Word: golub
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Golub: painter, Museum of Fine Arts, through...
...Golub: painter Museum of Fine Arts, through...
...were documentary. They were about power and torture on the fringes of Western politics in Latin America: "White Squad" killers, interrogators, mercenaries, the seedy and deadly emissaries of order. The paintings were huge, some of the figures nearly twice lifesize. Tacked unstretched to the wall like tapestries or (as Golub prefers to think of them) like skins, they resembled, in their stark silhouetting and red earth-colored backgrounds, Roman frescoes whose surfaces had been corrupted by the blackening breath of the late 20th century...
Though there is no lack of American painters who confuse eloquence with elephantiasis, the size of Golub's figures seems justified and necessary. Only by monumentalizing their documentary content could he give it the kind of fixity and silence it needed, and only that way could he achieve his peculiar balance between the sacrificial and the banal and so get rid of the sour whiff of pornography that attends images of extreme violence...
...retrospective of Golub's work, seen this fall at Manhattan's New Museum of Contemporary Art, is now on view at the La Jolla Museum in La Jolla, Calif. The show will also travel to Chicago, Montreal and Washington. It is not a show to miss, partly because it has so much to say about the problems of being an "engaged" painter in America today. At root, they come down to how painting can operate in the realm of ideas about violence and power when its audience's sense of the terrible has been so largely...