Hyperallergic

Peter Saul’s Hair-Raising Attacks

By John Yau 

Peter Saul’s anarchic imagination is a singular phenomenon in American art. He seems to have channeled the madcap humor of Alfred Jarry, who coined the term “pataphysics,” and the sharp observant eye of Honoré Daumier, along with much else, including Salvador Dali’s melting forms, Thomas Hart Benton’s muscular figures, Jackson Pollock’s all-over compositions, and the jarring colors of Op Art. The result is an unparalleled body of work done over the past fifty years that the art world has yet to fully address, much less embrace. While Saul’s art may have anticipated the work of Kara Walker and Sue Williams, as Roberta Smith recently wrote in her glowing New York Times review (March 12, 2015), or point to artists, such as Carroll Dunham, who have claimed him as an influence, in the end he stands alone.

The reason Saul stands alone is because he does something unique in the annals of postwar art: he elevates his rage to the point that it undermines its own didactic impulses. In fact, there are times when Saul does something seemingly impossible; he is didactic while simultaneously mocking his didacticism. He can home in on a particular subject, such as the Vietnam War, with unparalleled ferocity, while expressing glee that murder and mayhem are among his subjects. It is this unlikely combination of outrage and delight that sets our teeth on edge.

Saul does not try to moralize, as the great eighteenth-century English caricaturists Thomas Rowlandson or James Gillray did. Satire and caricature are too polite for an artist as fierce and funny as Saul, who loves to paint gelatinous or viscous bodies erupting or spewing gobs of goo. The wonder is his ability to channel his anarchic impulses into paintings in which formal beauty is inseparable from pointed outrage and merriment.

In the exhibition Peter Saul: From Pop to Punk at Venus Over Manhattan (February 25–April; 18, 2015), there are sixteen paintings and five large drawings the artist did between 1961 and 1973, a tumultuously violent decade in American history that continues to cast its dark shadow over the present. This group once belonged to his dealer Allan Frumkin (1927–2002), whose gallery in New York represented an alternative to the prevailing taste for Minimalism, Color Field Painting, Pop Art and Painterly Realism.

Much of the work has not been seen since it was first shown, and in that regard this exhibition offers us a tightly focused view into what Saul was up to during a turbulent era marked by war, race riots and assassinations. The group includes six paintings done in oil between 1961 and ’67, three done in acrylic and pencil in 1966, when the artist started to switch mediums, and seven done in acrylic between 1967 and ’73, while he was living in California (1964–75). Although Saul has been connected to Pop Art and its use of cartoon imagery, his deeper connection is to the lawless spirit he first saw in the pages of Madmagazine in a Paris bookstore in 1958.

In “Pinkville” (1970), a huge, orange, naked American G.I. wearing gleaming black combat books is busy shooting, stepping on, or crushing four, naked Asian women whose skin is a bilious green. The pigtails of two of the women are joined together to spell “big murder.” When it comes to stereotypes, Saul pulls out all the stops. Each woman is wearing a traditional conical hat with a name printed on it: Ching Chang; Chung Chong; Ching Chong; Chung Ching. Saul’s attention to details is where his genius becomes evident. The distortions he wreaks on the bodies are both horrific and hilarious.