‘Surprisingly, the timeliest as well as the rudest painting show of this winter, opening at the New Museum, happens to be the first New York museum survey ever of the American aesthetic rapscallion Peter Saul. The earliest of the works date from the early sixties, when Saul, who’s from San Francisco, was a bohemian-dreaming expatriate in Paris: blowsy pastiches of Abstract Expressionist brushwork and proto-Pop imagery. Recognition so delayed bemuses almost as much as a reminder of the artist’s current age: eighty-five, which seems impossible. Saul’s cartoony style—raucously grotesque, often with contorted figures engaged in (and quite enjoying) intricate violence; caricatures of politicians from Nixon to Trump that come off as much fond as fierce; and cheeky travesties of classic paintings by Rembrandt, Picasso, and de Kooning—suggest the gall of an adolescent allowed to run amok. It takes time to become aware of how well Saul paints, with lyrically kinetic, intertwined forms and an improbable approximation of chiaroscuro, managed with neon-toned Day-Glo acrylics. He sneaks whispery formal nuances into works whose predominant effect may be as subtle as that of a steel garbage can being kicked downstairs. Not everyone takes the time. Saul’s effrontery has long driven fastidious souls from galleries, including me years ago. Now I see him as part of a story of art and culture that has been unspooling since the nineteen-fifties; one in which, formerly a pariah, he seems ever more a paladin.
‘Saul, who now lives in upstate New York, was the only child of an oil executive and a federal-government secretary who appeared to take little interest in him. A nursemaid saw to much of his upbringing. He was packed off at ten to a rigid boarding school in Canada, where beatings were frequent and he was assumed, based on his last name, to be Jewish. Only after six years of enduring abuse as the school’s rare “kike” did he learn that he wasn’t. (Saul says that his name may be derived from his father’s ancestral home, in England: the village of Saul, in Gloucestershire.) That strange tale feels both inconceivable and revelatory, considering the mixture of aggressive absurdity and armor-plated defiance with which Saul, after studying at the California School of Fine Arts and at Washington University School of Fine Arts, in St. Louis, entered into a tough-love romance with modern painting. He was already primed for affront by a love of hellacious comic books, such as the standout series, from the forties and early fifties, “Crime Does Not Pay.” Those books were so gruesome that threats from Congress forced self-censorship on the industry, which in 1954 instituted the Comics Code Authority. Saul thrilled, too, to figurative painters who had fallen from fashion in New York as abstraction became well-nigh obligatory: Salvador Dali, Thomas Hart Benton, Paul Cadmus, George Tooker. Saul says that when he was five years old he was deeply affected by a reproduction of Cadmus’s rhapsody of human ugliness, “Coney Island” (1934). In it, a wobbling pyramid of gross bathers pose for a snapshot. Others writhe or sprawl, contributing to a sort of carnal junk yard, though with the homoerotic garnish of one good-looking young man in the background.
‘Tyro ambition pointed Saul toward Europe, where he spent eight years in England, the Netherlands, Paris, and Rome. He took to painting jam-packed brushy images of consumer goods, body parts, and (inspired by his discovery of Mad, in 1957 or so) lampooned comic characters, including Superman and Donald Duck, who tend to meet awful fates on his canvases. (Only oldsters like me will remember the revolutionary effect, on young minds, of the early Mad’s scorched-earth hilarity.) Art historians have striven to categorize those works by their affinity to Expressionism, Surrealism, and English Pop art, but, as with everything Saul, including his drive-by relation to funk and psychedelia in San Francisco, in the hippie sixties, the links don’t hold. (He turned down overtures from R. Crumb and other cartoonists to collaborate in the underground-comics movement of the time.) His adamant individualism is keyed precisely to his rejection of similitude to the manners of anyone else.
‘Especially futile are comparisons to the New York Pop of Warhol and Lichtenstein, who tempered the shock of vernacular images with modernist formal cool—far more in tune with the sang-froid of minimalism than was initially noticed. Saul brought heat, with goofball and/or monstrous, teeming imagery that makes sensation a means and an end in itself. His pictures mount furious assaults on the eye, leaving you with indescribable (art critics aren’t supposed to say that, but I give up) choreographies of one damned thing after another. Where Emanuel Leutze carefully arrayed the constituent parts of “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” his 1851 commemoration of American valor, Saul’s 1995 parody keeps the elements more or less in place—but mostly, vertiginously, less. That boat is doomed. Compared with him, Lichtenstein is Ingres. Saul came to function as an exterminator of the kind of refined sensibility that separated the sophisticates from the yahoos in haut-bourgeois twentieth-century America. Maybe think of him as a yahoo’s yahoo, by design.
