Peter Saul is an American painter whose vivid, eccentric paintings elicit an almost visceral response. Whether it be startled, disturbed, or intrigued. Many of his pieces function as a political commentary with some linked to the Vietnam War, Ronald Reagan, the war on drugs, corruption, among so much more. He straddles movements, fluctuating between the absurdity of surrealism, the flamboyance of pop art, and the energy of expressionism. His figures look like caricatures, over exaggerated and cartoonish. Some canvases are borderline grotesque and you’re compelled to look away but you’re simultaneously drawn to the work. They’re powerful like that.

Saul’s art exposes the ugly and uncivil in a way that’s affective and reproachful. His paintings are littered with genitals, blood, and violence. “I guess [I’m] a leftist… I have trouble with authority,” Saul said in an interview later in his life. He even describes his perspectives on the issues he addresses as a bit facetious, but I personally find his sardonic style persuasive. It’s captivating. It makes you think. It pushes you to consider unpleasant histories and the longstanding–often unjust–systems we have in place.

I hadn’t learned much about Peter Saul until I saw his Crime and Punishment exhibition at the New Museum. The show was fantastic. Vibrant, busy paintings suspended in salon style on the museum’s white towering walls. The floor was crowded with people, their heads angled in every direction. There was murmuring, pointing, snickering, bickering. All of it. These are big paintings, too. Big paintings for big ideas. Saul wasn’t afraid to call out what he saw as hypocrisy, bigotry, or hatred.

In Subway I (the first photo), Saul depicts a crushed, warped subway car packed with exaggerated characters who spill out of the M train’s broken windows. Their bodies are entangled with each other. Police handcuff, stab, shoot, and strangle civilians of all colors. It’s pure mayhem and almost uncomfortable to look at.

I’m thinking about this painting especially today after the unjust murder of George Floyd. He is far from the first and far from the last Black man to die a senseless death at the hands of police brutality. For centuries, Americans have treated Black bodies like they’re disposable. And Saul’s Subway I touches on that, but it doesn’t centralize the Black experience, it makes it part of a larger whole.

I scoffed at the irony of the officer near the top of the canvas who dribbles an unknown substance from what looks like a fire extinguisher. It’s marked Rescue Only. ‘To serve and protect’. Isn’t that what the police are supposed to do? Who are they serving? Who are they protecting?

The whole thing doesn’t sit right with me and clearly it didn’t sit right with Peter Saul either.