Existing comment:
Peter Saul
born San Francisco, CA 1934
Saigon
1967
acrylic, oil, enamel, and fiber-tipped pen on canvas
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Purchase, with funds from the Friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art, 69.103
Saul created his Vietnam paintings to deliver, as he put it, a "cold shower" of "bad conscience" to the viewer. Here all players in the war are grotesquely dehumanized. The ferocious, Day-Glo scene shows distorted U.S. soldiers torturing and raping cartoonish Vietnamese. In skewering what he saw as a racist war, Saul puts on display American stereotypes of Asians. Intense and startling, these images are designed above all to confront and engage the viewer. Though motivated by current events, the kinetic and densely packed tableau came entirely from the artist's imagination. |