Peter Saul

Peter Saul was born in San Francisco in 1934, studying at the California School of Fine Arts from 1950 to 1952. He went on to get his Bachelors in Fine Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, then spent several years in Europe. In 1964, Saul moved back to the United States, choosing to return to the Bay Area rather than the established art center New York in part due to his distaste for the elitist art culture of New York City. Saul folded artistic elements of the abstract expressionist movement into his own painting, especially the interest abstract expressionists had in creating works composed of dynamic, energetic gestures. He, however, considered the existential crises that plagued those artists’ works as pretentious and useless to his own art. He wanted his art to be accessible to the general public.

Saul’s works in the early 1960s utilized the mainstream imagery of cartoons in the form of familiar characters like Superman, Mickey Mouse, and Donald Duck. Yet Saul stood apart from the Pop Artists with his zealous, unironic paintings that he himself describes as having “too much emotion” compared to Pop Art (McCarthy 2007).Dynamic caricatured figures and vulgar subject matters come together to make the aggressive, in-your-face visual politics. His paintings seem to delight in pushing the boundaries of socially unacceptable, unabashedly depicting the perverse and violent. Throughout his works, Peter Saul makes it clear that he has no interesting in pleasing art critics or even viewers with aesthetically appealing works, he paints to challenge intellectually and emotionally. Saul remains active as an artist. For a characteristic interview click here.

-Aileen Wang