‘As a malcontent, Saul tends toward a policy of not so much getting mad about anything in particular as of getting even across the board. In 1996, he made a topical exception with “Art Critic Suicide,” which is not in the show but has been reproduced here at my request. It features me and the conservative critic Hilton Kramer (1928-2012) as Siamese twins gravely blowing our brains out with bullets whose wandering malice isn’t sated by plugging us only once. Saul tells me that he forgets the proximate motive, but it may have had to do with how paintings of his in the 1995 Whitney Biennial were received. I was amused at being paired with a writer who was so much an intellectual antagonist of mine that you’d have been unlikely to encounter us sharing the same city street, let alone what amounts to a history painting. At any rate, I was taking hot lead for belonging to a New York critical establishment that had condescended to the wrong guy.
‘The timeliness of the New Museum’s show strikes me as threefold. First, there’s an air of canonical dignity that hasn’t exactly been earned but has irresistibly descended. Decades of aesthetic, social, and political democratizing have collapsed the redoubts of consensus good taste. (If you think Rembrandt is a better painter than, say, Richard Prince, as I certainly do, be ready to make the case.) Second, young painters are on board. The various returns to (or re-volcanic-eruptions of) figurative image-making in current art make Saul’s multifarious tropes a handy visual thesaurus for engaging the mind through corporeal mimesis. (Never mind the heart, though. Saul’s emotional tone, with no exception that occurs to me, is a polar vortex.)
‘Finally, we may have here a test of political correctness. Although the show’s selection of works is ecumenically misanthropic, it admits wildly stereotypical renderings of African-Americans, Asians, and women—defensible, if they are, by being so far over the top of any detectable attitude as to self-destruct. Where apparent, Saul’s satirical spleen is default leftist—he was America’s most graphically anti-Vietnam War painter, as witness the storming pageant of American-soldier depravity that is “Saigon” (1967)—but with an antic panache that gainsays righteousness. “Crucifixion of Angela Davis” (1973), in which the activist is stuck with knives and sports a halo, might equally be seen as tweaking the left’s deification of Davis as protesting her persecution. Either way, or neither, sheer visual impact seems to be Saul’s aim, in service to an ever-seething personal rage that finds release and takes refuge in double-down buffoonery. He is like one of Dostoyevsky’s irrepressible fomenters of chaos. Is moral equivocation for art’s sake O.K.? The temerity is echt Saul, who, whatever you choose to think of him, definitely disagrees with you. Is raw intensity a malady or a purgative? Does it kill or cure?’ — Peter Schjeldahl
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Further
Peter Saul @ Almine Rech Gallery
Peter Saul @ Venus Over Manhattan
petersaul_archive @ instagram
Pop art painter Peter Saul: ‘What’s the matter with me? Who knows’
Peter Saul and the importance of having a salary
Peter Saul’s Big, Life-Changing Break
Peter Saul Paints the Carnage
Peter Saul, American Gadfly
Peter Saul, by David Carrier
Peter Saul “Art History is Wrong”
David O’Neill on Peter Saul @ Artforum International
Iconic, Controversial Artist’s Texas Connections Help Define His Remarkable Career
Peter Saul interviewed by Saul Ostrow
Peter Saul, an anatomist of social violence
Shock Value: Peter Saul’s American icons
PETER SAUL: A CASE OF NECESSARY EVIL?
Peter Saul Wants to Paint Women’s Misbehavior
PETER SAUL’S PAINTING SURVEY ASSERTS A NUANCED TAKE ON PROTEST AND COMPLICITY AT THE NEW MUSEUM
Peter Saul Sabotages Everything, Including Himself
Colour and chaos: the pioneering pop art of Peter Saul
Peter Saul, Curmudgeonly Father of Pop Art
Peter Saul: An Artist’s Artist
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Extras
Peter Saul: Crime and Punishment at the NEW MUSEUM
Peter Saul – Interview
Sinister Pop: Peter Saul, Saigon, 1967
Peter Saul: New Paintings
Peter Saul at the New Museum – Virtual Tour
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Interview
Your style has been consistently weird for a long time however you like to take risk’s when painting and for me that’s exciting. What drives you today and do you feel you have the same energy to push the boundaries of what is possible in painting?
I pay a lot of attention to the subject matter of the individual picture and try to have a fresh and obvious approach. The “ideas and theories” of painting are not very interesting to me because they don’t last very long, 20 or 30 years at the most,but if they help the picture to look interesting I’ll make good use of them.
For a long time you have addressed political and social issues as central themes in your paintings. Today with such political degradation globally do you feel it necessary to attack certain forces or issues that currently effect America and the rest of the world?
I don’t think painting a picture is very useful in attacking any forces that affect America and the rest of the world. I think my pictures function best as modern art. My actual political ideas are too commonplace and leftist to be of much interest. If possible I’ll have my picture agree with those ideas but it rarely happens. I let the picture do what is best for it.
