Chicago-born Leon Golub is one of several prominent contemporary artists who in the mid-1950s bolted from the prevailing non-objective mode of abstract expressionism in favor of a brutal and coarse figurative style. Retaining the large scale, violent brush stroke, and agitated paint surface characteristic of abstract expressionism, Golub has created grotesque human forms that individually are psychologically disturbing characters and, when shown interacting in numbers of two or more, are contenders in powerfully moving, yet abstruse dramas. In the mid-and-late '50s, he painted a series of what he called "monster heads," which represent "mutations of thwarted feelings." The Hunter's Head XXV of 1959, an excellent example from the series, reveals not the countenance of a specific person, but rather a type. It is a being encrusted or attrited, depending upon one's point of view, by the deleterious effects of oppression, exploitation, and defeat. The facial expression is nonplused and stupified, yet the intense eyes seem to blaze with pent-up feeling. Golub wants his images to express indignation, anguish, and suffering, but without resorting to obvious propagandistic clichés.

Speaking more specifically on a source of inspiration for the heads, the artist reveals:

In the late '50s I used to go to see Roman and Greek sculpture and in many of my paintings I stole from Greek sculpture. That is to say I took a figure and imitated it. I tried to give it a contemporary flair, but I also wanted those who knew these sculptures, particularly the late pieces, to recognize them and make a connection from the condition of the original sculpture and the contemporary situation. I thought I found a kind of urban stress and violence and vulnerability in these sculptures which was equivalent to the kind of urban stress I was interested in in my own time.

From the preceding commentary one should not be surprised to learn that Golub has studied art history extensively. In fact he earned a B.A. degree in that discipline from the University of Chicago in 1942. He also received a B.F.A. in studio art in 1949 and an M.F.A. the following year, both degrees from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In the intervening years he had taught at Northwestern, Indiana, Temple, and Rutgers universities, though he is now working independently and lives in New York City. From his student days to the present, Golub has been a political activist, not only through the intended message of his art, but also by organizing and participating in events for "progressive" causes. While attending the Art Institute he was a force behind Momentum, an exhibits program developed as an alternative to the officially sanctioned Institute annuals. In the 1960s he was involved variously with the Artists and Writers Protest Group, the Committee for Artistic Freedom, Los Angeles Peace Tower, and the Angry Arts Week.

Sincere in his political and humanistic convictions, Golub has endeavored through his art to generate a consciousness about what he perceives to be the evils and injustices of modern times. For more than twenty years his painting has been something of an anomaly, existing outside the mainstream of American contemporary art - - fashions dominated by the restrained aesthetics of pop art, op, minimal abstraction, color field painting, and the new realism. With the turn in the 1980s to what has been tenatively called neoexpressionism, Golub's seemingly raw visual statements have taken on a newly comprehended validity.