Peter Saul, “Flunking the Talent Test”
by David S. Rubin
Michael Werner Gallery, Beverly Hills, California
Exhibition continues through February 3, 2025\
December 7, 2024
Peter Saul, “Madoff,” 2009, acrylic, colored pencil, ink on paper, 22 3/4 x 29 1/4”.
All images courtesy of Michael Werner Gallery, Beverly Hills.
At age 90, Peter Saul is still actively painting. Since the late 1950s, he has steadily chronicled American politics and culture in biting satirical paintings featuring contorted cartoonish figures that are stylistically influenced by “MAD” magazine and rendered in Day-Glo colors. He repeatedly returns to depict violent situations that call attention to a vast array of societal ills. Over the years, Saul has critiqued the United States’ involvement in various wars and caricatured presidents, politicians, artists, and celebrities. In the current exhibition, two examples of the latter are devoted to well-known figures whose lives were marked by notoriety, Salvador Dalí and Bernie Madoff.
Peter Saul, “Flunking the Talent Test,” 2023, acrylic on canvas, 59 x 59”.
In spite of Dalí’s flamboyant, self-promotional lifestyle, he was a role model for Saul early in his career. The younger artist incorporated some of the more macabre aspects of the Surrealist’s imagery into his own visual lexicon, such as depicting objects or figures in the process of melting or in scenes of self-mutilation. “Dalí in Trouble” (2004) shows a double-headed Dalí, a likely reference to the fact that Dalí believed himself to be the reincarnation of an older brother who died before he was born, intertwined with a gluttonous Donald Duck holding an ice cream sundae while poised under the thumb of God and being shot by Dick Tracy. Little of this makes any sense, since irrationality was the driving force behind Dalí’s art. The confusion is a befitting homage.
“Madoff” (2009), by contrast, is a scathing indictment of the Ponzi scheme criminal who eventually died in prison in 2021. As a Wall Street mogul who would sell you anything, Madoff is shown handing over his testicles to a client in a pre-MAGA Trumpian blue suit with red tie, while a trembling man’s thought bubble reads “No more dentists” (many of Madoff’s victims were in the dental profession).
Peter Saul, “Driving into the Art World,” 2024, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 90”.
In reference to his work of the past few years, Saul has commented that he is no longer interested in painting about politics, and indeed three of his recent works could be interpreted as the wise reflections of an elder artist. Having taught for many years at the University of Texas, Austin, Saul is highly experienced in dealing with the frustrations of students hungry to make the perfect painting. In “Flunking the Talent Test” (2021), an aspiring artist gets both a pat on the head and a kick in the derriere from a painting-in-progress that has sprouted a hand and a foot. It’s a nod to the idea that judging a work of art can be subjective and disagreements over its success or failure are quite common.
Peter Saul, “Heaven and Hell,” 2024, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 90”.
In “Driving into the Art World” (2024), which features a turbulent collision of an automobile, pedestrians, a toilet, and paint tubes squeezing out paint, Saul reminisces about the unexpected twists and turns that an artist’s career can take over time. The subject is something that he knows all too well, having once been considered an “outsider artist” who is now accepted by the “academy.”
Try as he will, Saul cannot escape a bit of social commentary. In “Heaven and Hell” (2024) he muses on mortality, but the image is also a morality tale about America’s billionaires. A contemporary equivalent of Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” (1503-15), Saul’s allegory shows a group of boozing money-hungry men and women, currency raining down on them, as they are about to topple from the upper regions into the bubbling, monster-filled red cauldron below.
Peter Saul, “Argument with a Bowl of Flowers,” 2024, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 84”.
Indeed, even in viewing other recent paintings such as “Argument with a Bowl of Flowers” (2024) and “Conversation with a Steak” (2024), in which a woman and man are shown stupidly conversing with inanimate objects that possess the human attribute of contentiousness, we cannot help but think about the Fox media mentality that has infiltrated the minds of millions of Americans and paved the way for the precarious political era soon to begin. Saul is, and has always been, an acute observer of the zeitgeist, and some of his latest paintings leave us with serious cause for reflection.
