|
|
PETER SAUL
Ellen H. Johnson
Peter Saul may be Polemical in his subject matter, but not in the way he presents it. Not for him experiments in new techniques and hybrid mediums; he regards traditional oil painting as a satisfactory vehicle for what he urgently wants to say and it is more than satisfactory exactly because it is so at odds with the content of his work. The conflict between Saul's ideas and the language in which he puts them makes his message more drastic at the same time that it gives the viewer a reassuring loophole in the thought that anyone who paints such intriguing forms and vivid colors can not really be serious about those outrageous things. Saul's painting, like that of Bosch, looks cheerful until one sees what the weirdly metamorphic creatures are up to and even then it is fairly easy to make the picture "Go Abstract." At least, that is the way it will work for some viewers, while others may be stuck with the subject matter. To let the one exclude the other is to miss the pungent flavor of the mixture: Saul wants to offend and please at the same time, because he is a painter and because he is a young man who finds much that is rotten in the state of the world, particularly in his own country which he has looked at from Europe for the past eight years. He is not at war with painting, but he is with many other things: crime, brutality, commercialism, prudery, greed, among others. And he is especially troubled, I think, by the adolescent mentality of the pulp-magazine and TV public, which is fascinated by lurid corruption and violence and which is willing to settle for a secondhand experience of what it secretly craves. Saul is not advocating a first-hand experience of perversion and murder (as the narrative of so many of his pictures testifies, he firmly believes that crime does not pay), but he does urge an honest awareness of their presence and of their dangerous appeal which makes the subject of crime such a commercial success in the entertainment field. A similar aim motivates the sexual and scatological character of his imagery. Anyone who looks at TV commercials, advertising cigarettes languidly inhaled across soulful glances and celestial kisses, or stomach tablets travelling along a dainty intestinal tract accompanied by nauseating music, should at least be grateful to Saul for stripping things of their insipid packaging and putting them bluntly as they are. He strikes back at advertising with its own weapons: exaggeration, scale distortion, quick contrast, emphatic colors, visual directives (arrows, etc.), repetition of brand names and emblems. With e.e. cummings he is protesting "The Unspontaneous and Otherwise Scented Merde which Greets One" - except that Saul does not put merde in a foreign language. When he paints toilets, viscera, excrement, sexual organs, it is not that he loves dirt like a naughty boy but, like Aldous Huxley, he appreciates that "It's difficult ... not to be vulgar, when one isn't dead." In his best paintings Saul achieves what must be one of the basic aims of his work - a natural radiant vulgarity.
While Saul's subjects may suggest parallels with such contemporary writers as Beckett, that resemblance is only on the surface. Saul may have something of Beckett's humor and poignant sense of the absurd but little of his wit or his profound pity and love (if Saul does feel those emotions, he has no way of conveying them in the idiom he has chosen). Even his humor is different from Beckett's; Saul's characters and their antics are amusing, rarely ironical or touching. However, it is obvious that he has a more ambitious ideological program than just to make us laugh (although most of us would be grateful enough for that). One suspects that he does have sympathy for his poor little creatures running futilely here and there; Donald Duck is apparently everyman who pathetically but eagerly bucks all the odds of commercialism, apathy, mechanization, money, crime, etc.; our soldiers are ducks fighting with baseball bats and boxing gloves; Superman is nothing more than his insignia. Man is a mindless thing - a bottle, a toilet, a phallus on legs - nothing but his bodily functions. These are some of the messages Saul may have intended; but usually his paintings do not arouse terror so much as uneasiness and, most of all, amusement. The ludicrous and lovable expressions of his characters (the face of the duck as be squashes a Japanese can), the ridiculous situations (a football-helmeted man and flower-pot-headed woman smoking an enormous dual cigarette) and his fantastic inventions (a yellow sex-monster with twenty-three phalluses attacking a green mattressclad woman whose distant head emits a comic "ugh") are all just plain funny. One delights in his zany combinations and the richness of his fantasy; but these are fantasies, Rube Goldberg machines for sex and crime. They are daydreams, not nightmares. That effect comes not only from his irrepressible humor but from the quality of innocence that pervades the work. This quality is not just something put on with the childish primitive drawing, but the very ideas themselves, the fresh imagination, the uninhibited forms. The awkwardness and boldness of the shapes all have an appealing childlike flavor reminiscent of Klee, although far less sophisticated. However, Saul's work is closer to Miro and Gorky in other elements: The predominantly sexual imagery, the humanization of objects, the interchange ability of living and inanimate forms and the way forms flow into and grow out of each other in a wild but natural association of ideas. The foot of an electric chair becomes a human leg; a breast becomes a coffee-stand; a dagger is a murder weapon, a phallus, a missile, a pointed breast and a man with a black hat. One is reminded of Gorky's multiple morphology of sexual, visceral and floral forms wandering in and out in a constantly varied chain of life, but Saul's explicit images are far less abstracted and on a different plane of being than Gorky's. Their playfulness is closer to Miro and so is the way Saul intensifies the brightly colored shapes by setting them in an airless environment. On the other hand, the variety of color and disposition of forms more often suggest Gorky. (Compare "Scream" with the blue and gold version of "The Plough and the Song.")
