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This show of new work by Peter Saul followed on the heels of the well-received touring museum retrospective organized by the Orange County Museum of Art, where it debuted last year. The six large canvasses and the group of works on paper in the more recent show proved the San Francisco-born Chicago Imagist veteran to be in fine acerbic form. Saul uses his twisted cartoon imagery to tackle, or rather, attack, a host of topics ranging from Cold War politics (Stalin + Mao, 2009) and gratuitous sex (Viva la Difference, 2008) to Joe the Plumber (Plumber Meets Francis Bacon, 2008) and Bernie Madoff (testicles of a Billionair, 2009), part of a series of raunchy portrayals of the Ponzi schemer as a self-emasculating oaf.
Swipes at art-world values appear in a number of works, including Better than de Kooning (2008), a wildly exaggerated pastiche of the maestro's venerated "Woman" series from the 1950s, which Saul has reinterpreted in his own work periodically since the 1970s. The 7-by-6-foot canvas's airbrushed-looking surface of finely dappled brushwork in garish hues, is a send-up of Ab Ex's revered gestures and impastos. Further skewing de Kooning's iconic image, Saul adds to the swirling morass of breasts, teeth and hair a large and grotesque penis.
Elsewhere, he is more deferential to artist-predecessors. Over the years, Saul has acknowledged the influence of Paul Cadmus and Max Beckmann, and he pays homage to the latter in Beckmann's The Night (2009). This nightmarish image features an armed figure with a knife and pistol on the right attacking a naked woman to the left. In the lower left corner, a head in the style and likeness of a Beckmann self-portrait licks the foot of a screaming man in his underwear hanging from a noose. Updating the Expressionist idiom of Beckmann's The Night (1918-19), Saul, in this ghastly scene, brings it to a whole new level of brutality and violence.
Saul's ongoing struggle to bore ever more deeply into his own creative psyche is evident in two of the show's most striking works: the obvious but hilarious My Lousy Brain (2008), showing a blocky figure with knife in hand, who examines the brain he has just carved out of his own skull; and a more playful composition and the exhibition's tour de force, Bad Restaurant (2008). Here, four well-defined self-portrait heads top diminutive bodies. The figures, undulating above a dining room table, traverse a quasi-surrealist space. On the far right, a figure squeezes a red fish; another, holding a giant pickle, slogs through a big bowl of spaghetti. On the left a hot-dog figure with Saul's head glares pop-eyed at an olive hovering above an overfull martini glass, the artist's reward, perhaps at the end of a long and productive day in the studio.
DAVID EBONY
"Gross Anatomy"
by Mario Naves
Bernie Madoff and his testicles make a fleeting appearance in Peter Saul's exhibition of paintings and works-on-paper at David Nolan Gallery, and New Yorkers are poorer for it. Actually, it's Mr. Madoff's castration Mr. Saul depicts. Notwithstanding the artist's typically over-the-top finger-pointing, the "Maddoff" drawings aren't anywhere near as disgusting, funny or caustic as they should be.
The Ponzi King deserves, not commentary done on a deadline, but vitriol made gross and lurid through paint. Mr. Saul's finicky style, with its innumerable pats of oversaturated color, is inherently anti-immediate; we'll have to wait for his definitive take on capitalist excess and arrogance. But then, topicality isn't Mr. Saul's forte. Bile is.
For the last 50 years or so, he's thrived on the stuff, and created a body of work that stands as a monument to garish, adolescent overkill. From his early, not un-fond forays into AbEx pastiche to the pseudo-pointillist cartoons for which he's gained a significant following, Mr. Saul has trained his scatological eye on humankind's failings and follies. Ronald Reagan, Fidel Castro, O. J. Simpson, Donald Duck, Jeffrey Dahmer and Newt Gingrich—in mortal combat with Little Orphan Annie, no less—have met with his ire.
Mr. Saul has worked on themes both grand (totalitarianism, the ubiquity of racism and genocide) and trivial (zit-popping, nose-picking and Marcel Duchamp). Either way, he invests a given motif with gleeful and raucous overstatement. "I like the way [a] picture presents problems you have to deal with," the artist, in an understated mood, told BOMB magazine. If there's no particular breadth to Mr. Saul's maliciousness, its unflagging nature is impressive in its purity.
