Leon Golub: Echoes of the Real

Leon golub (1922-2004) was a leading exponent of history painting - painting as a narrative, symbolic expression of global, social and political relations and of the realities of power. In this revised and expanded second edition of Leon Golub: Echoes of the Real, Jon Bird examines the artist's work from the classically influenced early paintings through depictions of conflict and masculine aggression to the compelling images of Golub's last years, when the illness that restricted the scale of his output initiated a return to small paintings and drawing that allowed his inherent playfulness and ironic self-reflection to become the motor of his aesthetic style.

As a history painter, Golub is acutely aware of the antecedents to his own imagery and symbolism, and part of Bird's examination of Golub's work is to track and define the artist's relationship to modernism. Making a case for the artist's practice of `critical realism' that also takes account of the unconscious, Bird focuses on two themes that dominate Golub's work: how his art figures the body as a sign for social and psychic identity, and what might be termed the symbolic expression of social space. Golub's main point of visual reference for his painting, drawing and print-making was his archive of photographic images, and Bird shows how the imagery of Abu Ghraib confirmed the topicality and accuracy of Golub's vision as he traced the effects of traumatic violence upon the bodies and psyches of both perpetrators and victims.

Jon Bird is Professor of Art and Critical Theory at Middlesex University. He has edited Rewriting Conceptual Art (1999) and Otherworlds: The Art of Nancy Spero and Kiki Smith (2003), both published by Reaktion.