Crime and Punishment: Peter Saul at the New Museum DOCX

Title	Crime and Punishment: Peter Saul at the New Museum
Author	Vikram Zutshi
Pages	5
File Size	152.8 KB
File Type	DOCX
Total Downloads	67
Total Views	426

Summary

Description

Meet Peter Saul, the Bad Boy of American Art Hallucinatory scenes painted in garish colors leap off the walls in a full frontal assault, an impossibly layered fever dream rife with fornicating body parts, melting heads and cartoon violence. I am at the artist Peter Saul's first major New York show called Crime and Punishment, comprising sixty of his most overtly political works at the New Museum. While sharing superficial concerns with pop art, surrealism and expressionism, Saul's work defies easy categorization. The irreverent comic-book style of MAD magazine can be discerned in his series on presidents Reagan, Bush and Trump, their stretched and twisted bodies depicting the greed, corruption and racism inherent to American politics. Iconic characters from the pop culture pantheon like Superman, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck are repurposed and deployed to subvert tropes of national pride, patriotism and war. Saul took a bludgeon to the refined sensibilities that separated the beau monde from the rubes in twentieth century America. His 1983 painting, Art Critic Suicide, skewered the guardians of good taste by showing conservative art critics Hilton Kramer and Peter Scheldahl as Siamese twins blowing their brains out, and in 1995 he created a parody of Emmanuel Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851), depicting the patriotic tableau as a sinking ship peopled with buffoonish characters. Saul came to note in the tumultuous sixties in San Francisco, as an outsider and troublemaker who would paint scenes of racism, murder and misogyny inspired by the war in Vietnam amidst the parades and love-ins of flower-child culture. His...