Peter Saul @ Orange County Museum of Art

Peter Saul
Newport Beach

jun 22, 2008 - sep 21, 2008

The Orange County Museum of Art presents the first major American survey of works by Peter Saul. Organized by the Museum with guest curator Dan Cameron, the exhibition features paintings and drawings from the early 1960s to the present, including large-scale “historical epics,” satires of art history, and several of his most recent paintings addressing World War II and the war in Iraq. After its premiere at OCMA, the exhibition travels to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine
Arts in Philadelphia.

Peter Saul (American, b. 1934) is among the handful of American painters and collage artists
whose groundbreaking proto-Pop achievements in the late 1950s and early 1960s were demoted once the champions of that movement were anointed a few years later. Saul has always forged his own path, creating often difficult, funny, and trenchant works—“sick jokes” according to Robert Storr, distinguished curator and dean of the Yale School of Art. His art embraces personal foibles and important events in American history, such as the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement. His twisted comic-book forms, artificially hot colors, controversial subject matter, and unquenchable ambition to provoke strong feelings through his paintings have kept him on the edges of the art world while also preserving, for over forty years, the freshness of his work.

"Peter Saul is some kind of national treasure."–Christopher Knight, art critic, LA Times


Major sponsorship for this exhibition provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

This exhibition is organized by the Orange County Museum of Art with guest curator Dan Cameron.