Leon
Golub was born in 1922 in Chicago, Illinois, where he grew
up. He received a bachelor of art degree from the University
of Chicago and both a bachelors of fine arts and a master
of fine arts degree from the School of the Art Institute
of Chicago. In the 1960s and 1970s he was an active member
of Artists and Writers Protest against the Vietnam War and
the Art Workers Coalition.
The lithograph
White Squad II is part of a series of drawings, paintings,
and prints called White Squad. Learn
how a lithograph is made.
Golub's
figures are often based on images that he sees in books,
magazines, and newspapers. He keeps an extensive collection
of these images to use as models for his work. If he finds
a book that he feels is particularly powerful, he will buy
two copies—one to keep and one to cut the pictures out of
for his files.
- Have
you ever come across an image in a book, a magazine, on
television, or in a movie that inspired your own artwork?
Why did it inspire you?
Much
of Golub's work includes imagery that raises questions about
authority and people in power— why they have power, and
what they do with that power. He sees authority and power
as something that is too often and too easily abused. Many
of the figures he portrays are anonymous attackers and anonymous
victims, which allows for a variety of interpretations of
the scene depicted. It could refer to a specific event or
a general scene of terror and war.
"I
have pictured some of the events and some of the kinds of
experiences that undercut our current world pictures, that
is to say the effects of power and domination, the uses
of interrogation to control dissidence or opposition, how
such behaviors effect the consciousness and psychic responses
of victimizers and victims." 1
- Hans-Urlich
Obrist, ed., Leon Golub: Do Paintings Bite? Selected
Texts 1948-1996 (Ostfildern, Germany: Cantz Verlag,
1997), p. 31.
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