{"data":{"id":"4118","type":"artist","attributes":{"id":4118,"topgoose_id":2046,"tms_id":4118,"display_name":"Leon Golub","sort_name":"Golub Leon","display_date":"1922–2004","begin_date":"1922","end_date":"2004","biography":"\u003cp\u003eLeon Golub addressed mankind’s capacity for brutality in figurative paintings that adopt the monumental scale of traditional history painting. While Golub’s 1970s works focused on the war in Vietnam, the eleven paintings that comprise his \u003cem\u003eWhite Squad\u0026nbsp;\u003c/em\u003eseries, painted between 1982 and 1987, were created in response to the large-scale human rights abuses committed by death squads in politically unstable Central and South American countries.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"/collection/works/9025\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eWhite Squad I\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e does not present a single discernable event, setting, or narrative, but the figures are based loosely on photographs of the violence wrought by paramilitary gangs that Golub culled from contemporary newspapers and magazines. Here, the viewer’s gaze mimics that of the camera, and Golub noted that the flattening effect achieved by the red background and the absence of shadows relates to photography’s tendency to fix figures in frozen poses. Golub’s painting process paralleled the raw physicality of his subject matter; he built up layers of paint to render the figures and then scraped them down with rubbing alcohol and tools so that, as he described it, “what you see finally is a paint film which has been in a sense ’smashed back’ into the tooth of the canvas.” The extreme foreground positioning of a partially undressed female victim brings the violence dramatically into the space of the viewer, who is placed in an uncertain role, caught between accomplice, witness, and voyeur. Golub explained this troubling ambivalence: “I can see myself in, or at least understand, the position of the victim and the victimizer. One could, at different times of one’s life—who knows under what circumstances— become either.”\u003c/p\u003e","on_view":false,"artport":false,"biennial":true,"collection":true,"ulan_id":"500003430","wikidata_id":"Q475655","created_at":"2017-08-30T16:58:33.000-04:00","updated_at":"2026-03-29T07:03:38.931-04:00","links":{"artworks":"/api/artists/4118/artworks","exhibitions":"/api/artists/4118/exhibitions"}}}}