Paging Mr. Pynchon

I have to say that I was taken aback when I first saw the cover art (above) for Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel, Inherent Vice. The novel, which I just finished, is excellent and, at 370 pages, rather “light” for Pynchon in terms of sheer words but as weighty as ever with deep thoughts and cosmic wit. Pynchon riffs on the noir conventions of the private investigator but with a neon-colored, drug-altered twist in placing the PI in California around 1970, during the peak of the Charles Manson-inspired paranoia and the beginning of the end of the 1960s hippie culture. The dime store quality of the artwork could easily trick someone not recognizing Pynchon as one of the highest of highbrow novelists into thinking they’ve picked up a run of the mill “beach read.” I think Pynchon himself would enjoy playing that little joke on an unsuspecting reader, so maybe that’s the reasoning behind the cover art. I, however, have another suggestion for a cover, perhaps for the second edition.

Pynchon creates a landscape of pure paranoia—the straights fear every hippie is a Manson-in-the-making ready to murder them in their beds, while the hippies fear the straights are trying to kill them off by more “officially sanctioned” means. Peter Saul’s The Government of California (above, from 1969) visually captures the public madness of that place and time, setting the ominous mug of Ronald Reagan, then governor of California but already setting his sights on the highest office, in a place of prominence. If Manson is the monster under the bed for the straights in Inherent Vice, Reagan is the monster ready to spring out of the closet for the hippies. The acid colors and twisted forms of Saul’s art mesh perfectly with similar effects Pynchon achieves in his psychedelic prose.

If anyone out there knows how to get in touch with the elusive Mr. Pynchon, please pass on my idea for a second edition cover. If Mr. Pynchon himself is reading, please feel free to drop a line in the comments. To confirm that you’re the real deal, please attach a recent picture, too.

Mountain Range

In the New York City art scene of the 1950s, artists joked that you were either with the “red mountain,” Harold Rosenberg, or with the “green mountain,” Clement Greenberg. Born January 16, 1909, Greenberg helped set the standards of taste for post-war America like few other critics. A failed painter himself, Greenberg (above, photographed in 1972 by Arnold Newman) built an entire system around the idea that traditional ways of painting, including painting recognizable subject matter, were not only passé but dangerous for society. After witnessing the way the Nazis commandeered art and culture for nefarious, propagandistic purposes in World War II, the Jewish Greenberg sought to turn the tide and incite a new way of painting that stressed the individual and freedom over the state and state-enforced control. Such a goal neatly survived the transition into the Cold War period by replacing the fascism of the Nazis with the Communism of the Soviet Union. America, Greenberg asserted, as the beacon of freedom for the world, would also illuminate the path to the next stage in the evolution of art.

For Greenberg, the next stage came in the person of Jackson Pollock and Abstract Expressionism. Works such as Pollock’s Lavender Mist: Number 1, 1950 (above) epitomized everything that Greenberg wanted for art and culture. While Rosenberg championed Willem de Kooning, Greenberg hitched his wagon to Pollock’s star. Greenberg and Pollock rose together into the cultural firmament. The two names became almost synonymous. Greenberg worked with the U.S. Government to organize international exhibitions of Pollock’s art to counteract the ideological spread of Communism during the 1950s. Unfortunately, Pollock’s messy personal life and chaotic psyche clashed with the fastidious habits of Greenberg. In the movie Pollock, Jeffrey Tambor captures that aspect of Greenberg’s personality beautifully. Pollock the man always interfered with Pollock the abstraction for Greenberg, who wanted an idea free of all baggage.


Greenberg seemingly found this baggage-free type of painting in the next style he championed, which he called Post-Painterly Abstraction but is also known as Color Field painting or Lyrical Abstraction. Many artists in the 1960s left behind the angst of Pollock and took a cooler approach to art that reveled in color and shape with no reference to subject matter, including their own mental state. Morris Louis’ Alpha-Pi (above, from 1960) exemplifies this person-less, subject-less style. Greenberg swayed the taste of contemporary art even further towards abstraction, leaving contrary-minded artists far behind and devoid of any chances of fame. Furious at Greenberg’s stranglehold over the artistic dialogue, Peter Saul painted the critic in 1971 as Clemunteena Gweenburg. Saul’s feminized caricature sits on a palette marked “Abstwack Arts” with a paintbrush extending from his (female) genitals that reads “Hy-Brow Art.” Saul and others saw Greenberg’s move to abstraction not as an escape from fascist circles but as an escape from responsibility to address the wrongs of capitalism and American “democracy.” In their view, Greenberg’s belief in the American way blinded him to its wrongs and drove him to blind others to them as well. Greenberg ruled over the art world for nearly two decades, passing down judgments that still echo in the works of critics influenced by him who set today’s standards. Like a mountain, Greenberg continues to cast a large shadow.

