Golub: Late Works Are the Catastrophes

“I once described myself as a machine for producing monsters, but my production of monsters is minuscule compared to the real production of monsters,” explains the painter Leon Golub in this portrait comprising two short films. What Golub presents to us is the monstrosity of humanity, in huge and confrontational works based on the violent images of war and terrorism that filled the media in that time.

In 1985 the filmmakers followed Golub in the studio that he shared with his wife Nancy Spero, from the start to the completion of his painting “White Squad X.” We see the artist collecting and selecting reference photographs, sketching in chalk, building layer upon layer of paint and scraping them off, and exhibiting the final work for the first time. Along the way, Golub offers reflections on his politically charged images of soldiers, martyrs, and mercenaries that draw directly from reality.

Thirteen years later, we see that his work has become more abstract and fragmented. The second part of the film shows an artist who knows he has embarked on his late period; now that he has nothing left to prove, he can be even more confrontational.