“I do like to hit the nerves,” painter Peter Saul confesses. Yes, but that doesn’t mean we have to like it when he does. In the past, whenever I encountered Saul’s paintings—unmistakable with their garish, artificially hot colors and repellant imagery—I quickly withdrew from this frontal assault on my sensibilities. As it turns out, I was shortchanging myself.

I rescinded my snap judgments after seeing the first major U.S. survey of Saul’s paintings and drawings from the early 1960s to the present, organized by the Orange County Museum of Art and guest curator Dan Cameron. I caught up with it in Philadelphia, the second stop on its four-venue tour. The organizers in Orange County had presented Saul as a “bad boy” who does things his own way and tries to shock. But Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts curator Robert Cozzolino approached the installation differently, framing Saul’s consistent railing against political oppression and his love/hate relationship with U.S. consumer culture as a purposeful strategy to challenge the status quo of late modernism.

The retrospective contained large-scale “historical epics,” satires of art history, and several of Saul’s most recent works addressing World War II and the war in Iraq. Cozzolino chose to emphasize Saul’s self-conscious aspiration to make contemporary history paintings. Saul gravitates to individuals whose actions have threatened U.S. society. They range from politicians Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush, to the infamous John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and O. J. Simpson, as well as such nameless people as the soldiers who carried out the My Lai massacre. Audience discomfiture has been a component of Saul’s oeuvre throughout his fifty-year career. He is a master of the transgressive gaze, compelling viewers to confront horrifying, preposterous images that push racist, misogynist, and homophobic stereotypes further than most hatemongers dare to tread.

But it is a tricky business, this. None of us enjoy being provoked. We all draw the line at a different place. Not only does Saul specialize in jumping over these boundaries, he also sets distance records. Like visual artists Robert Colescott and Kara Walker, or writer Ishmael Reed, he takes a “let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may” approach when his own righteous indignation triggers the creation of caricatures of caricatures. This was evident early on, for example in New China (1965), a fantasy image that takes on Maoism with racially charged and grotesquely exaggerated figures.

A seventy-five-year-old painter whose development unfolded at a significant physical and psychological distance from the mainstream U.S. art world, Saul is especially outrageous when he skewers the power politics of that world. In New York Painter (1987), a Cyclops with a sculptured coif paints with fiendish concentration. As he bears down forcefully on a plump paint tube, a spurt of brown pigment ejaculates onto the shaped canvas. The double-barreled pipe jutting out of his mouth reads as the lower half of a truncated figure or, looked at in the reverse direction, like balls and a cock. His sweatshirt reads YAIL, a clever allusion to the prison of privilege some are consigned to, and, yes, to the advantages accrued thereby.

The look, sound, and meaning of language are major ingredients in Saul’s work. Take, for example, Clemunteena Gweenburg (1971). At the height of Clement Greenberg’s influence as an arbiter of taste, Saul depicted him as an onanistic androgyne—Greenberg’s deftly rendered balding head poises atop a female nude. Consept art, a string of text in script, links his parted lips with a mono-breast titled ABNORMUL ART. HY-BROW ART is the inscription on the ludicrous creature’s enormous genitals. Saul shows her rump resting on the palette-shaped ABSTWACK ARTS; both this and “Gweenburg” are sly references to the lisping speech of Toonville denizens Elmer Fudd and Sylvester the Cat. Saul envisions an obscenely industrious critic, pleasuring him/herself with the stick end of an outsized paintbrush tagged HEE-MAN ART while simultaneously sodomizing him/herself with a second tagged MAH DURN ART. Yikes.

Dark, hilarious, and calculated to deflate Greenberg’s lofty status, this caricature is not without its own iconographic ties to the art world. It was Jackson Pollock—championed by Greenberg—who boasted that he painted with the brush between his legs, a figure of speech that Saul may well have known when he made the painting. But it is unlikely that he was familiar with Shigeko Kubota’s proto-feminist response to that sexual description of process: in 1965 she created Vagina Painting, which she painted with a brush placed between her legs.

In the gruesome Legal Abortion (1990), Saul addresses the dilemma of unwanted pregnancy. A post-Roe v. Wade citizen with the option of legal abortion must nonetheless face the wrenching consequences of that liberty. He expressively contorts the head of the sobbing woman, exposing her brain. She flails at herself with two hammers, one of which makes a direct and bloody hit on a nail tagged LEGAL ABORTION. Is he empathetic? Saul studs the landscape of her gray matter with other tacks labeled MEN, MARRIAGE, TASTEY (sic) VEGETABLES, CLEAN BATHROOMS, MONEY, and LOVE. In apparent response to Freud’s famously unanswerable question, “What do women want?” Saul created an unflattering diagram of female desire. Sexist? Oh, yes. Funny? That also.

Saul’s retrospective included some terrific proto-Pop and Pop-era compositions made between 1958 and the mid-sixties, with their iconic washing machines, toilets, and refrigerator doors. It is hard to believe that these major early works have never before been shown together in the United States. Surveying the show’s concentration of Saul’s work from the past fifty years, I became aware of his fondness for grids, not a trait I would have associated with the little I knew about the artist’s practice. Yet there they were—witness the orderly criss-crossings of barred windows, netting, and brick and tiled walls present in dozens of Saul’s compositions.

The image of an electric chair appears and reappears in the course of his career. This compelling iconographic tic materializes in Woman Being Electrocuted and Sex Deviant Being Electrocuted (both 1964); it returns in the horrific Ethel Rosenberg in Electric Chair (1987) and nine years later in The Execution of O. J., an imagined scene of retribution that Saul envisioned two years after the murders. I went through the retrospective alternatively shuddering and smiling. Clemunteena Gweenburg was shown in Philadelphia only, as were the bizarre and amusing sketches Saul dreamed up during tenure reviews and faculty meetings at the University of Texas, Austin, from 1988–2000. Ah, the tendentiousness of our colleagues and the pleasures of doodling.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts sponsored a colloquium (blogged about here). The exhibition was accompanied by an excellent catalogue with essays by Cameron and Michael Duncan, as well as an interview with the artist by Robert Storr. The book can never replace the experience of seeing Saul’s work in person, but it does offer those who missed the show a good place to begin in order to appreciate his singular role in the history of American art.