And All That Jazz

I always find an artist’s final works to be just as interesting, if not more so, than his or her first masterpieces. How an artist finishes seems to me as important as he or she begins. If you’re Andrew Wyeth (still alive, last time I checked), you stay the course for almost a century with your powers mostly intact. Renoir asked for brushes to be strapped to his wrists when his arthritic hands could no longer hold them. Willem De Kooning battled through Alzheimer's disease to create works of great emotion and style before slipping away. When Henri Matisse reached his seventies, infirmities made it difficult for him to hold a pencil or brush. Born December 31, 1869, Matisse refused to stop making art and began creating images by cutting out colored pieces of paper and arranging them on other colored pieces of paper. Using such childhood means, Matisse reached great artistic ends, eventually assembling in 1947 an entire book of such works he titled Jazz. Like a great jazz musician, Matisse improvised on themes from earlier in his career and created wholly new works, such as Icarus (above). Unable to paint or sculpt, Matisse’s artistic spirit grasped onto a new medium when his fingers could no longer grasp the old ones.

Even Jazz’s images of implied danger, such as The Knife Thrower (above, from 1947), don’t seem frightening or edgy in any true sense. The softness of Matisse’s cutouts, with their beautiful design and saturated colors, could lead you to think that his Jazz belongs to the Kenny G school. Matisse may be smooth, but he’s not generic, snoozy “smooth jazz.” Instead, Matisse’s smoothness is that of Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Ben Webster, or any of the other great jazz saxophonists who could caress the old standards and tease out untapped resources of melody without resorting to unnecessary pyrotechnics, even though they could blow the roof off when they wanted. When Peter Saul announces that he never wants his art to become “furniture,” he points a finger directly at Matisse, who famously announced that he wanted his work to be as soft as an easy chair. Certainly there’s a place and time for Saul and others to challenge the status quo, but Matisse addresses the need to find a moment of repose, to simply sit and allow life and art to wash over your senses before taking on the next project.

In 1905, at the beginning of Matisse’s career, when works such as Woman with a Hat and The Green Line made him notorious, the public literally called him a beast, or Fauve in French, thus giving a name to the new style of bold, non-natural color. It seems quaint that people were once shocked by the idea of a green stripe running down a woman’s nose. Eventually, Matisse settled into a comfortable groove and gained acceptance, rivaling Picasso for the title of the greatest living artist of the twentieth century. Once Matisse found the potential for cutouts, he continued in that style for most of his remaining years. In Blue Nude II (above, from 1952), Matisse returned to the epic nudes of his earlier years, but, again, smoothes out the final rough edges and delivers one final variation on a great theme. With only a series of blue shapes cut from a larger piece of paper, Matisse constructs an entire sculpture of color with discernible shape, volume, and weight. It’s pure magic, like a great musician taking a reed and his own breath and blowing a solo that sinks down to the bottom of our souls.

Anti-Idea Man

If you look closely at the cover of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, festooned with so many famous faces, between playwright George Bernard Shaw and soccer star Albert Stubbins and peeking out from behind the feather in George Harrison’s hat, you’ll find the face of iconoclast American sculptor H.C. Westermann. Born December 11, 1902, Westermann led a colorful life, doing everything from performing as an acrobat to working in logging camps and rail yards before serving as a navy gunner during World War II in the Pacific Theater. Watching Japanese kamikaze attacks kill American sailors as well as the attacker, Westermann developed an anti-war, anti-ideological, and anti-materialist philosophy that refused to accept a world in which humans killed other humans, and sometimes themselves, in blind allegiance to an idea. Westermann’s sculpture titled Memorial to the Idea of Man If He Was an Idea (closed) (above, from 1958) quirkily calls into question the values that compel nations and people to wage wars. The robotic look of the “memorial” comments on the blind automatism of citizens who support governments unquestioningly. The single, cyclopic eye mimics the lack of vision of such people, who refuse to see any depth or complexity to the issues of the day. Man is not an “idea,” Westermann says. Man is man, nothing more or less, with the freedom to be anything and not just a predetermined idea.

