ART : Together Again, on the Battlefield : Leon Golub and Nancy Spero, partners in life and art, have never shied away from tough challenges. Both have overcome art’s fickle fashions with unflinching critiques of world violence.

PARIS —  Leon Golub and Nancy Spero are having the time of their lives. The veteran New York artists--partners in marriage, aesthetic dialogues and art-world politics for more than four decades--have logged more time as outsiders than as artists in demand.

But their stars have risen during the past few years as Golub has gained critical acclaim for his massive paintings of male aggression and Spero’s fragile but often horrific depictions of women have exploded out of feminist circles into mainstream museums and galleries.

Now the couple--who have relentlessly pursued their own separate versions of figurative Expressionism regardless of fashion--have returned to the city where they lived from 1959 to 1964. They are subjects of a joint retrospective, “Leon Golub and Nancy Spero: War and Memory,” at Paris’ new American Center, which opened in June in a flamboyant building designed by Los Angeles-based architect Frank Gehry.

“It was the kind of idea you can’t afford to ignore,” Golub says of the show, smiling broadly as he and Spero stroll through the sparkling new cultural center. The exhibition--organized by Katy Kline and Helaine Posner, director and curator, respectively, of the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Mass.--is the second major visual art event in the center’s inaugural year program.

The show surveys a continuing interchange between two artists who have long addressed themes of social and physical conflict. For the exhibition centerpiece, Spero has painted a ceiling mural of female figures on walls leading up to a rectangular skylight. The work, called “To the Revolution,” is a celebratory parade of mythical and historical figures led by a likeness of the flag-bearing woman in Eugene Delacroix’s 1830 painting “Liberty Leading the People.” Twenty-nine other pieces by Spero mingle with 23 of Golub’s gritty large-scale works in the main exhibition space and in a smaller gallery.

Lesser mortals might brag or gloat about snagging such a desirable spot in the City of Light. But enjoying the moment seems to be the best revenge for Golub and Spero. Too honest to pull their punches, they can tell horror stories about bucking the forces of Abstract Expressionism, Pop art and Minimalism from the 1940s through the 1970s, and Spero can tell you how it feels to get laughed out of a New York gallery.

“The art world can treat you like you wouldn’t believe,” Golub says ruefully. “It can be very discouraging and demeaning.”

Spero agrees: “And it’s such a subjective thing. I mean, who’s right and who’s wrong?” Furthermore, she says, art-world opinion is fickle.

But if the artists are all too aware of battles that have brought them to the American Center--and that their fortunes could change with the next trend--one would never guess it from their demeanor. They radiate a contented sort of energy. And if their portrayals of violence and torture might appear to have been created by people you wouldn’t actually want to meet, think again. Magnanimous, considerate and intently focused on the matter at hand, they are up for an interview.

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The exhibition takes a long view of their careers, so we begin at the beginning--with their meeting in 1946 at the Art Institute of Chicago. Spero, who was born in 1926 in Cleveland, was a second-year student. Golub, a Chicago native four years her senior who had earned a degree in art history at the University of Chicago, entered the institute on the GI Bill.

They gravitated together because of their interest in figurative imagery and in the unschooled expressions now known as “outsider art.” But they were part of a group that was fraught with tension, which Golub characterizes as sexual, ideological and professional.

“There is a great deal of edge in these kinds of relationships,” he says, noting inevitable “hostilities and attractions” among young artists who are attempting to find themselves and their aesthetic directions.

In 1950, when Golub was granted his master of arts degree, Spero left Chicago to spend a year in Paris. Searching for the right word to describe the situation, he says, “Our relationship was very . . . “

When the word doesn’t come, Spero provides one: “Strained.”

“Friendly and strained,” Golub corrects, as an entourage of curators and assistants bursts into laughter.

Now that the ice is broken, the artists plunge into their story, frequently talking at the same time and contradicting each other but always listening intently.

“We exchange ideas all the time, continuously. We are very frank, but neither one of us gets insulted by what the other one says,” Golub explains.

“What we have between us is trust, and that’s fantastic,” Spero confides.

Golub recalls that Spero sent an olive branch across the Atlantic in the form of an issue of Art Aujourd’hui, a French magazine that contained an article on art of the insane, a subject that intrigued both of them. She returned from Paris to Chicago in mid-1951, and they were married that December.

But Spero entered her new life with trepidation about maintaining her aesthetic identity.

