Night watchman: Gerald Marzorati on Leon Golub.

IT COULD BE SAID that the world caught up to Leon Golub last spring, just months before he died from complications of surgery on August 8 at the age of eighty-two. The images that emerged in April of what transpired when darkness fell at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad horrified the world. Golub included, no doubt, but they couldn't have taken him by surprise. He'd already conjured them with paint, slowly teasing pictures of abuse, torture, and degradation from his careful reading of progressive journals and from photos that he clipped from S/M magazines and, ultimately, from the deeper recesses of his psyche, where it always seemed to be 3 AM and a pitiless man with someone scared and vulnerable in his charge was capable of just about anything. In series such as "Mercenaries," "White Squad," and "Interrogation" (begun in the late '70s and early '80s and first shown in New York at the Susan Caldwell Gallery), Golub's imagination and painter's concentration ran not to the victims but to the brutalizers. He portrayed the banality of evildoers. And now some twenty years later, in the broad, dumb smile of Specialist Charles A. Graner, standing behind his frat-house pyramid of naked, hooded Iraqis; and in the hackneyed thumbs-up flashed by Private Lynndie England as she caught the photographer's eye--her other hand pointing at the genitals of a prisoner she and her buddies had ordered to masturbate--we could see how horridly right Golub got things. Art history was littered with victims. But the casual viciousness and terrifying vacancy of torturers, irregulars, those perpetrating political cruelty: No one had ever painted their kind until Golub did.

"Put cruelty first"--that was the formulation the Harvard political theorist Judith Shklar arrived at in the 1970s to describe, in motto-like terms, what made a liberal a liberal. Shklar's point was that the victims of physical and mental political cruelty were made to feel powerless and thus without purpose, too painfully stripped of the strength and fragile hope required to continue to create the private, independent, and ultimately nonpolitical (that is, not politically debatable) individual narratives essential to modern, liberal life. Shklar, like many other late-twentieth-century liberal theorists, was immersed in an increasingly vibrant and consequential conversation about human rights, and that is the cultural context in which Golub's mercs and torturers emerged. Temperamentally, though, Golub had been putting cruelty first pretty much since he decided, in 1946, to abandon his art-history graduate studies at the University of Chicago (he was a 24-year-old vet on the GI Bill) and enroll at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The first paintings he did there were based on concentration-camp scenes. "It was something I guess I had to get at," he told me one night as we sat in the modest LaGuardia Place loft, just north of Houston Street, that he shared for years with his wife, the artist Nancy Spero. Why? Why paint such stuff? Did it have to do with being the son of immigrant Jews? Or his own night fears?

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He wouldn't say, which was rather out of character. Leon was a talker. He'd sit, his feet apart, his knees twitching, his hands kneading the air before him, his voice rising as he concluded a thought or observation with an upturned okaaaayyy? Well, maybe it was okay, you'd think; but by then he was onto something else. He loved to talk about politics. He loved to gossip about the art world. He could hold forth on Greek and Roman art. especially if he had just come across something in the New York Review of Books. He could keep the waiters at Chez Jacqueline, a short walk from his loft, idling for an hour with the check as he posited, parried, reinforced, and rebutted. (He could have been a character in an early Saul Bellow novel.) Only when he'd gotten around to a funny anecdote, which was often enough, and then laughed himself into a coughing fit telling it, did he catch his breath.

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There was anger in Golub, too, and like most anger you encounter in New York, especially in its art-making precincts, it was the manifestation of that combustible admixture of self-assurance, romance, and underlying vulnerability. Living in Chicago in the early '50s and making flattened portraits of shamans and other "primitive" priestly figures with torn and gouged surfaces--tortured pictures, you might say--he'd been called (by the New York Times) "a worthy challenger to England's Francis Bacon and France's Dubuffet." It was a moment when Abstract Expressionism appeared to have run its course, and a kind of expressionistic figurative painting seemed to be establishing itself, and Golub believed it--why not? He had that kind of ambition. But that moment vanished in an instant: It was Johns and Rauschenberg who were suddenly understood to be carrying art "forward," toward Pop, then Minimalism, then Conceptual art. Golub's work more or less vanished from the New York scene until that Susan Caldwell show some thirty years later. "I was damn frustrated--I was in this situation and didn't know how to get out of it," Golub told me once, speaking of that time. "Back in the forties, I couldn't see how someone in my situation--in Chicago, so far away from it all--how I could live the life of the artist.... And then, in the mid-fifties, I was back in the same boat in a way." Golub was not blindly angry. He was honest about and to himself, no small thing.

He never stopped painting during those years, of course. He and Nancy left Chicago in 1956 for Florence and Ischia, a small island northwest of Capri, where he painted portraits, based on fragments of classical sculpture, that might be of totemic victims: men with flesh bruised red and bluish, their gazes deadened, defeated. In 1959 they moved to Paris, where they would remain for four years, making their work and beginning to raise kids and experiencing the tail end of European bohemianism. He was painting figures drawn from Greek and Roman sculpture, warrior-like figures he set in combat against one another: wounded heroes. New York paid scant attention to him or to them, but it was to New York that he and Nancy moved in 1964, renting an apartment east of Avenue A and a studio on Wooster Street where Leon could paint--when he wasn't teaching. They had three sons now, and there were few sales, and Leon was spending many hours teaching to earn a living. This was not the happiest of times. He remained out of step with the New York scene ("In New York, in the sixties--as a painter? I didn't mean a damn thing," he told me), except with regard to the Vietnam War. Along with scores of others, he attended antiwar meetings, signed petitions, made prints. But Vietnam for him, as for no other artist I can think of, brought about a sea change in his work. In his fifties, in many ways a lonely artist, he abandoned the iconic figures he'd painted most of his career for a kind of searching, roughed-up realism. He painted a few mural-like depictions of Vietnam atrocities and then, through the mid-'70s--Golub's breakthrough years, I think--dozens of small "head shot" portraits of the world's powerful: Mao, Ho, Franco, Kissinger, Arafat. Golub was in midcareer and suddenly working toward a new pictorial language for himself, painting haltingly from wire-service photos and (as a result of that?) more arrestingly than he ever had, working painstakingly, drawing and applying paint and scraping it away, trying to get the faces just right and then reducing them to haunting, ghostly traces: newsmaker Shrouds of Turin. "In a sense I began to see myself as a reporter," he told me. What he meant was that from that point on, his paintings not only existed in relation to other paintings, but "they also existed with news stories, reports about human-rights abuses, things of this kind." With the modest portraits of political leaders and the monumental paintings of political thugs that followed, Golub now saw himself as a painter bearing witness, someone making paintings, as he put it, that say, "That's how it was."

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Do we need paintings to do this work? Can't the human-rights reports--and, now, the digital photos snapped at Abu Ghraib--do the job? Czeslaw Milosz, the epical poet and witness bearer, whose death at ninety-three came a week after Golub's, weighed this question some years ago as he walked through the galleries of the Musee d'Orsay. Later he would write in his diary an observation that makes the clearest, simplest case for the painter's work and, I tend to think, for the work that Golub turned to in midlife and made his own: "Painting condenses and fixes this human time of rushing decades that is otherwise evasive, untouchable." Daringly, carefully, and rather beautifully, as odd as that may seem, Golub fixed on coarse canvas the worst we are capable of. His focus--so much his own--will be very much missed. And, it would seem, we won't soon have the comfort of calling his paintings dated.

Gerald Marzorati is the editor of the New York Times Magazine. His book about Leon Golub, A Painter of Darkness, was published in 1990 (Penguin USA).