While Golub’s work acknowledges the influence of such contemporaries as Jackson Pollock, Adolph Gottleib and Ad Reinhardt, the classical art of Antiquity and the Renaissance gave him the impetus he needed to concentrate on large scale, totemic figures which often form a hybrid of man and beast. ‘Burnt Man’, like the 1959 painting of the same name, refers to the brutality of war and human cruelty, a subject that was to dominate his later paintings of the war in Vietnam as well as referring to other aspects of American and European foreign policy.