Peter Saul: Flunking The Talent Test

Michael Werner Gallery, Beverly Hills is pleased to present Flunking the Talent Test, an exhibition of new paintings by renowned American artist Peter Saul (b. 1934 in San Francisco).

Throughout his almost seven-decade career, Saul has cultivated a reputation as an outsider in the art world. Saul started his career as an expatriate in Paris in the 1950s, when the epicenter of the art world was in New York and the Abstract Expressionist movement was wildly popular. To Saul, Abstract Expressionism seemed like a “gimmick,” and he sought to forge his own path. Saul says, “I needed to figure out some purpose if I was going to be an artist, some reason to expect a viewer to look at my pictures with interest. My solution was to try and pack my picture with as much psychology, narrative, unusual distortions, etc.”

Over the ensuing decades, Saul continued to perfect and expand on his signature style. Decades of painting self-described “humorous yet ghastly war scenes and suffering politicians” positions him as a great American history painter of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, chronicling on canvas the United States’ unending news cycle of war and political divides. At 90 years old, Saul says that is behind him. In this show, he continues to innovate, finding and expanding on new subject matter, oftentimes inspired by traditional, art historical sources.

In the painting “Flunking the Talent Test,” which is also the title of the exhibition, a canvas kicks its painter away. Saul conceived of the subject through the realization that “in modern art there can’t be a talent test because no judges would be able to agree on who’s passing and who’s flunking.” In the painting “Heaven and Hell,” Saul takes on a grandiose, religious topic typically reserved for church frescos. In “Argument with a Bowl of Flowers,” Saul paints the classical subject of floral still life, except this time the bowl fights back.