The New York Times Style Magazine

By Max Lakin

Next to a roadside barn in Germantown, N.Y., two and a half hours outside Manhattan, someone has set up an impressively elaborate “Trump 2024” display made from red, white and blue cut paper. The artist Peter Saul, who lives a few minutes down the road, gets a kick out of it. “Oh yeah, that’s good,” he said, sitting in his studio last month. “We have Trump people here out in the country. I’ve only met one — a mortician, retired, very intelligent. I think he thought, ‘Oh, a professional artist type, I’m going to show him that I’m not an idiot,’ so he tells me all about everything that’s going on. I know practically nothing. Nice fellow.”

It’s not exactly true that Saul knows nothing — he certainly knows something about art, even if the version he practices is rather antagonistic. Since the 1960s, he’s made rude, indelicate paintings that have agitated and mostly torched any idea of good taste and taken Cubism to unhinged extremes. Yet his imagery, which is alternately sophomoric, hysterical and grotesque — more Mad magazine than Mondrian — is deceptively potent: distended caricatures of presidents and soldiers meting out delirious violence, gormless figures stuffing their nostrils with cigarettes, cops blowing open skulls or yanking the lever on an electric chair. His subject matter is nothing so complicated as the brutal underbelly of American excess — it’s as if he’s turning over a rock in the woods and seeing what neon horror crawls out.

Saul has lived in this rural part of the Hudson Valley with his wife, the sculptor Sally Saul, for 21 years. The remoteness suits him. “I’ve always been a kind of isolated person,” he said. “I thought it was a great, luxurious thing to not have to deal with people. It’s a bad sign, mentally, but I seem to be OK. I mean, who knows? Maybe not, really. Don’t care. As long as I have a beautiful woman, I’m satisfied. I don’t need to talk to five other people.” The couple’s studio building, clad in corrugated sage green metal that blends in with the tall Norway spruce in the front yard, sits directly behind their modest house. Sally works downstairs, and Peter has the second floor.

It’s spare, and more sober than you might imagine given his material. There are no couches, no soft surfaces of any kind, really. Just racks of paints and a Bose speaker, which is switched off, perched on a wooden stool. A few cardboard boxes and a sheet of plywood form a makeshift drafting table. The only inducement to slacking off is a narrow bookshelf (some Francis Bacon monographs, a lot of World War II histories) under a bank of windows. Saul’s placed two metal folding chairs in front of the picture on which he’s at work, in which Superman, a favorite motif, trades right hooks with God over the Brooklyn Bridge. He’s just about finished inking it in. Saul, who is nearing 87, has never employed assistants, something he prides himself on: “I don’t want any advice,” he said.

Tacked to an adjacent wall is a recently completed work, “Artist Receives Mind-Blowing Inspiration,” the titular painter gripping wilting brushes as his cranium floats away in a geyser of foaming, toxic-spill green. “I wanted an excuse to have the brain come out of the head without bloodshed,” Saul said. “It’s my second attempt at art appreciation as a subject.”

Saul doesn’t put much stock in art appreciation. He’s only recently been embraced by the market, which has finally caught up to him. For a long time, his work was held at a polite distance from the inner sanctums of the art world. Politeness isn’t an idea Saul has ever been much interested in either, of course. “It didn’t occur to me to join up with anything in a friendly way,” he said. “Still hasn’t, really. I just do what I want and try to make it through life without doing an honest day’s work. I wanted to live without working, and without going to prison. So what are you going to do? Modern art, it’s a blessing. I felt it was a do-anything-you-want area of life, though I didn’t find any agreement with that idea among people I knew. People I knew took it more seriously. I felt that it was serious enough.”

Saul landed on just what he wanted to do around 1959, when he was living in Paris and selling copies of The Herald Tribune on the street, which he refers to as his last real job. He found Abstract Expressionism, the dominant American mode, too cerebral. Instead, he shaded toward realism, but only just, creating soft, flat, crowded compositions of cartoon steaks spilling out of iceboxes and rubbery superheroes with snaking limbs. He was lumped in with the Pop artists but bristled at the association. “As soon as I realized it existed, I wanted out of it because I felt that I was being used as a bad example,” he said. “I was rebellious. The idea that you use subject matter was very controversial. However, I did want to have a successful situation where I show art and it’s sold. How to do that? I mean, I don’t know. To this day it’s kind of a mystery. I was told earlier in life I wasn’t OK. I’m told I’m appreciated now, but I don’t inquire further.”

The Sauls didn’t travel over the past year, and Peter says he didn’t use the extra time to get any more work done. Instead, he “sat on the porch looking at the trees.” But that’s also not exactly true. He made 13 new paintings and four works on paper, which were recently on view between his two New York galleries, Venus Over Manhattan and Michael Werner. They’re a touch sunnier than his usual output (there’s only one execution), but as insolent as ever.

Across two wall-size panels, one of which was on view in each gallery, he’s painted New York in cheerful disaster, the Statue of Liberty sinking into the Hudson, taxis spinning off the George Washington Bridge and into the top floors of the Chrysler Building, their respective occupants locking lips in a smooch. The obvious thought is that these works are a commentary on the state of the city during the darkest moments of the pandemic. Saul is surprised by this reading, though “I don’t mind interpretation,” he says.

“I’m not out for my pictures accomplishing anything outside of art. They want to be looked at. The pictures say: ‘Pleaaaase.’ I’m trying to rescue painting from its actual fate, which is as an intellectual exercise. I don’t think about honesty. I don’t know what my personal relationship to these pictures is, really. I use my imagination freely. I don’t worry where it’s going to go.”

The most startling picture in the body of work is “Bowl of Flowers with Insects,” which is probably Saul’s sweetest, most earnest still life. He painted it for Sally. “I want to make sure I don’t get stuck,” he said. “Almost everybody over 60 does the same thing over and over again until they drop dead, like Wayne Thiebaud, you know? Chuck Close — it never occurred to him to do the kneecaps. I just feel like, maybe for business reasons or something, they produce, and I’m not going to do that. So flowers are an obvious thing, but getting into them is hard. I never even thought of doing them before. The flowers, I actually Googled a couple, and some I looked at growing. But next time I’ll probably just make the whole thing up, like everything else.” Lest he verge too far into the saccharine, a successive painting with a similar arrangement shows Saul’s bug-eyed figures sawing off sunflowers.