Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art

About this Work

After teaching from 1957–1959 at Indiana University, the Chicago-born Golub spent several years in Paris, where he likely painted Torso I. Golub’s distinctive paintings critique the violence and abuses of political power that defined the twentieth century. By adding and then scraping away layers of paint to create distressed surfaces, Golub used the artistic process itself to explore the violence that humans perpetrate against each other. This work is one of a series depicting brutalized male figures with skin that appears to have been burned. This series likely references the burning of human bodies in the Nazis’ death camps, in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and during the Vietnam War, which he vocally opposed.