Which is a not-so-roundabout way of saying that the exhibit is more of the same. The fleshy and contorted figures; the electric palette; the Silly Putty–like elisions of space; and an endearing weakness for the easy mark—Joe the Plumber no less than Bernie Madoff—the recent work demonstrates that Mr. Saul is as reliable a stylist as he is a misanthrope. Stalin and Mao make an appearance, as does the artist himself, brandishing a large pickle and running through a bowl of what appear to be SpaghettiO's.
A keen, if dyspeptic, student of art history—Mr. Saul is, for example, a fan of 19th-century academic painting—he knowingly parodies Willem de Kooning's slash-and-burn methodology in a canvas titled (what else?) Better Than De Kooning. A homage to Max Beckmann's The Night simultaneously simplifies and amplifies that masterpiece's grotesqueries without necessarily tapping into the German painter's philosophical gravity. But that's kind of the point: Mr. Saul prides himself on his amorality. He trades in across-the-board vituperation. He's refreshingly un-p.c. that way. That's why charges of, say, misogyny don't phase him.
Not that he doesn't ask for them. The unabashedly puerile Viva La Difference (2008) is a case in point. A kneeling man in purplish-pink pajamas—he resembles Derek Jeter, though the folks at Nolan emphatically state that it's not—crouches by a bed, putting his arm around a multiethnic lump of flesh with six breasts, six vaginas, blond hair and no face. In the catalog interview, Mr. Saul's posits the canvas as a bedroom emollient for the collector ready to snap it up. There's no accounting for one's tastes in aphrodisiacs. But neither is there any doubting the integrity of an artist who is, in the end, less cantankerous or scabrous than just plain lovable—at least for those of us with a weakness for exuberant ill will.
"Peter Saul: New Paintings" is at David Nolan Gallery, 527 West 29th Street, until May 23.
Peter Saul, New Paintings
by John Yau
David Nolan, April 2 – May 23, 2009
I wonder how many artists would readily admit that Peter Saul has influenced them. He certainly was the first to make high art out of strident and cartoony in-your-face images. Isn't it about time the art world acknowledges Saul as a modern master? Not for the kind of formal innovation that has been pursued by Jasper Johns or Robert Ryman, although, like them, Saul's inventions can't be reduced to style, materials, process or, as some have advanced in his case, subject matter—all middlebrow markers of success. Saul's innovations instead spring from picture-making as an imaginative act. This is what he has in common with Johns and Ryman, as well as Squeak Carnwath, Mark Greenwold, Catherine Murphy, and Thomas Nozkowski. All of them know that style is death, and art isn't about originality: it is about reality, the time-space continuum we inhabit as we are pulled toward termination. To dream of freedom in the face of inevitable destruction is a far more powerful and compelling accomplishment than kissing the ass of theorists espousing a one-size-fits-all narrative.
Peter Saul, "Viva La Difference" (2008). Acrylic on canvas,72 × 72 inches (182.9 × 182.9 cm). Courtesy of David Nolan Gallery.
Saul makes inimitable paintings. For all their zaniness and rage, provocation and weirdness, chilling violence and outlandish humor, his are some of the most complexly sophisticated, densely engaging pictures of any painter of his generation (he was born in 1934). His manipulation of forms is both fluid and sculptural: pictorially speaking, a wildly imaginative synthesis of Salvador Dali's melting and rubbery forms and Willem de Kooning's savagely comic, figural distortions that results in something all his own. He conveys distance not through perspectival means but photographically, with crisply focused foreground objects juxtaposed with fuzzy-edged ones behind. In terms of spatiality and color, highly revered figurative painters like Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud are pedestrian compared to Saul. He dances circles around his contemporaries, and younger artists, such as Peter Doig, Carroll Dunham, Elizabeth Peyton, and Lisa Yuskavage, are not even close to being in the same category.
The question remains in the air, like a fart in a crowded bus: Why hasn't Saul's work gained the status it deserves? Why has it always been regarded as a special case? Is it too iconoclastic to be considered mainstream? Is it because the mainstream prefers the predigested, quick but anticipated shock rather than a prolonged engagement with something open-ended, irreducible, and other? One reason is capitalism—Saul's works can't be financed. Nor are they interchangeable products that can be theorized, like Wade Guyton, Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, and other appropriation artists. (Have theorists, in their institutional critiques, ever explored the link between their theorizing and capitalism?)
There are six paintings in this exhibition, all completed since 2008, with no two that are remotely similar, and four drawings. Instead of an overriding theme, a hook to hang the paintings on, Saul depicts all kinds of figures, things, excretions, and liquefactions.He takes a perverse delight in conflating the viscosity of paint with that of the body's innards, jamming together the image and the visceral. His scatology is an unequivocal reminder that art is rooted in the body, time, and mortality. The mind-body problem has never been presented like this.
