Leon Albert Golub was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1922. Having the desire to express himself from a young age, Golub studied art history at the University of Chicago before serving in the U.S. Army as a cartographer during the Second World War.

When he returned to Chicago after the war, he enrolled as a painting student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he received an MFA in 1950. Golub was soon hanging out with like-minded Chicago artists, including Cosmo Campoli, George Cohen and Nancy Spero, whom he married in 1951. Golub sought to develop a figurative approach that responded to the existential and political conditions of the postwar period in which he was living.

In 1955, Golub articulated his dissatisfaction with art that, in his view, placed aesthetics above ethics in a College Art Journal article titled “A Critique of Abstract Expressionism.” After a short lived teaching contract in the Midwest, Golub together with his wife Nancy Spero, moved to Paris in 1959. Along with painting and exploring European influences, the two artists raised their three sons as well. After six years Golub and his family returned to the United States in 1964, where they promptly moved to New York City.

Back in the States Golub began to create on a very large-scale. Paintings of battling figures based on Classical models he studied while in Europe. He also began to partially scrape away the images on his painted canvases, which helped to create a dramatically abrasive surface. About this time, he rejected the stretched canvas, outfitting his paintings with grommets that allowed them to be hung easily on the wall with a few nails or tacks.

As the 1960s progressed, Golub’s art began to respond more directly to current news events, in particular the Vietnam War, which he whole-heartedly opposed. He also increased the scale of his work: the largest of the Vietnam paintings, done in the late sixties and early seventies, measures some 10 by 30 feet.

Golub created large and frequently horrific paintings that depicted the shadowy world of soldiers of fortune and government torturers operating throughout the developing world. As he explained to Art in America magazine in 1991, “I think of myself as a kind of reporter; I report on the nature of certain events. I think of art as a report on civilization at a certain time.”

An accessible figure for younger artists and writers, Golub was an enthusiastic talker who enjoyed long, free-ranging discussions about art and politics. Golub continued to evolve artistically and from the nineties to his death, Golub's work shifted toward the illusionistic, with forms semi-visible, and created a variety of styles derived from ancient carvings, medieval manuscripts, and contemporary graffiti. As an older person considering mortality, he moved toward themes of separation, loss, and death. Text appeared in many of the paintings and is combined with a series of symbolic references, including dogs, lions, skulls, and skeletons.

In 2001, Golub’s art was celebrated in a giant retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. His place in art history had been firmly established. Golub’s paintings called attention to things most people choose to ignore. His teaching at a number of schools influenced artists such as Julian Schnabel and Eric Fischl. He continued painting throughout the end of his life and in August 8, at New York University Medical Center after undergoing abdominal surgery he died at the age of 82. He is survived by his wife, Nancy Spero, sons Stephen, Philip, and Paul, and six grandchildren.