Surprising himself

Last Monday afternoon Leon Golub had his first glimpse of his own retrospective exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. With his wife, the artist Nancy Spero, his assistant Samm Kunce and the show's curator, Jon Bird, he climbed the glass staircase of the entrance hall and turned a corner to look at the huge, cinerama-like expanse of one of his epic Vietnam paintings. It is, at 12 metres wide, the largest work he has ever made. With its raw, jarring depiction of US soldiers on one side and Vietnamese civilians on the other, it has an overwhelming, threatening presence in an enclosed space. Golub was pleased. "It's never looked better," Spero said immediately.

A compact figure with a bald pate and a beak-like profile, Golub was relaxed and good humoured - with a quick, deadpan wit - despite a transatlantic flight without sleep.

When Kunce, commenting on the poor quality of one of the frames, asked him if it was one he'd made himself, he replied without pause: "No, I sent that one out to a famous framer who imitates very deliberately the kind of bad job an artist does."

Born in Chicago in 1922, he completed a BA in art history before serving with the army during the war (he worked at interpreting aerial reconnaissance photographs). Under the auspices of the GI Bill, he enrolled in the Art Institute of Chicago in 1947, graduating in 1950. It was an extraordinary time for American art, with the advent of Abstract Expressionism.

Looking at some of his early works, it seems he might have followed Pollock and Rothko into a realms of personalised mythology and abstraction. In fact, from the first he was resolutely set in another direction. He was vehemently opposed to the transcendental aesthetic underpinnings of Abstract Expressionism, and saw art as necessarily grounded in immediate social reality. An artist was someone who lived in society, was part of society and the job of the artist was to represent that world.

He looked to classical, European models, and his work from the 1950s has parallels with European approaches to the figure. He and Spero spent nine months in Italy and, later, several years in Paris. After struggling through much of the decade to formulate a personal pictorial language, he reached the first phase of his artistic maturity with a series of figures directly inspired by antique statuary. The sheer level of attack on the surface has consistently been a hallmark of his approach, and in his treatments of heroic male figures, the scraped, scarred surfaces operate on a number of levels.

They blur the distinction between figure and ground, physically and metaphorically. Often the figure permeates the ground, is bedded into the weave of the canvas (one of Golub's techniques is to scrape off layers of pigment with the edge of a meat cleaver). They also suggest the sheer endurance of the figures, and they imply an accumulation of suffering and injury. All of this is relevant given the figures are both civic presences, as with the Philosophers and, increasingly, civic and martial ones.

The Vietnam War was a crucial moment for Golub. Throughout the 1960s he produced extraordinary pieces like the huge Gigantomachy I in which livid, fighting warriors blur into a mass oddly reminiscent of a Pollock all-over composition. The combatants are undifferentiated, and there is a sense of conflict as universal and timeless. But increasingly he felt compelled to incorporate explicit references to events in Vietnam. In this, he was diametrically opposed to the prevailing artistic climate.

Where previously his battling warriors and scarred figures, however immediate they looked, enjoyed a non-specific, allegorical status, with their allusions to Greco-Roman and Renaissance sources, images of nervy, aggressive American GIs with automatic weapons looming over terrified Vietnamese civilians obviously allowed considerably less allegorical distance. It marked a major departure, leading on to several of his best known series of works. But the art world could not quite assimilate these uncomfortably contemporary paintings. It wasn't until the advent of Neo Expressionism in the 1980s that his achievement was recognised.

In 1979, Golub began his Mercenaries series, the first of a sequence that encompasses a range of covert state activities, as witnessed in Latin America and other parts of the globe. "You use a covert agent when you don't want to use the public means of order, so you go to the fringe. . ." he explained. But by foregrounding their activities in the cultural mainstream he is making explicit the connection between state and terror. The heroic, enduring warriors of the late 1950s and early 1960s have become a cast of joshing, brutish thugs, torturers and killers. They no longer represent suffering. That role is taken over by the endless parade of their helpless victims.

Golub's basic pictorial strategy could be inspired by W.H. Auden's celebrated observation on the casual way the Old Masters deal with suffering in their paintings, how "even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course/Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot/Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse/Scratches its innocent behind on a tree." The action in Golub's paintings unfolds away from the public eye, with comparable casualness, without drama. The violence is almost banal and often peripheral. Interrogators joke and laugh: the doomed victim is an afterthought, a blank, a prone form at the foot of the canvas.

The body is at the centre of his art. In a sense, one of his achievements is to infiltrate the suffering human body into the pure, abstract space of Modernism, an idealised nowhere that the backgrounds in his pictures often resembles.

His figures have an awkward, disjointed look, a kind of jerky articulation, that doesn't take away from their documentary feel. They come across as real but disturbingly strange: human monsters. In fact they are composites, each constructed from an extensive archive of photographic source material, from news and sports pictures to Soldier of Fortune magazine.

As he moved from room to room on Monday, greeting some works like old friends - "That's my baby. She's a cutie alright" - Golub was clearly delighted with the show.

Once, he stopped, looked at a picture and just shook his head. Was there a problem with the way it was hung? No, it wasn't that.

"In a funny way," he said after a moment, "I feel some of these paintings are outside of me. I don't know . . . I'm really surprised by them."

Leon Golub: Paintings 1950-2000 runs at IMMA until October 15th. To coincide with the exhibition, Reaktion Press has published a book by Jon Bird, £17.95 in UK