Much of Golub, the prize-winning 1988 documentary by Kartemquin Films, focused on how the former Chicago artist, who’d settled in New York in 1964, created a painting called White Squad X. It’s from his disturbing “Mercenaries” series, in which third world paramilitary figures are shown torturing and murdering people. Scenes of Leon Golub working in his SoHo studio–selecting photographic sources, scraping the painted canvas with a meat cleaver–were interwoven with archival and news footage of conflicts in Vietnam, Central America, and Africa along with interviews with museumgoers during a mid-80s traveling retrospective. “These paintings make me feel ugly,” says one.
“We had a very political view of him, while he was more concerned about being taken seriously as an artist,” says Quinn. “Golub was our story, and he always acknowledged that. He’d say, ‘But you have to know how I feel.’ He was quite forceful about it.” The footage–dubbed the “marching sequence”–was removed.
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The disagreement over the film’s ending is recalled in Late Works Are the Catastrophes, Kartemquin’s new 15-minute video postscript to the 16-millimeter documentary. In the video, while interviewing the artist in June 2001 at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Blumenthal ventures that Golub’s paintings of the last decade or so don’t have the kind of imagery that would compel people to take action. But the artist reminds Blumenthal that his work has never been about that. “We fought over that for a long time,” Golub tells him. “Maybe you feel something ought to be done; maybe somebody else doesn’t.”
Meanwhile Kartemquin–founded in 1966 by Quinn and two other University of Chicago graduates (Blumenthal joined a year later, while still a graduate film student at Northwestern)–was gaining notoriety for provocative documentaries that focused on social institutions (Chicago Maternity Center Story), progressive politics (Where’s I.W. Abel?), and the changing urban scene (Now We Live on Clifton). But by the early 80s, the organization was in a bit of a funk.
The movie “spread my name around to people who don’t go into galleries,” he adds. It also raised Kartemquin’s profile. “It was an important moment in the history of the company and in our careers as filmmakers,” says Blumenthal. Golub was screened at 11 film festivals around the world, earning the Silver Hugo Award in Chicago in 1988 and the Golden Gate Award in San Francisco a year later.
Golub’s late works show the artist reflecting on his own mortality as well as on the legacy of his 55-year career. The paintings bristle with apocalyptic imagery–skulls, snarling dogs, aging lions, dessicated bodies, predatory eagles, and fireballs announcing the end of the world–yet are leavened with the artist’s mordant, ironic wit. In 2001’s Bite Your Tongue II, appearing alongside graffitilike sketches of a few old paintings is a 1937 quote from German philosopher Theodor Adorno: “In the history of art late works are the catastrophes.”
“This is an artist who’s dealing with the issues that you deal with at the end of your career, and that really resonated with me,” says Quinn. “Kartemquin is a certain kind of institution that has been going on here for 35 years. One of the things we’re thinking about now is reshaping this institution so that it can live on beyond us….The idea of looking at this guy struggling with issues–it’s what we’re doing too.”
