Yerbolat Dosbayev

ENG-101-402

Ms. Kelley

28 November 2003

Leon Golub. “Columnar Head”, 1958, lacquer & oil on canvas.

Most of the paintings in the museum left me indifferent. However, one attracted my attention. There was something moving in that picture. A psychologically disturbing combination of wild abandon and, at the same time, of great despair made me turn away quickly but then come back to it as if I had stolen a look in a mirror at my true inner self and went away, disgusted, repulsed and confused, but then got back to look closer.

The title read “Columnar Head”, painted by Leon Golub in 1958.

The picture depicted a grotesque, thickly painted head, human and inhuman at the same time. It occurred to me that it could be a field soldier awakened from his troubled sleep in a trench by a sudden powerful flashlight directed right into his contracted pupils. His dulled yet fiercely staring yellow eyes of a large savage feline made me feel uneasy if not scared. The facial expression was nonplused and stupefied, yet the intense eyes seemed to blaze with pent-up feeling. Those were the eyes of a human beast or a werewolf, but not of an average man from the street. His head looked like a chunk of wood, shaved and truncated by a hatchet, or like a burnt brick with blood clotted at its sharp edges. His eyelashes and eyebrows must have faded in the heat of battle making him look desperately wasted. This kind of men emerge straight from the earth and are shaped out of a clay ball by their master, made ready for service, ready to eventually dissolve in the loam womb. Born dead and raised to vanish, they carry on with hope in their radiant eyes.

When the first impression receded, I started perceiving the tools that made the canvas so clearly vivid.

Golub applied pigment and lacquers thickly to the canvas and then scraped it off, creating a highly textured effect. This process resulted in a dense, flat surface exposing the raw fiber of the canvas. His painterly concerns with texture yield a highly tactile surface that has a subtle, but disturbing reference to raw flesh and wounded skin. This cyclic process serves not only visual but also a symbolic hint. When old thick layers of archaic culture, outdated knowledge and timeworn civilization can no longer bear their heavy burden, the true existential purpose starts revealing itself. First are born the eyes and then the new flesh cracks its old cocoon. Only the head with its neatly painted alert eyes and the idea they carry will survive the hurdles of transformation – the rest of the image is a yellow blank, crumbled by thousands of years.

On the other hand, this same technique of painting could symbolize the process of chipping all the husk and tinsel and revealing the beast, that is, the process of ethic degradation caused by the sheer reality of war throughout the life of just one individual. The partial loss of the face – about one half is gone and smothered – symbolizes a significant loss to the human side of the personage, who becomes faceless, thoughtless, and unemotional.

The weather-stained yellowish palette of the canvas creates the sense of a very distant past, as in some old discolored photographs. In fact, the regular facial features of the head tell us that Golub must have used Greek or Roman ancient statues as models for this image. If so, the statue, risen alive from its carefree eternal existence by author’s will, looked deeply disappointed with the world of 1960-s.