“The Artist as an Angry Artist: The Obsession with Napalm”

On his return in 1964 with Nancy Spero and their family from a five-year spell in Paris, artist Leon Golub became both an anti-Vietnam War activist and a producer of large-scale paintings in the European figurative tradition. He also participated in the Collage of Indignation, during Angry Arts Week (New York, January 29 – February 5, 1967), angered by the use of napalm on innocent civilians and the indifference of the established art world to contemporary war atrocities and the US Government’s mendacity about the Vietnam War. This article, which focuses on the aforementioned collage, exemplifies the range of expression employed by contemporary activist artists for whom the limits of autonomous art had to be broken by actions that spill over into the street.