World War II drastically changed the United States both politically and artistically. It became,
by far, the world’s strongest nation. Geoffrey Warner, a diplomatic historian,
said that “President Roosevelt was aiming at United States hegemony in the postwar
world” and this aim transformed the United States’ diplomatic approach,
switching from being isolationist to interventionist. America’s interventions
rarely benefitted local populations. One of the most known interventions is the Vietnam
War which sparked opposition from US citizens all over the country.
Artistically, America created its own identity and one of its greatest embodiment
was abstract expressionism, a form of art revolutionary for its energy and its intensity.
Leon Golub, a Chicago-born painter, both opposed America’s new implication in foreign
politics and its new form of art. Instead of adopting the abstraction trend of the time,
he decided to keep his style figurative in order to better denounce the injustice in the world.
His series Vietnam and Napalm were in direct opposition to the United States’ role in the
Vietnam War. In his work Vietnam, he shows the duality between the American soldiers and
the Vietnamese people while, in Napalm, Golub shows victims of napalm strikes,
which the United States often used against Vietnamese civilians. The victims of napalm
made for extremely graphic and powerful images. For example, who hasn’t seen The Terror of
War by Nick Ut taken in 1973. This violence, committed by American soldier, deeply shocked
part of the American population, which fuelled the opposition to the war. Golub contributed
to this opposition by representing victims without skin, as if napalm had melted it off.
What also interested Golub was power, or the relationship between the dominant
and the dominated, which he violently illustrates in his series Interrogrations.
Finally, his series Mercenaries is an exploration of these groups of soldiers, in it for the money,
with little to no concern for any form of morality. These are, oddly enough, some of Golub’s
least violent pieces as they are just portraits of mercenaries, yet, they still sparked controversy.
So this image, Mercenaries 2, painted in 1979, is,
as Golub said, pretty big. It’s 305 x 366 cm, making it extremely imposing,
like many of his other artworks. The support is unconventional, it’s un-stretched canvas,
which compliments the grittiness of the subject matter. Added to that, Golub scraped off painting
from his work with a meat cleaver in order to give a violent undertone to the texture.
As for the subjects themselves, they are dirty. Their skins are filthy and their clothes are
unwashed. They seem to be having fun, which makes them even less likeable, as they are not in a
pleasurable situation. The man on the right almost has pig-like features: pink skin, a short nose
and a physique which is slightly on the heavier side. War Pigs, an anti-war Black Sabbath song,
came out 9 years prior to this painting, perhaps inspiring the physique for this man.
Finally, the composition is slightly off-centred, to the point where the
subject on the right is cut out of the frame, as if the composition wasn’t carefully crafted,
but quickly made in an instant, almost like a photograph. Photography had a huge role
to play when it came to picturing war, especially the Vietnam war,
but it also had a great influence on Golub as he painted from photographs.
Ben Shahn, which we have covered in an earlier video, also painted from pictures in order to
denounce injustice, just a couple of decades before Golub. Both of them contrasted the
dominant and the dominated, the violence of the people with power. We can compare Vandenberg,
Dewey, et Taft painted by Shahn in 1941 and Golub’s series on men of power. Both
criticize people in positions of authority by painting them in vulnerable positions,
almost to remind us that, they to, are humans.