallery."
As we walk together towards the door, he begins to describe one or two paintings of the past decade that are hanging here. Many of the earlier paintings are worked over again and again, coats and coats of paint applied and then laboriously scraped off to give the eviscerated surface look that is so characteristic of this work. The more recent work is not like that at all. The application of paint is much looser and less dense. Inscriptions play an important role. "I can't do all that scraping and scraping these days. I used to scrape for four to six hours at a time, with a meat cleaver," Golub recalls. "I got tennis elbow. Later on, I had a hernia. Fortunately, my developing physical incapacities coincided with a wish to get another way into our world, to be more viral, more sardonic."
We are standing in front of a canvas called Strut, which he painted in his 72nd year. Golub runs me through its themes with relish. "You see this? I'm playing with stuff here, I'm monkeying around. This smart-ass guy here giving the finger ends up with these tough ladies - that came from a poster for a strip show. He's saying; up yours. He's a rough guy. He's no philo-sopher." It's hardly an old man's painting.
Leon Golub's exhibition is at the South London Gallery (020 7703 6120) until 17 December
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