Peter Saul, 2019
Peter Saul was born in 1934 in San Francisco, California. He attended the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, and the Washington University School of Fine Arts in St. Louis. His work has been the subject of numerous international solo presentations, including recent exhibitions at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg; the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; the Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg; The Arnold and Marie Schwartz Gallery Met, Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, New York; and the Fondation Salomon Art Contemporain, Alex. In September of 2019, les Abattoirs, Toulouse, will present “Peter Saul: Pop, Funk, Bad Painting and More,” a major retrospect of Saul’s work. In 2008, his work was the subject of a traveling retrospective curated by Dan Cameron, which opened at the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, and traveled to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, and the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans. An earlier retrospective of his work opened at the Musée de l’Hôtel Bertrand, Dole, in 1999, and traveled to the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Mons. Saul’s work is frequently featured in major group exhibitions at institutions both stateside and abroad, including recent presentations at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; The Met Breuer, New York; the Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln; Kunsthalle Emden; the Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Greenwich; the New York Academy of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Musée d’Art Contemporain, Marseille; the National Centre for Contemporary Arts, Moscow; MoMA PS1, Long Island City; the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence; and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus. His work is held in the permanent collections of numerous public institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In 1993, Saul received the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. In 2008, Saul received the Artist’s Foundation Legacy Award. In 2010, Saul was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Peter Saul lives and works in New York City and Germantown, New York.
His cartoony style and subjects exalt sensation as an end in itself.
A conversation with the painter ahead of his retrospective at the New Museum in New York.
It seems crazy to think that this is the first NYC museum survey for Peter Saul, who has influenced a generation of contemporary artists. For many, Peter Saul is a gateway drug.
Acid in both color and content, Peter Saul's cartoonish political commentaries are still outlandish and relevant 60 years on.
Peter Saul has been called a painter’s painter.
Peter Saul's pointed and provocative style of paintinging has been raising brows and hackles since the late 1950s.
In Sally Saul's Together (2017), two happy polar bears stand side by side, holding hands. They look content (if a little befuddled), ready to face whatever the future might bring.
Robert Arneson, Luis Cruz Azaceta, Jack Beal, Joan Brown, William N. Copley, Roy De Forest, David Gilhooly, Red Grooms, Philip Guston, Robert Hudson, Maryan, Willard Midgette, Richard T. Notkin, Jim Nutt, Philip Pearlstein, Peter Saul, Richard Shaw, H.C. Westermann, William T. Wiley
In many ways 2015 was a year of historical return for New York’s galleries, with successful exhibitions of the Memphis group (“wacky, boldly kitsch-adjacent design”), Hollis Frampton (“penetrating, conceptually-oriented photography”), and septuagenarian Lynn Hershman Leeson (“started making alliances between art and science well before trendy millennial artists”).
The wonderful exhibition “Peter Saul: From Pop to Punk”—challenging, engrossing, troubling—which consisted of sixteen ambitious paintings and five equally ambitious drawings from the 1960s and ’70s, was woefully mistitled: There was nothing waywardly adolescent about this show, nothing punk, as I understand the meaning of both word and style.
I doubt Peter Saul will ever get his critical due as the significant painter of his generation that he is. Like Robert Colescott, another artist who did not hesitate to offend in his skewering of U.S. culture, Saul has never toed the line of art-world taste (or tastefulness), remaining staunchly figurative and political, and a painter to the core.
“The cowboy has been written about as if it were the pinnacle of freedom … In fact, it was a sleepless drudgery almost beyond imagination.”
Peter Saul is probably older—and cooler—than your favorite artist. Last Friday night at Neuehouse, he and contemporary art star Joe Bradley took part in a conversation moderated by Dallas Art Fair founder Chris Byrne.
Now, here’s an interesting pairing. Peter Saul, who has a mad funhouse of a show up at Venus Over Manhattan, will be talking to one of this decade’s most prominent market darlings, Joe Bradley.
Caught up in the fluorescent reds, acidic greens, and woozy ultramarine blues coating erotic entanglements of cartoons and classical figuration, politics and fantasy, in these acrylic and oil canvases, you could just miss the black marker insignia “SAUL ’68” on Target Practice.
In August 1970, civil rights activist Angela Davis became the third woman ever to be placed on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” list.
“From Pop to Punk,” a show at Venus over Manhattan featuring his work from the sixties and seventies, brims with candy-colored violence and lush, vibrant grotesqueries.
Peter Saul’s anarchic imagination is a singular phenomenon in American art.
Even before there was Pop Art, Peter Saul was making it. Born in 1934, Saul gave birth to his idiosyncratic style while living in Paris and Rome
“Peter Saul: From Pop to Punk” is a stunning, museum-quality survey of Peter Saul’s early work, from 1961 to 1973.
Peter Saul: ‘From Pop to Punk’ (through April 18) This selection of paintings and drawings owned by Allan Frumkin (1927-2002), Mr. Saul’s longtime dealer (30 years), brings a new clarity to Mr. Saul’s early development.
The New York art dealer Ileana Sonnabend once avowed — somewhat self-servingly — that the best collectors are people in her line of work. Every so often the evidence mounts, as it does with “Peter Saul: From Pop to Punk” at Venus Over Manhattan.
“A lot of these I haven’t seen since I sent them off!” the painter Peter Saul announced as he walked briskly around an exhibition of his work from the 1960s and early ‘70s at the Upper East Side’s Venus Over Manhattan gallery.
The latter inclination was revealed when discussing Saul’s current show at Venus Over Manhattan, comprised of works made in the 1960s.
Peter Saul is a national treasure, a man who still, at the age of 80, is making exuberantly perverse paintings of the really important stuff — like pastries, having sex with each other.
"I'm a nutcase when I get in the studio!"
Peter Saul may be 80 years old, but inside he feels like a 14-year-old boy. Since the 1950s, Saul has offended, grossed out and entranced the art world with his neon infused, cartoon snarls, jam-packed with gore, psychosexual mumbo jumbo and all kinds of visual excess.