In "Bad Restaurant," lemon slices, spaghetti, fish, and wine all play a role, as well as a giant, phallus-like cucumber balancing a slice of chocolate cake, two cups of coffee, and a bumblebee. The artist makes four appearances, in sneakers and a T-shirt, as a snake/hot dog inside a bun, as a head popping out of a coffee cup, and with a pickle for a body. Starting with the pickle body on the far right and ending with a sneakered, headless creature on the far left, Saul lines up a distinct range of green, from Veronese to the electric and bilious.
It is fairly easy to recognize what's in a Saul painting but impossible to explain what's going on. He has a genius for following internal logic to its troublesome conclusion—something that is also true of the great stand-up comic and outspoken libertarian Bill Hicks (1961–1994), who described himself as "Chomsky with dick jokes."
The masterpiece of the exhibition is "Viva la Difference" (2008), in which a pajama-clad man crouches beside a bed, his arm around a half-reclining female nude, all breasts and vaginas, whose puppy-like face is crowned with reddish-orange hair. (Magritte's "Le viol" [The Rape] [1945] is the likely source for her body). A martini glass filled with an orange-colored drink, complete with orange slice, rests rather precariously in one of her vaginas at the dead center of the painting. From the crimson satin sheets to the man's phallic cigarette, there is nothing that Saul hasn't considered. And yet, for all its clarity of detail, the painting is irreducible. And Saul isn't trying to be ambiguous or ambivalent, which are familiar forms of avoidance.
Is "Viva la Difference" Saul's vision of otherness? If so—and certainly the tongue-in-cheek title suggests it—then it is an otherness that remains beyond naming and cannot be colonized. There is nothing coy or haughty about this painting or any of Saul's work, in fact. This is what the mainstream art world can't deal with. They prefer self-satisfied judgments and easy putdowns to the tenderness and sympathy that Saul infuses into his paintings of losers, dumbbells, schlubs, murderers, dictators, and headless monsters. He recognizes that they are not as inhuman as many would like to think. One even feels something for Bernie Madoff who, in one drawing, offers up his "bloody testicles." To his credit, Saul never indicates whether it is payment extracted ("a pound of flesh") or penitence. And therein lies more than one tale.
PETER SAUL
David Nolan
527 West 29th Street, Chelsea
Through May 23
The irrepressible Peter Saul, now 74, continues his cheerfully acerbic, riotously goofy ways. The paintings in this entertaining show are made in Mr. Saul's signature Pop-Surrealist cartoon style. With their rubbery, pneumatic forms neatly rendered with a spongy, semi-pointillist touch in glowing colors, they are like much-enlarged stills from a twisted animated film.
There are three different types of pictures: weirdly personal, violently political and insouciantly art historical. In "Viva la Difference," a grinning bon vivant in pajamas with a martini in one hand wraps his arm around an amorphous blob that sprouts multiple breasts and is perforated by numerous vaginal orifices. (Talk about your male gaze!)
On the political front, there's "Stalin & Mao," in which the dictators are represented as giants punching the heads off enemy soldiers. As for art history, "Better Than de Kooning," a translation of de Kooning's "Woman" paintings from the 1950s into a picture of bulging, writhing, tubular forms, is visually captivating and amusingly Oedipal.
"Beckmann's the Night" is based on a 1919 painting by Max Beckmann. In Mr. Saul's version, a green maniac armed with a knife and a pistol attacks a naked blonde tied by her wrists to an overhead beam, while Beckmann himself licks the swollen foot of a half-naked man who hangs by the neck. A careening bullet rips through the flesh of the strung-up victims. Mr. Saul's picture reminds us that few sights are more gripping to behold than scenes of horrific carnage.
KEN JOHNSON
PETER SAUL
Saul's recent paintings continue to electrify peaks and pits of narcissism—grandiosity and self-loathing, in arrogant and abject fantasies of murder, rape, and all-around depravity—with sweetening effects of effulgent color (purple-shaded purples, green-shaded greens, and so on) and pillowy texture. Why is it interesting to behold Stalin and Mao beheading legions of Nazis and Chinese Nationalists, respectively? Well, they do it against a field of sumptuous blue. Like a kid seeking the aid of his older brother in a fight, Saul dials up Willem de Kooning, with a quite wonderfully boop-boop-a-dooped "Woman." Through May 23. (Nolan, 527 W. 29th St. 212-925-6190.)