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Leon Golub: Echoes of the Real

Two new chapters and an Introduction to the Revised Edition have been added to Leon Golub: Echoes of the Real, (2000) which now covers the entire period of his artistic output (1949-2004). In ‘Photography and the Archive’ (pp193-224), I examine the artist’s use of photographic imagery as source material for his paintings and his extensive photographic archive. Tracing specific photographs and photographic fragments used as visual reference in a number of key works, I examine the transformation of the figure from documentary image to expressive composite within the context of Golub’s interrogation of the critical relations between photographic constructions of social reality and the pictorial medium of painting. In addition, this chapter analyses Golub’s eclectic image data-bank in relation to an archival impulse common to many artists since the 1960s.

‘This Could Be You’ (pp225-267) focuses upon Golub’s ‘late style’; the drawings and small paintings produced during his final years and examines the centrality of drawing to his practice as a whole, from his student years at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, to the oil transfer and acrylic works produced between 2000-2004. The two series of small paintings – ‘This Could Be You’ and ‘We Can Disappear You’ are discussed in the context of the medieval tavolette and Goya’s series of etchings, ‘Disasters of War’ and ‘Caprices’.