Leon Golub—Art vs. Craft

By Robert Wittig

I remember when I found out the difference between art and being a skillful painter. I was at the Art Institute in Chicago, Illinois, looking at paintings, which is a pretty usual thing for me to do. Having had no art education at all, I was at that time pretty fond of saying: I don't know anything at all about art, but I know what I like.

For most of my life, I deferred to the authorities in a lot of matters, thinking, well, these people are pretty smart, they've been educated, they should know ...

One area that particularly baffled me was the area of paintings, sculpture, etc. ... the fine visual arts. I was like a lot of other people who find themselves drawn to the visual arts ... "I don't know anything about art, but I know what I like ... " So I knew what I liked, and a lot, in fact most of the newer, Abstract-Expressionist art that I saw was not it. It appeared that these individuals for the most part could not paint very well, and if they could paint well, I wondered why they worked so hard to hide it in their work. But I kept quiet, after all, the art authorities were telling me I should like all this stuff, and that if I didn't, I was displaying my ignorance. Not in so many words, but in effect, that was the message they were sending.

Time marched forward, and my interest in the visual arts got me to sketching, and then more formal drawing, and finally into painting. This only served to make my apparent lack of understanding about this "modern art business" more glaring. I set out to solve the mystery, once and for all, and for the next four years, I studied and painted and painted and studied, but I still wasn't getting it.

Then one day the Art Institute here in Chicago (I had become a regular member and weekly visitor) hung a huge, ugly canvas by someone I had never heard of before, Leon Golub, and I walked into this room full of typically lame modern works, and there on the far wall was this huge house painter's canvas tarp, covered with this incredibly crude, vulgar, leering, amateurish depiction of some mercenary goons torturing someone.

My first reaction was usual ... hey, this guy picked himself a topic that was at once high in shock value and politically correct, and here his work sits, in the Art Institute, but I am a more skillful painter than this man. I am ... by that time I had become a very skillful painter, and whether or not Leon Golub could have done a better job, I knew that I could have done a better job than the one he had presented here. And then I noticed that tears were running down my face, that something in his painting was so honest that it had been able to reach right around all my prejudices and get to me in a way that I did not think I could be reached. And as I was blowing my nose down in the washroom a few minutes later, I realized the meaning of art, as opposed to the skill of painting. It was an experience both humbling and inspiring.

As I made my way up and out of the museum that day, I also realized that I was right about most of the modern stuff. Most of it is not very good ... mediocre, and even downright lousy ... but some of it is art. I also realized that most of the curators and gallery owners and critics, who seem so sure of themselves and secure in their knowledge ... are not. Some are just wrong, and others have become liars, defending their emotional and financial interests. And a very few of them ... know what they are talking about.

Later, as the 'L' train rose up out of the subway tube, and ran above the streets for the last few stops before I got off, I realized that the possibility existed for me not to be simply a better painter than Golub, but a better artist as well.