It’s easy to see how the Beatles wanted to include Westermann among their pantheon of heroes. A rugged, very physically active man as well as an infectious thinker, Westermann showed the way for other artists to find their own way, such as the equally unconventional and anti-establishment painter Peter Saul. In the 1950s and 1960s, when America’s post-war profile in the world grew exponentially and the American way of life in all its materialist glory reigned supreme, Westermann saw only darkness behind the gleam of shiny new cars and refrigerators. In Antimobile (above, from 1965-1966), Westermann shows the twisted sensibility of a country that made an idol out of the automobile by sculpting a literally twisted automobile steering wheel. Westermann targets the American infatuation with the car as a prime example of how the country has lost its way spiritually while consumed by getting someplace physically. Westermann sees America getting nowhere fast.

In addition to sculpture, Westermann tried his hand at printmaking with the same iconoclastic touch. Turning a popular advertising slogan for tourism on its head, Westermann created a series of prints titled See America First (Untitled No. 1 is above, from October 1968). Advertisers wanted Americans to travel domestic and spend their money in America to help fuel the American economic machine. Westermann calls on people to open their eyes and actually see the America they’re traveling in as a place desperately in need of a spiritual awakening. As flames lick upwards and surround a bare skull, the words “See America First” take on a sinister cast that belie the sunny optimism of the post-war period. Westermann’s work is perceived by some as anti-American, but I only get a sense of the love he had for his country as an assemblage of people rather than as an abstract concept grown beyond the control of those same people. If we could only see America first as just the combined desires and hopes of ordinary people, then those desires and hopes might actually be realized.

The Original Maverick

Peter Saul, Self, 1987; Acrylic and oil on canvas, 72 x 100 inches (182.9 x 254 cm); Private collection, New York; courtesy George Adams Gallery, New York.

In the 1953 film The Wild One, someone asks Marlon Brando’s character, a rough motorcycle gang leader, “What are you rebelling against?” Brando snarls back, “Whattya got?” Similarly, Peter Saul never met a idea he couldn’t rebel against in his art. In a retrospective exhibition currently at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the motivations of this original maverick are examined. “Considering how much American art over the past two decades has been devoted to dissecting the dark underbelly of the beached American dream,” writes Dan Cameron in his essay “Front Row Seats in Hell” in the exhibition catalogue, “one might even be excused for thinking that Saul is one of the quintessential U.S. painters of the past 50 years, as egregiously underrated as he is pathologically incorrigible.” Saul’s incorrigibility blankets over his ability as both an artist and a social commentator. In a work such as Self (above, from 1987), Saul cracks open his own cranium to reveal the conflicting forces within. “Expression (a firecracker) and Abuse (a lit cigarette) seem to be in a perpetual standoff with Knowledge (a soup spoon) and Esteem (a condom nailed to a cross),” Cameron writes of Self. Fearful of falling into what Saul calls “that giant pit of so-called truth, good intentions, and responsible attitude,” the artist maintains a uneasy alliance with his own head while picking through modern systems of belief and refusing to buy into any of them.


Peter Saul, Icebox Number 7, 1963; Oil on canvas, 74 1/2 x 63 inches (188 x 160 cm); Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Bill Lenox, Dallas.

The first modern system of belief Saul strikes out at is consumerism in works such as Icebox Number 7 (above). The Icebox series offers “compendiums of aggressive consumer madness,” writes Michael Duncan in “The Spectacular Wrath of Saul: Peter Saul’s History Paintings.” Duncan places Saul within the larger tradition of history painting kicking and screaming, just the way Saul would prefer. Saul paints the Icebox series just after returning to America after living in Holland and Paris. As Cameron points out, Saul not only leaves Europe itself behind but also European style itself. Upon Saul’s return, he adopts “a more slickly hard-edged, hyper-American technique” that “successfully fused the distorted angst of Francis Bacon with the aerodynamic sleekness of H.C. Westermann.” Once Saul set his sights on America as his main subject, the possibilities seemed endless, especially since he attacks every side of every issue. Although Saul is personally more liberal than conservative, Cameron believes, “what appears to motivate Saul more than rage is indignation over the hypocrisy of American liberals.” For Saul, liberals can never be liberal enough as they always cling to some ideology. Saul seeks and ideology-free zone, which may be impossible but remains the only climate his conscience can survive in.

