Peter Saul: Art World Portraits

August 20–September 15, 1996

This exhibition of fourteen pencil and gouache works revisited a little-known body of work by Austin-based Peter Saul, an innovator of American pop art whose work pushes the limits of acceptability and taste.

Created in the early 1970s, Saul’s satirical portraits critique the “superheroes” of the art world including Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Clement Greenberg, Allan Frumkin, and Leo Castelli. Rendered in a comical manner, with Day-Glo colors and enlarged female and male genitalia, each “sitter” becomes a parody of himself, a tactic Saul used to assail modernism and its practitioners.