“At that time I felt that Leon had honed his skills much more than I,” she says. “Yet I had this rather unrealistic notion that if one worked long enough, the work would be understood without any sort of explanation. That may have come from the idea the Abstract Expressionists had . . . that there’s this emotion lying on the canvas. But I just felt that there was this long tradition of the art speaking for itself, forgetting that we are in the age of media and that there always has been some explanation or reason for art, whether it’s come from the government or the church or whatever. When art comes from an individual, there’s another necessity to give it a reason for entry into the world . . . and the artist has to do it.”

Nodding admiringly, Golub says: “She has become very articulate.”

As a young man eager for verbal exchange, Golub became a leader among Chicago’s figurative artists in the 1950s while Spero cared for their two young sons and painted at night.

Meanwhile, although acutely out of step with the New York elite, Golub’s work became known through such controversial exhibitions as the Museum of Modern Art’s 1959 presentation “New Images of Man.”

The couple spent a year in Italy in 1956-57 but resisted moving to New York because they considered it a hostile environment for their art.

“We felt that New York was not capable of accepting us on the level that our work called for,” Golub says. “Our idea was that maybe one could internationalize oneself, be part of a wider world art scene.”

They moved to Paris in 1959, beginning a five-year sojourn and an association with European galleries and museums. Golub was represented by Galerie Iris Clert in Paris. And although Spero gave birth to the third of their three sons in Paris, she too found outlets and appreciation for her work.

In 1964 the artists believed they were ready for New York, where they have lived and worked for the past 30 years. But while Golub earned grudging respect for his work and supported the family by teaching (primarily at Rutgers University), he didn’t become a star until the early 1980s--when figurative art and political themes gained critical favor.

Spero’s rise was even slower and more painful. While living in Paris, where memories of World War II were still fresh, she began a series of war paintings. She also immersed herself in the work of Antonin Artaud, with whom she identified as a fellow artist who used language but was not heard by an uncomprehending intelligentsia. “I felt isolated and silenced,” she says.

Finding no interest in her work in New York’s commercial galleries, she eventually connected with the burgeoning feminist art movement. “To my great interest and relief, I discovered that women artists were really analyzing the art scene and revealing how little power women had,” Spero says. She joined the A.I.R. Gallery, a women’s cooperative, in 1972.

“That was when I had to learn to speak up,” she says. “I didn’t know any of these women. And at that time I didn’t even say that I had three kids and a husband, even a dog. . . . But eventually we all learned who we were, and I learned tremendously. I had to articulate my position in the operation of a gallery that I would be pleased to be showing with.”

Through the years, the artists have drawn on many of the same sources but processed the information differently. Golub, who counts pre-Columbian and late Roman art and Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History--as well as current international power struggles--among his influences, says he has always played out his struggles externally, in aggressive images and forthright discussions.

Spero, on the other hand, characterizes her artistic evolution as an internal process that has produced a relatively elegiac body of work.

“Sometimes I look at my war paintings and Artaud paintings, which are angry, furious work, and I wonder where the anger has gone, but I cannot stay in the same spot,” she says. “I feel that all the work is open-ended . . . but I do emphasize . . . that I am a woman artist and that I have been differentiated--if not overtly, implicitly--all these years. A lot of women don’t want to acknowledge this, of course, but it’s true. It’s absolutely true.”

K line and Posner proposed Go lub’s and Spero’s joint retro spective in response to an invitation from the American Center. Although the artists rarely show their work together, the curators say they never considered choosing only one of them.

“Their work has always been socially engaged. It’s about the world and what goes on in the world,” Kline says. “To look at these people who have lived together for 40 years and produced art together for 40 years seemed a rich way to explore their work.

“And the more we worked with their art, the more we (realized)--despite the disparity in their scale and touch--that there’s a great deal that reverberates between their two bodies of imagery. There’s an empathy for humanity and human nature that permeates both bodies of work. Even Leon’s more brutal work is rendered with poignant compassion and empathy for this ongoing painful difficulty of living.”

Summing up a two-hour conversation, Spero says: “I do know one thing about our relationship. We’ve had some successes. Mine has come relatively late. And we’ve had a lot of ups and downs. But we have always pushed each other to the limit. Instead of getting back, we like to push each other to the edge.”

For once, Golub offers no rejoinder.

* “Leon Golub and Nancy Spero: War and Memory,” American Center, Paris; through Jan. 15. MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Mass. ; April 15-June 25.