Peter Saul, Columbus Discovers America, 1992-95; Acrylic and oil on canvas 96 x 120 inches (243.8 x 304.8 cm); Levy Family Collection, Dallas.

When it came to history painting, Saul first thought locally, then globally. Living in California in the 1960s, during the draconian governorship of Ronald Reagan, Saul depicted Reagan and his policies with “scatological vehemence” in works such as Government of California, according to Cameron. Saul also protested the Vietnam War, while simultaneously depicting the war crimes of American soldiers. “There are no heroes in his paintings, no victories, no coronations, no causes for inspiration or spiritual uplift,” Duncan writes of Saul’s unique brand of history painting. Some of Saul’s take on modern society’s accepted level of madness comes from the sensibility and visual style of Mad Magazine, especially the art of Basil Wolverton. The relentless irreverence of Mad Magazine, aimed at an “immature” audience, informs Saul’s work in that he refuses to grow up if that means growing comfortable with injustice in any form, especially passive acceptance. “I feel completely relaxed in rebellion,” Saul tells Robert Storr in the extended interview in the catalogue. In works such as Columbus Discovers America (above), Saul “has developed a style dedicated to the dystopian reversal of all ideals—a comic-book grand manner,” Duncan believes. For those growing up on the rebellion of comic books and their “ugly” style, Saul’s work reveals a whole new way of seeing the world as an adult through the eyes of a perpetually angry young man.

Peter Saul, Cold Sweat, 1999; Acrylic on canvas, 55 ¼ x 66 3/4 inches (140.3 x 169.5 cm); Private collection, New York; courtesy David Nolan Gallery, New York.

Saul, of course, is no longer a young man. Cold Sweat (above) shows an aging figure coming to terms with the limits of his physicality. As Cameron points out, Cold Sweat presents “the eruption of the body’s interior fluids as a problem in social etiquette for those who are viewing from the outside, while discounting the genuine agony of the poor aging slob who cannot control the workings of his own body.” Similarly, Saul’s work remains uncomfortable for everyone, including himself in terms of a failure to achieve much recognition in the art world. “The professional art world seemed to me like working in an office building,” Saul says of his early days and his choice to buck the system. Works such as Double de Kooning Ducks and Donald Duck on Toilet Descending a Soft Watch spoof, respectively, Willem de Kooning, Walt Disney, Marcel Duchamp, and Salvador Dali, just a few of the art history targets Saul set his sights on. Saul never asks for acceptance by the art world, knowing that none would be coming and not really wanting it if it did. By adopting a brightly colored, cartoonish style, Saul circumvents all art world apparatus and speaks directly to the viewer, which, as Cameron writes, “is another way of saying to the critical establishment that while [Saul] may care about its judgments, he will always behave as if he has risen above them.” Saul prefers to sweat out the judgment of history, bathing in the knowledge that he remained true to himself throughout.

Peter Saul, Bush at Abu Ghraib, 2006; Acrylic on canvas 78 x 90 inches (198.1 x 228.6 cm); Hall Collection.

“There’s a tremendous need to be not seen as a racist, not seen as a sexist,” Saul tells Storr. “So I want to make sure I am seen as those things.” Even in his seventies, Saul still steps on toes. Bush at Abu Ghraib (above), reminds us “that nothing that can be summoned from the dregs of the individual creative imagination is anywhere near as terrible as the actual horrors taking place right now, in our name, somewhere on the opposite side of the planet.” Saul paints “ugly,” but in the “ugly” tradition of Goya, William Hogarth, William Blake, and others who step outside of the parameters of acceptance to reject a world. Dan Cameron, Michael Duncan, and Robert Storr’s Peter Saul and the accompanying exhibition introduce us to an artist who has been under our noses all along, saying all the things we should have been saying, and quietly waiting for a moment of understanding if not acceptance on his own terms and not those of the art world or society at large. This catalogue and exhibition are as much a blessing and a gift upon us as they are upon Saul, the real original maverick.

[Many thanks to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts for providing me with a review copy of Dan Cameron, Michael Duncan, and Robert Storr’s Peter Saul and for the images above from the exhibition.]