Sometimes it is interesting to see how artists re-tool the past. Which period do you keep coming back to in art history and who do you look to for inspiration?
I like the whole 19 century – Manet, Monet, Gerome, Whistler, Gaugin, Rosa Bonheur, the whole thing irregardless of fame or style, the collision between the subject matter and the style I find very exciting.
If you could be in the studio of a surrealist from the 20’s or 30’s who would it be?
Salvador Dali is one of my favorite artists, so I would visit his studio.
What is harder to paint: Donald Trump or Hitler ?
Donald Trump is much harder to paint than Hitler because 10,000 other artists are painting him, and every conceivable sexual, financial and political viewpoint is being covered many times from all angles. Hitler has no artist attending to him at this time and is entirely fresh material.
What’s are your favorite museums globally?
Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the Whitney and the Metropolitan Museum in New York City are my favorites.
Your wife Sally is a very cool ceramic artist. Have your ever thought about making sculpture (because to be honest that would be incredible)?
Yes, I have made sculptures between about 1966 and 1970. There are only a couple extant, the rest broke apart. The problem with sculpture you need helpers and money, which I was reluctant to involve myself with. My idea of art is just me in the room with a bare canvas which I then paint on. A large sculpture I made called “Dirty Guy” or “Man in the Electric Chair” does exist in the diRosa Foundation Museum collection in Napa, California. A smaller sculpture is owned by the Smart Museum in Chicago, and in the 70’s I collaborated with a ceramicist, Clayton Bailey, and we made several ambitious sculptures.
Have you every painted a self-portrait?
I did paint one self-portrait but it wasn’t nearly as good as a number of the distorted heads I painted in the 80’s and 90’s which are maybe me rather than the subject they’re supposed to be. I also figured in a few earlier works made between 1968 and 1971.
Is there a particular film that had a big impact on you?
No, I don’t think there’s a particular film that had a big impact.
Do you listen to music in your studio and if so what exactly?
Yes, I listen to music, usually classical music, but occasionally country and western, and sometimes Christmas carols. It doesn’t seem to matter to me very much what kind of music I’m listening to, but the voices of the announcers sometimes annoy me.
Where do you escape to think about the paintings you create?
I don’t need to escape, I can think about my pictures just about anywhere.
What do you see as the task of contemporary art today?
The task of contemporary painting as I see it is to be about something besides the way it’s made. There’s nothing wrong with painting being about itself, but that’s already happened, and it looks like it’s going to need to have something to do with the outside world to continue to be interesting.
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Show
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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yes, he seems to be kind of unknown, at least outside of Spain. Strange, considering. Well, yes, I strongly encourage you to hit Paris before you do Australia. For all kinds of reasons, including no jet lag! So you did edit such a video. I didn’t know you have video editing skills. Handy. You should make films/videos, no? I think you know that the most direct route to my heart and other faculties is cold sesame noodle, so I thank your yesterday love from my knees! Plus, the whole trashy day gift sounds perfect. Oh, we had that Zoom meeting with our film’s Executive Producer last night, and it was woefully inadequate on the needed information front, so we’re hopefully having another meeting tonight that will also involve our LA producer, and, between the two of them, we hope to squeeze out what we need to know. Impatient, grr. Love awarding every shadow protected status as a historical monument, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. B. I haven’t seen that de Iglesia film, so, yeah, cool, give your report when the time comes, thank you, bud. ** Steve Erickson, ‘Colegas’ is soon to be released/DVDed/etc. in the US by Altered Innocence. Bill compared Tasmanian devils to raccoons, and that seems about right, actually. Kind of tough and suspicious but also chill. Seemingly chill. Probably not actually chill. ** Bill, Nope, only once! I still haven’t seen ‘Annette’, but I’m determined to before the weekend is history. ‘Two Drifters’: I’m on it. Thank you, man! ** Corey Heiferman, Hi, C. I think you would win the extreme gig contest were there one. Mm, I really enjoyed curating/hosting the Beyond Baroque reading series back in the day. I did burn out, but it took a few years. I did host one writer’s workshop at my apartment in the 90s that was very non-traditional — work talk and also special guests including porn directors and musicians to talk about creating/editing in non-linguistic forms — and it was really quite fruitful and a blast, but I handpicked the writer participants, which no doubt helped. So, long story short, yeah, sure, I say go for it. I don’t think ‘sophisticated’ is necessarily bad as long as it isn’t another word for ‘the usual’. Bonjour! ** Right. I decided to ‘ugly’-up my galerie and blog today with the works of the venerable rapscallion artist Peter Saul. Dig? See you tomorrow.
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