Art

Peter Saul's exhibition at PAFA includes his Vietnam War paintings.

Add Comment Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted Nov. 5, 2008

Peter Saul is not a pacifist or a left wing radical. And he's not a communist, because, he says, he never did find where the party hung out. But the wry contrarian--now having a major museum retrospective at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts--skewers all brutes and evil-doers with eye-popping paintings that are existential and satirically political. Unbelievably, he's never had a solo museum show in New York. Now, at age 74, the lion of barbed political narratives has a major retrospective at PAFA. And according to PAFA curator Robert Cozzolino, the show has been drawing both laughs and outrage from viewers.

Beginning with early paintings and drawings from the 1960s, the show introduces an artist of loose works that are a jumble of pop culture icons (soupcans, Donald Duck, toilets, Superman, money, police, Kleenex). With their bold fields of color or grid backgrounds they suggest domestic interiors or confused board games while feeling intimate and personal. Somewhere in the mid '60s the artist changes subject matter with works like "Woman Being Executed," "Donald Duck Crucifixion" and "Sex Crime." These pieces are no longer intimate or domestic and instead deal with larger social themes. The colors get brighter, the paint handling tightens up, and, as the show continues--with work through 2007--there is more confidence and controlled fury. The technique becomes so pristine it looks similar to air brushing.

Peter Saul: A Retrospective.
Through Jan. 4.
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,
118-128 N. Broad St.
215.972.7600.
www.pafa.orgIn

At the symposium on art and politics at PAFA on Nov. 1, Saul was asked about his motives for painting. Speaking cryptically, he explained that at the time when people told him his work was too "pop" and that "Pop was dead." He saw the Vietnam War being televised according to the artist, he "made it my next subject ... to save my career."

Saul says he's fascinated with rebels. "First of all I read [Truman] Capote. It incited me to bad guys," he said. Then he belonged to a psychology book club. "I only concentrated on criminals and not the self-help books," he admits.

Some of the most hallucinating and biting works in this show--the ones with the most electric colors, twisted bodies, oozing blood and punctured body parts--are the Vietnam War paintings, made throughout the 1960s. Hard-edged works for a hard-boiled subject, they describe a modern-day Hieronymus Bosch hell on earth. Their blinding reds and greens and acidic yellows and hot pinks hurt the eyes and dare the viewer to stay with them.

Saul's larger narrative paintings are ambitious. He may be using cartoon-like methods but he's making work "for the same audience Kandinsky painted for."

The traveling exhibit includes 50 paintings and drawings supplemented by notebooks from the artist's studio.



For more on the Philadelphia art scene go to http://fallonandrosof.blogspot.com

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