Peter Saul
Announcement card for Peter Saul’s ‘Custer’s Last Stand’ and ‘Little Guernica’ at Allan Frumkin Gallery, New York, April 10 - May 3, 1973.
Fifty years ago, Peter Saul’s first two major history paintings went on view at Allan Frumkin Gallery in New York. The pair, one based on Edgar Paxson’s Custer’s Last Stand and the other after Picasso’s Guernica, were the culmination of an evolving line of thinking that Saul underwent in the years prior. His last major series of paintings was about Black America; before that, the Vietnam War, making his switch to staid history painting (in the case of Custer at least) a toning down of his rhetoric. Indeed, the press release for the exhibition notes his “change in both direction and intention” with these new paintings, describing them as “heroically scaled works dealing with heroic themes.” No one was fooled.
Barbara Rose, writing for New York Magazine notes that Saul’s “pseudo-primitive style [conveys] a real sense of outrage at the barbarism he perceives around him.” Meanwhile, James Mellow in the Times explains that ‘Custer’s Last Stand’ is in fact about “human viciousness and depravity, violence and war.”
In some ways Saul’s new direction grew organically from his recent caricatures of art-world personalities, though he himself viewed the change as getting “back into ‘painting’ as such.” While his Vietnam work - and the politically and racially charged subjects that followed – were (as Saul himself admits) intentionally incendiary, he also thought of himself as a maker of “rectangular, storytelling pictures.” The novelty of his history paintings was less about the obvious change in subject and more about the depth of thought that went into their creation. If it was unfashionable to consider American Scene painting interesting, Saul saw the genre as ripe for exploitation. He explained: “The only thing wrong with American Scene pictures is their actual appearance which is usually terrible, and always bad in some respects, if not the lousy color, then the weak composition, or the flaccid, listless filling-in, the tiredness, to the wooden illustrational figures, or the insincere story of it, the puerile psychology… etc.” His solution was to combine the ordered (yet dated) grandeur of Old Master paintings with an economy of expression (if such a term can be used to describe Saul’s work), allowing him to eschew any unnecessary details. While tackling ‘Custer’ (which was followed by a second version shortly after) he postulated that “I have all the qualities Thomas Hart Benton needs and lacks: violent color and imagery, emotional distortion, sense of movement, etc. My pictures, while undeniably similar to his… [are an] improvement over his – better made, better looking, more psychologically penetrating, etc.” His own ruminations must have inspired Saul, as he did eventually take on Benton directly, in an on-going line of “accidental” inquiry that continued to feature in his work for decades to come.
Announcement card for Peter Saul’s Custer’s Last Stand and Little Guernica at Allan Frumkin Gallery, New York, April 10 - May 3, 1973. Image courtesy the George Adams Gallery Archives.
Fifty years ago, Peter Saul’s first two major history paintings went on view at Allan Frumkin Gallery in New York. The pair, one based on Edgar Paxson’s Custer’s Last Stand and the other after Picasso’s Guernica, were the culmination of an evolving line of thinking that Saul underwent in the years prior. His last major series of paintings was about Black America; before that, the Vietnam War, making his switch to staid history painting (in the case of Custer at least) a toning down of his rhetoric. Indeed, the press release for the exhibition notes his “change in both direction and intention” with these new paintings, describing them as “heroically scaled works dealing with heroic themes.” No one was fooled.
Barbara Rose, writing for New York Magazine notes that Saul’s “pseudo-primitive style [conveys] a real sense of outrage at the barbarism he perceives around him.” Meanwhile, James Mellow in the Times explains that Custer’s Last Stand is in fact about “human viciousness and depravity, violence and war.”
In some ways Saul’s new direction grew organically from his recent caricatures of art-world personalities, though he himself viewed the change as getting “back into ‘painting’ as such.” While his Vietnam work - and the politically and racially charged subjects that followed – were (as Saul himself admits) intentionally incendiary, he also thought of himself as a maker of “rectangular, storytelling pictures.” The novelty of his history paintings was less about the obvious change in subject and more about the depth of thought that went into their creation. If it was unfashionable to consider American Scene painting interesting, Saul saw the genre as ripe for exploitation. He explained: “The only thing wrong with American Scene pictures is their actual appearance which is usually terrible, and always bad in some respects, if not the lousy color, then the weak composition, or the flaccid, listless filling-in, the tiredness, to the wooden illustrational figures, or the insincere story of it, the puerile psychology… etc.” His solution was to combine the ordered (yet dated) grandeur of Old Master paintings with an economy of expression (if such a term can be used to describe Saul’s work), allowing him to eschew any unnecessary details. While tackling Custer (which was followed by a second version shortly after) he postulated that “I have all the qualities Thomas Hart Benton needs and lacks: violent color and imagery, emotional distortion, sense of movement, etc. My pictures, while undeniably similar to his… [are an] improvement over his – better made, better looking, more psychologically penetrating, etc.” His own ruminations must have inspired Saul, as he did eventually take on Benton directly, in an on-going line of “accidental” inquiry that continued to feature in his work for decades to come.