NEWPORT BEACH.- Long considered the quintessential “bad boy” of postwar American art, Peter Saul (born 1934) is also among the most innovative and influential artists of his generation. The Orange County Museum of Art presents the most comprehensive overview of Peter Saul’s career. Acclaimed as a progenitor of Pop Art, Saul was inspired to a creative breakthrough by a copy of Mad magazine and championed early on by the surrealist painter Roberto Matta. Saul has always forged his own path, creating often difficult, funny, and trenchant works addressing both personal foibles and the most important historical issues of our time. His twisted comic-book forms, artificially hot colors, controversial subject matter, and unquenchable ambition to provoke strong feelings through painting have kept him on the edges of the art world while also preserving, for over forty years, the edgy freshness of his work.

The exhibition features major paintings and rarely seen drawings from 1960 to the present, including his early “icebox” paintings, several epic historical canvases critiquing American involvement in Vietnam and the Middle East, homages to Salvador Dalí and Thomas Hart Benton, satiric works poking fun at the art world’s sacred cows, and still more that painfully evoke the multiple psychic hazards of being an aging American male. A fully illustrated catalog accompanies the exhibition including new critical texts on Saul’s work by Dan Cameron, Michael Duncan, and Robert Storr. Peter Saul: A Retrospective is organized by the Orange County Museum of Art and curated by Dan Cameron.