Leon Golub is best known for his large-scale paintings of violence and the abuse of power, scenes as colossal in brutality as they are in size. But, throughout his long career, Golub was a prolific draftsman as well. With subjects ranging from the classical to the erotic, and media ranging from oil sticks, to conte crayons, to inks, to acrylics, Golub's drawings interrogate the condition of our world. His first major drawing period began when he was a student in the 1940s. He began to articulate the figure in motion as he embraced Graeco-Roman sculpture, and in recent years (2000-2004) his drawings became more informal and spontaneous, with subjects ranging from aggression to erotic fun and games. Don't Tread on Me! features beautiful color reproductions and is the first book dedicated exclusively to Golub's provocative mastery of the figure. Essays by Robert Enright and Meeka Walsh. Interview by Douglas Dreishpoon.

Leon Golub's drawings have followed an itinerary different from that marked by his paintings. The latter, famously, have taken stands on the injustices and inhumanities committed in the struggles for political power that have defined the texture of history in our times. The drawings trace a more interior history, and express Golub's evolution as a person,and as an artist. Their project has been to resolve questions about the representation of humans and animals, and, espe-cially in the earliest drawings, to work out Golub's relationship to the artists who influenced him. The visual narrative that carries us from the slab-like anatomies of the earlier figure drawings to the fluid images of his recent work, cannot but be seen as a story of what one might think of as philosophical growth. Indeed, the latest work provides evidence for the existence of what art historians have identified as an Alte Stil - an artist's late style. These drawings convey an ironic detachment from the "follies and foibles" - to use an expression of Goya - that compose the wry human comedy they depict, for which eroticism is a signature. If the early work has a classical inflection, it would be that of archaic statuary.The late work breathes an affinity instead to vase-painting, in which tumescent satyrs chase ticklish nymphs in fluttering garments, or warriors gloat over stricken enemies. The license with which ancient imagination combined animals and humans into compound mythic beings - satyrs, centaurs, minotaurs - has a counterpart in contemporary life, in the recombinant genders and sexualities to which everyone is now entitled, in a world in which the boundaries of personhood are internalized, transcended, and redrawn. The new drawings are in this sense re-drawings - airy, fluent,funny, and joyous - or dark and tragic as the subject may require. They really belong to the genre of Caprichos - less sardonic, more forgiving, less hopeless than Goya, but with something of the same bite, the same sure aim, the same freedom from illusion. It is rarely observed that Goya also described as Caprichos Los Desastros de la Guerra.

TENSIONED AGAINST THE PAPER

LEON GOLUB AND THE EROTICS OF DRAWING

by Robert Enright

ANIMAL STORIES

by Meeka Walsh

THE DRAWINGS

ON DRAWING

A conversation between Leon Golub and Douglas Dreishpoon

LIST OF WORKS