Art | The killing feel


Like artists who came before, Leon Golub shows us what we shudder to see: The torture, the blood, the bodies of war.

By Edward J. Sozanski
Inquirer Columnist

Leon Golub, famous for raw, expressionist paintings of brutality and torture inflicted on prisoners of war, says he wasn't surprised to see photographs of sadism and humiliation meted out by American soldiers to Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison.

Neither did he feel vindicated for having displayed such coercive tactics in his art two decades
before they surfaced in Baghdad.

"I think this kind of behavior is nearly universal," he said over the telephone from his New York
studio. "It isn't restricted to one prison in Iraq or to the United States.

"It probably goes back to the [ancient] Egyptians and the Assyrians. If you're trying to get
information and the person is recalcitrant, you try persuasion and torture. That's what you do.
Sadism is common to this type of practice, but we usually don't see it," Golub said.

The internationally reputed Golub showed his work in Philadelphia at the Institute of
Contemporary Art in 1992, and earlier this year at Seraphin Gallery and Rosemont College.

Many of his paintings are based on news photographs, but he transforms the source material so
thoroughly that its documentary nature usually isn't recognizable. Because of this
transformation, the painted images can be more brutal and disturbing than the photographic
ones.

Other artists, particularly the Spanish master Francisco Goya (1746-1828), have capitalized on
this transpositional phenomenon. Goya's Disasters of War etchings may be the most horrific
images of war ever created; they certainly are the most memorable. And their raw power hasn't
diminished over nearly two centuries.

The artist modeled his series of 82 etchings on the work of the 17th-century French printmaker
Jacques Callot (1592-1635), who produced a series of 18 images called Miseries of War.

Callot's prints, packed with figures and detail, describe war from a distance, as if it were a stage
play. By contrast, Goya brings viewers right into the trenches, as it were; combat and death are
close enough to touch.

During the American Civil War, Timothy O'Sullivan documented the consequences of war with
macabre photographs of dead soldiers lying on the Gettysburg battlefield. Yet by the standards
of art, they're too reportorially matter-of-fact to evoke the horror that Goya achieved.

In the 20th century, both the German Otto Dix (1891-1969) and the French artist Georges Rouault (1871-1958) created suites of prints based on the carnage of World War I, in which Dix served.

Dix's prints in particular tend to be symbolic and metaphorical rather than realistic like Goya's,
full of skulls and figures in gas masks that read as demons.

The Philadelphia printmaker Benton Spruance (1904-1967) made similar images of World War II.
Moral outrage was a prime motivator for these artists. Goya, on the other hand, was more
inclined to let naked atrocity speak for itself.

Like these artists and Goya, to whom he has been compared, the 82-year-old Golub recognized
many years ago that while war has been a popular subject in Western art, graphic scenes of
war's consequences have not attracted a large audience.

It's no wonder. As we have seen recently, people eagerly embrace the jingoist aspect of war -
medals, parades, patriotic speeches, reminiscences of victories past - but are usually repulsed
by images of headless bodies hanging from trees or corpses lying on battlefields, just as we
have been by the photographs from Iraq, most of which are mild by comparison.

As Golub observed, "People don't usually hear about [prisoner abuse] or even respond to it."
And this includes government officials who are in a position to monitor what's going on in military
prisons, he said.

"Most officials don't want to know about it. We respond [only] when things go badly, and we
tend to look for scapegoats." Pfc. Lynndie England comes to mind.

Golub, like Goya, wants civilians to confront the bestial side of war, which is essentially about
killing, often accompanied by brutality, rape, torture and mass destruction.

Goya in his later years made this abundantly clear in paintings such as The Third of May, 1808,
which depicts Napoleon's soldiers executing a group of Spanish citizens, and his Disasters of War.

The most terrifying thing about The Third of May, 1808, is that the French soldiers are, as the
saying goes, just doing their duty. Goya has framed the bloody scene in stark contrasts of light
and dark, which gives the sacrificial scene a religious quality.

In Disasters of War, Goya reveals the absolute depths of military depravity. These images are
small and printed in black and white, yet they remain more shocking than just about any war
photograph one can imagine.

Robert Capa's celebrated 1936 photograph of a Spanish Loyalist soldier falling back after being
struck by a sniper's bullet is a notable exception. The instant of death is rarely captured on film,
but here it's clean, quick, even elegiac.

Golub hasn't been quite as graphic as Goya, but his paintings, especially those of the 1980s that
depict torture, exhibit a rawness and coarseness that accentuate the barbarities.

His figures are flat and looming, and usually angular and clunky, like monsters. Like Pfc. England,
they grin for the viewer as if enjoying their work. They are individuals, but they are also Everyman.

Golub, a World War II veteran, began painting war images in the mid-1960s. These were preceded by large paintings of nude figures struggling with each other that he says were influenced by the ancient Greek Pergamon Altar, now in a Berlin museum.

Meanwhile, the Vietnam War began to heat up. "I was active in opposing it, and I began to be
embarrassed by the fact that men were fighting a war with guns and I was doing nude figures like a Greek pediment," he recalled.

In his Vietnam paintings, which began in 1972, he went so far as to develop a rough, abraded
"napalm surface" on his canvases that complemented the subject matter. He also adopted monumental scale: 10 by 28 feet in his first Vietnam pictures, which increased to 10 by 40 feet.

"I wanted to have a great public utterance, a great force on the city," he explained.

The first mercenary paintings followed in 1979. "My intention with these was to show how our
government intervened in other countries, but with mercenaries, so they could have deniability."

Since then, Golub has dropped down to paintings about 2 feet square, done in black ink on
canvas, that include texts. A soldier pointing a gun to a prisoner's head is captioned "You're next."

Why the shift? "One moves on, naturally or intentionally," Golub replied. "I'm looking at the world as a place where all sorts of funny stuff happens. I'm 82 now, and cynicism is permitted at 82."

He says he doesn't intend his paintings to be propagandistic, but like Goya's "they have that effect."

"I'm not going to change our country," he added. "I'm not trying to influence people as much as
trying to make a record. I like the notion of reportage. I hope that in 50 or 100 years from now
my work will still be telling a record of what Americans were doing in terms of force, domination,
world interest. It's not a large part of history, but it's a crucial part."

Just as Goya's searing war images have transcended the early 19th century, Golub's are likely to
endure well past our time. As Gen. William T. Sherman opined, war is hell. Americans and their
rulers, and especially those who have never experienced combat, need to be reminded of that
sobering fact as often as possible.