The New York Times's Best Art Books of 2020--Peter Saul: Professional Artist Correspondence
Selected by Roberta Smith

Epistolary autobiographies are possible only if one writes letters often and well — like the maverick painter Peter Saul. This book contains over 100 letters from his correspondence with his parents and his first dealer, Allan Frumkin, whom he met in Paris in 1960. Both sets of letters are equally “professional,” in that they are smart, heartfelt reports from the studio about his progress, his place in the art world and his desire for success. Frumkin’s commitment jump-started Saul’s career. Two days after they met, the artist wrote to his parents about the dealer: “He said that it’s almost impossible to disappoint him except by dropping dead.”

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The In-Your-Face Paintings of Peter Saul
His cartoony style and subjects exalt sensation as an end in itself.
The New Yorker, review by Peter Schjeldahl

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. 
 

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