Kirjahaku

The American artist Leon Golub (1922-2004) is best known for his iconic history paintings of mercenaries, interrogations, torture scenes and riots of the 1980s and early '90s. Published to accompany an exhibition of Golub's political portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, London, from March to November 2016, curated by Jon Bird, this collection of almost 100 paintings offers a rich survey of his powerful images of world leaders, politicians and other notable personalities.In this book, Jon Bird and Gill Perry show how Golub explored the effects of power upon the body through facial expressions, gestures and poses, and invested his figures with psychological tension and depth. Golub found his source material in media representations, enabling the artist to capture the way power - whether political, military or social - is disseminated as well as mediated through the camera lens. This 'look of power' is the dominant characteristic of his series of political portraits, dating from the mid-1970s, of heads of state and corporate, military and religious leaders. Depicting individuals at various stages of their public office - from Fidel Castro and Henry Kissinger to Augusto Pinochet and Mao Tse-Tung - Golub traced narratives of arrogance and uncertainty, venality and authority across the faces of his subjects. Leon Golub Powerplay is an arresting compilation of images, rendered in Golub's scraped and visceral signature style.This book accompanies an exhibition of Leon Golub's political portraits to be held at the National Portrait Gallery, London, from March to November 2016, curated by the author.

'I'm trying to invite you into scenes where you might not want to be invited in' - Leon Golub Leon Golub (1922-2004) was a leading exponent of history painting - painting as a narrative, symbolic expression of global, social and political relations and of the realities of power. In this revised and expanded second edition of Leon Golub: Echoes of the Real, Jon Bird examines the artist's work from the classically influenced early paintings through depictions of conflict and masculine aggression to the compelling images of Golub's last two decades. Despite the widespread critical attention Golub's work has received, the range and extent of his practice and its complex interweaving of the iconographic traditions of both high and popular art have not been properly examined. As a history painter, Golub is acutely aware of the antecedents to his own imagery and symbolism; and part of Jon Bird's examination of Golub's work is to track and define the artist's relationship to modernism. Making a case for the artist's practice of 'critical realism' that also takes account of the unconscious, Bird focuses on two themes that dominate Golub's work: how his art figures the body as a sign for social and psychic identity, and what might be termed the symbolic expression of social space.