White Squad

Thank you to Benjamin J. Dineen III and Dennis C. Hull for the generous donation of this work. Printed at the Brodsky Center of Innovative Editions (BCIE).

According to the Whitney Museum in New York City, the subject of “White Squad” was one that occupied Leon Golub. He made seven protest paintings in the early 1980s, “in response to the activities of the Salvadoran death squads, an issue then receiving much international media attention…. These figures were drawn from a media archive of ‘political criminals’ that Golub amassed over forty years. The enormous figures, flattened like cut-outs against a solid-color background that denies retreat into an illusionistic distance, confront and overwhelm the viewer with the atrocity of their actions. Seeking to achieve what he called a ‘barbaric realism,’ Golub developed a unique working process that mimicked the physical violence he depicted. Laying the canvas on the floor, the artist built up his figures with acrylic paint, then poured solvent on top and scraped away layer after layer–sometimes using a meat cleaver–until only a raw, eroded film of paint remained.” The White Squad print you see before you is part of that project. The Whitney Museum notes that the “awkwardly frozen gestures and expressions recalling the image’s origins in journalistic photographs.”