In spite of their possible relation to surrealism, Saul's creatures are the invention of his own peculiar imagination, and his strangely childlike scale distortions are more related to our disjointed, swollen and threatening world of advertising than to surrealism. Cigarettes are as big as a table, glasses larger than heads, people smaller than telephones. Saul pulls together objects. Figures, landscapes, interiors and exteriors (a tree stump with a saw in it in "Living Room"), kitchens, bedrooms, and bathrooms into compact single compositions which are often astonishingly similar to late cubist still lifes in their basic design. They sometimes evoke Picasso's compositions, especially some of his protosurrealist pieces, as the "Nude with a Guitar Player" of 1914. Although Saul's work is in a new generation's "Cruder" style, there are analogies to those Picassos in the physiological and sexual imagery and the violent shifting in size implying distance in time as one leg miles away from the other. Besides the general cubist and surrealist tone of his work, there are more direct influences which Saul himself acknowledges: Beckmann (whose painting he must have become familiar with as a student in St. Louis), Diebenkorn, Orozco and Bacon. These are all highly expressive figurative painters whose attraction for Saul is understandable.
It will be interesting to see what happens to Saul's work now that he is returning to the States and can take his position in the midst of what he has been looking at from a distance, socially and aesthetically. Like several of his contemporary Americans, he has found much of his imagery in second-hand sources, things already once removed from actuality: comics, popular science and thriller magazines, TV programs and advertising. But he has never taken those images whole, only fragments and ideas, symbols and a cartoon style. Moreover, not only what he selects from those sources and what he does with them but also his attitude toward them is different. Where Lichtenstein appears to be amused and Warhol indifferent, Saul is angry - and wants to do something about it. He does not paint the banal because it has no meaning but because its meaning provokes him. He strikes reality through a medium which is supremely non-real; through the falsity of ads and comics Saul aims at what he considers to be "big truths." "I will show people that what they want most to look at is not the kind of thing that they will enjoy seeing."
In his allegories for today, as in Hogarth's "Modern Moral Subjects," satire is the major weapon, combined in Saul's case with a wildly humorous power to invent images and to say things through color. The painful antics of "society" take place on a terraced structure of lollipop colors; we feel the orange waves of electricity approaching the acid green flesh of the slick "Sex Criminal Being Executed." Saul pounds our senses with color: garish, vibrant, smoldering, brassy, tender, commercial, shrill, bizarre. There are passages of particularly outlandish appeal as the coral, orchid, Venetian red and yellow-green on blue in "Scream" or the two reds and Pepto-Bismol pink in the upper right corner of "Crime Boy's Secret Bathroom." That inset section is not only what the title indicates but it can likewise be taken as a think balloon or a cartoon within a cartoon-, and it also suggests an image on a screen with Mickey Mouse looking out at the real world and panting in terror at what he sees. One of the intriguing, and generally modern, aspects of Saul's "iconography" is that unlike earlier art, such as Hogarth's, it is private and open to many different readings. Even after one "gets onto" Saul's symbolism and cast of characters, it is difficult to unravel the complex narrative or situation and to extract the moral which he has in mind. Also characteristically contemporary is the great attention and vitality Saul gives to objects by isolating, exaggerating, distorting them in a flat world of color with none of the cast shadows of the natural world. But, even for contemporary art, Saul's objects are unique in their terrible power of mobility. They run, slide, push, bend, drip, pour, tumble and spin in an orgy of action.
In his recent paintings things tend to be somewhat calmer than they used to be. There is less aimless rushing around, a greater concentration of forces. Bigger, more simplified forms, sharper edges, braver and clearer colors and a surer sense of scale. Although now more complex, the total compositions are more assured. This represents a gradual development in Saul's art over the past two or three years. His earlier work, as "Murder in the Kitchen" of 1961, was still abstract expressionist in style but more like a happening in the rambunctious subject matter. In fact the whole wonderful mess might be a moment in the kitchen scene of Oldenburg's "Store Days" of 1962 (the parallel with happenings is, of course, completely coincidental). Saul's origins in abstract expressionism, most particularly in de Kooning, are even more apparent in the untitled drawing of 1960 with its eruptive shapes and lines and its turbulent space. This early work of Saul's is an excellent example of his drawings which deserve to be discussed separately, not peripherally. They are almost never studies for pictures; but, independent and complete, they are smaller paintings in crayon, gouache and pastel.
By 1962, Saul had freed himself sufficiently to paint such individual pictures as "Mad Ducks" and "Superman's Mightiest Task." These two, like many others of the 1962 paintings, have a considerable amount of white ground left bare. But later in the year, and throughout 1963, color gets fuller and bolder and forms move toward the more monumental character of the 1964 work. He has tidied up the ice-box, so to speak, putting things on the shelves in a more compact and orderly fashion. Instead of the former tendency to rotate movement across the surface like a swastika perpetually pushing itself around, there is now a coherent movement of large blocks in and out of space. Some passages of the recent pictures, for example the interweaving arms in "Japanese Versus Americans," make one think of the complex design of tubes bridging space in Duchamp and Picabia (that the erotic machines of both are recalled in Saul's inventions is almost too obvious to mention). Where previously floating, the forms are now more securely anchored in a space which is thre e-dime n sion ally occupied, approaching a sculptural concept. And he no longer roughs up the paint - he never did very much - instead he uses it straight and clean so it will not say anything in itself. Deeply concerned as he is with his parodies and parables for our time, the last thing Saul is interested in doing is to paint pictures about his way of painting pictures.
Exhibition catalogue, Peter Saul, Allan Frumkin Gallery, New York, October 1964
|
|
|
|
|
|
