Peter Saul

By The Week Staff

last updated 8 January 2015

Peter Saul

Orange County Museum of Art

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Peter Saul is a “classic artist’s artist,” said Holland Cotter in The New York Times. His “cartoony figures, lurid-lush colors, splatter-film expressionism, and contrarian take on topical subjects” are beloved by fellow painters but less well known by the public at large. In fact, this is just the 74-year-old artist’s third retrospective over the course of his long career. Even in an art world that thrives on controversy, Saul’s subject matter can be too hot for many museums to handle. How many would want, for instance, “a painting of a knife-wielding O.J. Simpson strapped down for execution as a buxom blond angel points to a bloodstained glove”? Or one of George W. Bush fingering the lip of an Abu Ghraib victim? Or “Christopher Columbus slaughtering New World natives who themselves hold platters of chopped human limbs in their arms”?

The Southern California artist “has not been controversial during his career so much as he’s been slightly off the radar,” said Christopher Knight in the Los Angeles Times. His first paintings, from the 1960s, were early examples of pop art. The squiggly, scratchy images showed refrigerator shelves filled with odd items—including “steak, cake, ham, and soda, but also furniture, a cross-eyed Disney duck, cigarettes, money, a toilet seat, genitals, and signage.” In time other pop artists, such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, would be viewed as modern masters. But Saul quickly left his early style behind, and by the 1970s was incorporating political subjects into his paintings. “The Vietnam War, capital punishment, religious hatreds, racial hostility, murder—he paints them all with skillful ardor.” Saul’s best paintings “refuse to be ingratiating,” and the fearless way he embraces and confronts the unpleasant aspects of contemporary culture set him apart from other pop artists.

Actually, what sets him apart is his extraordinary skill with a paintbrush, said Doug Harvey in the LA Weekly. Some pop artists, such as Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist, had compelling ideas but not much actual artistic talent. Warhol could create iconic images, but “in the end he was better at drawing lines than he was painting.” Those artists eventually ran out of places to go with their art. But “Saul was able to seamlessly channel his rage and disdain toward contemporary Western consumerist culture into sumptuous” paintings that remain fascinating to study—even when they’re difficult to look at. The surprising result has turned out to be “one of the greatest single bodies of work in 20th-century painting.”