The Brooklyn Rail

I keep a treasured memento mori before me on the desk as I write, a small drawing (oil stick on Bristol) by Leon Golub, from 1994, given to my wife Gret Sterrett Smith by Golub at the end of his life.¹ It pictures a skull lying on the ground with a dog’s head looming over it, looking straight into it, as a storm blows through a ruined landscape, and darkness creeps in like a claw. Across the top is the Latin inscription, “INFVITABILE FATUM” (“inevitable fate”), which reminds us that we are all only here on this mortal coil for a brief time, during and after which we are likely to be set upon by wild dogs. In Golub’s ethics, it is in the face of this inexorable end that we must try to make a difference and tell the truth about what we see while we’re alive, if only in fits and starts, with bits and pieces, working feverishly under the dead line, against great odds, and whether anyone recognizes or appreciates what we are doing or not.

I understand that some of you will think this a grim view of human life, but it served Golub well for over eighty-two years, helping to make him a provocative and fearless artist and also, in my experience, a cheerful and compassionate companion and interlocutor. Because of the abhorrent behaviors of humans often depicted in his paintings and drawings, some viewers miss the comic content, but it is definitely there in the late work, as it is in the comedies of Beckett or Burroughs or Basquiat, with graffiti and chants both indignant and insouciant rising from the smoldering ruins of society. As Golub said near the end of his life, “My work these days is sort of political, sort of metaphysical, and sort of smart ass.” As time went on, these three tendencies became more entwined, even as the edges became more jagged.

I well remember Golub’s delight in coming upon Adorno’s brief notes on late style in Beethoven, that end with this bombshell: “In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes.” At its most direct, catastrophe just means “conclusion,” especially the end of a tragedy. That’s how Shakespeare uses it in Love’s Labor’s Lost, when he says, “The catastrophe is a nuptial.” And the conclusion in a tragedy, or in this case, a comedy, is when everything comes apart. That’s very close to the Greek meaning of catastrophe. The “strophe” was a leather strap used to tie things together. And “kata” means down or over, so a catastrophe is when the band holding things together is cut, or loosened, or untwisted, and things come apart. I find this a piquant description of old age, and of Golub’s late work: an unflinching view of the state of our threatened and increasingly threatening world.

Adorno’s phrase, “late works are the catastrophes,” became the title of a feature film made about Golub at the end of his life.² In it, he says, “Things are more evasive now, more disguised,” and “This is the Endgame time,” and “I feel very free right now. It’s a kind of almost joyous letting go.” And at the very end of the film, after Golub and one of the filmmakers quarrel on screen about the filmmaker’s proposed (overly triumphal to Golub) ending of the first half of the film, wherein African Americans and their allies are shown marching into the future in solidarity with the messages of Golub’s pro-Civil Rights work, Golub says,

In a funny way, I’m back to the beginning. Each painting I make is a kind of new project—a crisis, actually. But in every state I’ve ever been in, I said to myself, this is how I’m going to try to get at it. At it. But what’s it? It’s the world. Saying something, somehow. Tag our society, you know? Put the tail on the donkey, you know? I’ve got a blindfold on and I’m trying to put the tail on the donkey.

Golub spent most of his life painting monsters, primarily those inside all of us, especially in men. He depicted the demons he observed in the world, without apology or excuse. If, as a society, we build monuments to heroism, there should also be monuments to the monstrous, to remember the awful things we’ve done and continue to do to each other in both war and peace.

In his late works Golub candidly exposed the horrors of the end of life, but he also made fun of these, and never, at least to me, exhibited fear in the face of death. In my experience, he faced death with uncommon courage and curiosity. His only regret was not being able to go on painting and observing, when there was still so much to be done.

A committed artist finds inventive ways to persist, even as their body declines. Golub’s unpretentious acrylic, oil stick, ink, and crayon musings on paper, vellum, and Bristol—small, diaristic, loosely conceived—still grapple with existential matters. Golub discovered he could still make “big” significant works in old age, but they would just have to be smaller in size due to increasing physical constraints. In the large paintings of the 1980s and ’90s, he gets those complex shimmering surfaces by aggressively cutting into color and line, by attacking the canvas with meat cleavers. In the late small works, it’s all about compression and concision, evoking the spaces between as the constituent parts fly away from each other. These small works have an extraordinary energy to them, but it is centrifugal rather than centripetal, struggling to make connections even as things come apart.

The late works bring the politics depicted and decried even closer to home, in miniature masques of gender and old age, still depicting human foibles in classical guises, as satyrs and nymphs (it has always been so), but showing what a colossal mess we’ve made of it in recent times. Old age here is not noble and transcendent, but comic and immanent.

As I approach the threshold myself, I am finding new ways to describe and condemn the social violence I see all around me, and to try to cut into it with analysis and insight whenever and however I can. I’m becoming more radical with age, not less, and that was certainly true of Golub. These late works of his should not be displayed in the sedate living rooms of wealthy art patrons, but rather scrawled or pasted onto the walls of our disintegrating cities and towns. What more can artists and writers do now, as things come apart on a cataclysmic, global level? Cry out, you know? Put the tail on the donkey!

1. Golub’s gift was made right at the beginning of the late small drawings. Two large paintings from this period—Infvitabile Fatum, 1994 (acrylic on linen), at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, and Snake Eyes, 1995 (acrylic on linen)—feature the same motif. Golub later said: “I’ve inserted ‘inevitable fate’ in several paintings. Originally, I saw the words in an anatomical diagram probably from the 16th century. Above a skeleton, it said ‘inevitable fate’ (INFVITABILE FATUM). It sounds beautiful to me and it looks beautiful in Latin.”
2. Golub: Late Works Are the Catastrophes (Kartemquin Films, 2004), directed by Jerry Blumenthal and Gordon Quinn.