Peter Saul
1934–
Upon his return to the United States from Paris in the mid-1960s, Peter Saul’s painting took a darkly political turn, aiming a fiercely critical eye at the American establishment. He conceived of his work as a response to what he saw as the apolitical nature of much American painting at that time. Saul’s subjects from this period include the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg for espionage; American consumerism; and the racism, spectacularized bloodlust, and violent misogyny that played out in the context of the Vietnam War.
Saigon is a melee of extreme violence enacted by and on grotesquely caricatured protagonists, presented on the vast scale of history painting. In it, Vietnamese women with distended, pneumatic breasts are defiled by whistling, Coke-swigging GIs with similarly distorted bodies. The subject of the painting, outlined on the left-hand side of the picture— “White Boys Torturing and Raping the People of Saigon”—came from Saul’s imagination and was shaped by the regular news reports from Vietnam and the rhetoric of antiwar activism in the San Francisco Bay Area rather than first-hand experience of the war. The saturated colors and bulging forms show the influence of popular cartoons and psychedelic art, but Saul was also linked at the time with American funk, Pop art, and European new realism. Although he has stated that he was unaware of the work of artists such as Roberto Matta and Max Ernst, Saigon might also be linked to Surrealism in its darkly sexual content and its dreamlike compositional structure.
Introduction
Peter Saul (born August 16, 1934) is an American painter. His work has connections with Pop Art, Surrealism, and Expressionism. His early use of pop culture cartoon references in the late 1950s and very early 1960s situates him as one of the fathers of the Pop Art movement. He realised about 800 paintings during his career.
Wikidata identifier
Q3376863
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed April 11, 2025.
Country of birth
United States
Roles
Artist, painter
ULAN identifier
500005884
Names
Peter Saul, Paul Saul
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed April 11, 2025.
