Leon Golub Works
“The recurrently astonishing gaiety of Golub’s imagination, in dire neighborhoods of dirt and blood, advertises how free a mind may be that dares itself to welcome truths that are respectable exclusively in being true.” – Peter Schjeldahl for The New Yorker
Leon Golub was an American painter known for his unflinching depictions of brutality and war. As evinced in his Mercenaries I (1976), a depiction of two Vietnam-era US soldiers carrying a charred body between them. “What is power? How is power shown?” the artist once asked. “Would we rather look at pretty colors and shapes? Do we flinch at seeing our own crimes and nightmares in ink?” Born on January 23, 1922 in Chicago, IL, he received a BA in art history from the University of Chicago before serving in the military. On the G.I. Bill, Golub received both his BFA and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he met his future wife the artist Nancy Spero. As the Vietnam War escalated, Golub’s belief that it was an artist’s responsibility to confront difficult issues faced by society, took hold of his work. Over the course of his career, the artist continued to address various factions of violence and abusers of power in his paintings, with depictions of Fidel Castro, Richard Nixon, terrorism, and police violence. Golub died on August 8, 2004 in New York, NY. In 2018, his works where the subject of a selective survey exhibition held the Met Breuer “Leon Golub: Raw Nerve.” Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tate Gallery in London, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others.
Selected public collections
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas
Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, Australia
Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois
Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris
Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas
Brooklyn Museum, New York
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio
Des Moines Art Center, Iowa
Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence
Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Washington, D.C.
Honolulu Museum of Art, Hawaii
Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington, Indiana
Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana
Israel Museum, Jerusalem
Jewish Museum, New York
Kent State University, Ohio
Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California
Madison Art Center, Madison, Wisconsin
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Miami Art Museum, Florida
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada
Musei Civici di Udine, Friuli, Italy
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas
Museum of Modern Art, New York
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri
Norton Simon Museum of Art, Pasadena, California
Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, Illinois
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership, Illinois
Tate Gallery, London, United Kingdom
Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Israel
Tennessee State Museum, Nashville, Tennessee
Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio
University of California, Berkeley, California
University of Massachusetts Amherst, Massachusetts
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Vancouver Art Gallery, British Columbia, Canada
Vietnam National Museum of Fine Arts, Hanoi
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Leon Golub
1922 - 2004
Seraphin Gallery, Philadelphia, PA