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”). 

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 in the late 1950s and early 1960s. 

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.

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.