Description

In 2020, the New Museum will present a major career survey of more than 60 works by the iconoclastic artist Peter Saul, known for brazen political satire executed in a style that melds Surrealism with an outlandish cartoon aesthetic. Saul emerged on the art scene in the 1960s with large-scale canvases that mercilessly indicted international political actors complicit in the Vietnam War.  In the decades that followed he continued his assault on contemporary and historical perpetrators of greed, corruption, and racism. The exhibition will identify the origins of Saul’s practice in a tradition of American political art that achieved particular vitality during the Depression. Offering a counter-narrative to the storied trajectory of modernist abstraction, it will present Saul as a leading proponent of an under-recognized lineage of American expressionist figuration increasingly embraced by contemporary artists.