Painter Leon Golub portrays two Vietnam-era U.S. soldiers in 'Mercenaries 1' piece at Portland Art Museum

leongolub.JPGView full sizeLeon Golub's "Mercenaries I," 1976
Painter Leon Golub earned his reputation as an artist of violence. Images from the 1970s through the 1990s are parlor scenes of horror, painted to show the variety of ways humans abuse their power.

A full-scale Golub work is a punch in the gut. It is a slap in the face. It is a mirror held to every awful act humans can and will do to each other. At his height, Golub made work that says Look at me, don't turn away, this is part of you, too.

That is the Leon Golub known in the art world, but that is not the Leon Golub on display in the Portland Art Museum's show, up through Sept. 5. During a three-year period of self-doubt in the late '70s, Golub took a break from war and torture and turned his brush toward portraiture, choosing as his subjects the faces of powerful men. Golub completed about 100 portraits -- of dictators and democrats alike, among them Nelson Rockefeller, Fidel Castro, Augusto Pinochet and Ho Chi Minh. The museum has 12 of these portraits on display.

Review Leon Golub: Historical Witness
Where: Portland Art Museum, 1219 S.W. Park Ave., 503-226-2811
Closes: Sept. 5
Admission: $12, with discounted rates or memberships available
At 1 1/2 times life size, the portraits of power have color tones that seem more crayon than acrylic and lines that seem to have been drawn with a Sharpie rather than a paintbrush. The look comes from Golub's signature technique, which involves grinding paint into burlap or linen canvas then scraping the paint away, sometimes with a meat cleaver, leaving only pigment-infused cloth. Ghosting, the technique might be called: The pigment that remains is only a memory of the paint that once was.

So, too, with the subjects of the portraits. Treated with Golub's flat pigment-paint, the style of the painting undercuts the presumed power of the subjects. The men depicted hardly seem human. They are icons, images of images of images, each painted from pictures Golub cut out of magazines and newspapers over the years. As a whole, the portraits are an interesting, if not hugely compelling, approach to the Big Issues of fame, power and cultural myth.

In the context of Golub's oeuvre, however, the portraits are a side note, a step along the way. Viewers come to him for more dramatic pieces -- the hulking, unsettling canvases that defined his career. There is one of these hanging next to the portraits, rounding out the PAM show at 13 pieces total. Called "Mercenaries 1," it shows two Vietnam-era U.S. soldiers carrying the charred body of what, one assumes, had been an enemy. One of the soldiers is shirtless. The other is chewing a cigarette. They are both cavalier, macho, their victim strung from a rope between them.

Standing in front of this piece is something extraordinary. The rough-cut canvas looms. The soldiers smirk and smile. The torture victim seems part animal -- burned, angular, faceless. Because of the scale of the piece, the viewer is forced to stand eye-level with the victim while looking up at the two massive soldiers. They dominate. We cow. Golub wins.

In his lifetime, Golub complained of being overlooked in favor of New York Minimalists and Conceptual Art. True to history, while Golub is relegated to a hallway -- the show is displayed on the walls of the underground hallway between the two museum buildings in what is, in essence, the lobby of the Whitsell Auditorium -- grand conceptualist Sol Lewitt dominates the museum's main entry.

Without putting a value judgment on either school -- form doesn't dictate quality, after all -- the relative location of the artists creates a tension that rises above either body of work. "What is power?" Golub asked over his long career. And: "How is power shown?" "Would we rather look at pretty colors and shapes?" "Do we flinch at seeing our own crimes and nightmares in ink?"

Golub forced his contemporary viewers to grapple with these issues. Now -- two wars and uncountable acts of violence later -- he's reaching through his canvases and asking us again.
-- Victoria Blake