PETER SAUL

From June 2 to September 3, 2017 the SCHIRN is presenting an extensive survey exhibition of the work of the American painter Peter Saul (*1934 in San Francisco, California). Long before “Bad Painting” became a central concern in contemporary art, Peter Saul deliberately offended good taste. Beginning in the late 1950s he developed his highly individual idiom blending Pop Art, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Chicago Imagism, San Francisco Funk, and cartoon culture, one in which he managed to address complex political and social issues.

Peter Saul began painting in one of the most exciting periods in American art history. In the mid-1950s a young generation of artists broke with the rules and values of Abstract Expressionism. They discovered a new parallel between art and life, one in which the traditional work of art had seen its day. In their engagement with the everyday they rejected middle-class notions of originality and uniqueness. Pop established itself as the leading culture, became a global phenomenon, and found its best-known representatives in Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg.

As a unique feature

Peter Saul’s paintings were often categorized as Pop Art. But despite similar motifs and an interest in everyday culture that link his works to Pop, they clearly diverge from it. The SCHIRN exhibition begins with his early "Ice Box Paintings" from the late 1950s and early 1960s. In postwar society the refrigerator was a symbol of prosperity and economic growth. Saul’s paintings present a chaotic excess of consumer goods, and tell of the promises they represent. At the same time they are settings for narratives of mass and consumer culture: in a weird formal language Saul packs whole lives into these Ice Boxes. With their complex pictorial structure they also have a certain similarity with the dynamic gestures in the Abstract Expressionism of a Willem de Kooning. In his painting Saul combines contrasting stylistic directions like Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism, and as a unique feature adds to his motifs the telling of stories.

In the mid-1960s Saul increasingly included political messages in his works. His proximity to Funk Art, especially Junk Culture, a specific genre prominent on the West Coast and especially in San Francisco, is obvious. His artistic position, with a preference for everything bizarre, sensual, informal, and often even ugly, is visible in his works presented in the legendary Funk exhibition in 1967 at the University Art Museum in Berkeley. Funk Art was the expression of a strengthening counterculture with a passionate disdain for the enticements of consumerism, for bigotry, and for the world’s rigidity, vulgarity, and injustice.

Criticism of the political system

In 1965 Saul was one of the first painters to turn to one of the darkest chapters in American history with his Vietnam paintings. The SCHIRN is presenting "Yankee Garbage" (1966), "Vietnam" (1966), and the main work from this group, "Saigon" (1967), in which Saul takes a stand and expresses his rage at such atrocities as the torture and sexual violence perpetrated by the American military in Vietnam. Here too the artist employed the language of comic books: all the figures are caught up in a chaotic jumble, garishly colorful, and overdrawn. In these works one sees both a very dark, sarcastic humor and biting criticism of the political system.