Peter Saul Rewrites Art History at Gladstone Gallery
The 91-year-old painter takes on Picasso, de Kooning, and Duchamp in a seven-decade survey of satirical masterwork remakes in Chelsea
Walking into “Peter Saul’s Art History” at Gladstone Gallery’s Chelsea flagship, cartoon colors strike first—pinks that belong on bubblegum wrappers, greens that recall toxic waste. Then come bodies, torquing across canvases in convulsive contortions. Pablo Picasso’s women look like they went through a funhouse mirror and came out meaner. Willem De Kooning’s women came out noisier, more deranged. “The unwritten rule of art was you had to be trying to do something beautiful, and, to me, that seemed really boring,” Peter Saul said in a recent interview with the gallery. “I chose something ugly instead. I knew that the only way you could sell art is to make it unusually interesting to look at.”
Cracked to a frequency that polite painting can’t quite reach, “Peter Saul’s Art History” gathers 20 paintings and drawings from the last seven decades. It is the 91-year-old artist’s first solo show with Gladstone since joining its program in 2025, and four of the canvases are brand new. The rest pull from the 1970s, ’80s, and 2000s. Side by side, early and recent work share the same unnerving precision. Painting since 1948, Saul’s hand has not loosened. The show’s premise is direct. Saul picked the most famous paintings in Western art history and re-rendered them in his own satirical language—rubber-limbed, neon-soaked, grinning. From Picasso to de Kooning to Marcel Duchamp to Salvador Dalí, nobody gets out clean. As Director Anna Christina Furney put it, the exhibition “maps Saul’s stylistic evolution over 50 years within the theme and underscores his unwavering mastery of technique.”
At center stage hangs a monumental reworking of Picasso’s Guernica (1937), on view for the first time in 40 years. That painting, Little Guernica “Liddul Guernica” (1973), marked Saul’s first attempt at remaking a canonical work. He was 39 and watching Vietnam unspool on television as Guernica resurfaced into the public consciousness. But where Picasso fractured horror into abstraction, Saul sought none of that distance. “The Guernica is weakened by having a massive abstraction in the middle,” Saul said. “So I decided to have the figuration going on all through the picture.” His version keeps each original figure but scrubs away the gray, the flatness, the careful modernist grief; replacing them with something cruder, gaudier, harder to sentimentalize.
A smaller companion, Guernica (Orange) (1977), in acrylic, ink, and graphite on museum board, hangs nearby. Its palette is hotter and tighter, two GE-branded lightbulbs glowing overhead where Picasso placed one bare bulb. In both works, the violence gets no cover.
Flanking Liddul Guernica, six de Kooning-inspired women line the walls. The woman of Better than de Kooning (2008) is blown to a grotesque scale, with limbs splayed and the face locked into a candy-colored grimace. The title, Saul admits, is “ridiculous,” adding, “what I’m trying to do is get people to take my work as seriously.” De Kooning gave his women the shelter of gestural abstraction. Saul strips this alibi, translating what was once legible only through painterly abstraction into the blunt visual grammar of a Sunday comic.
Folding two art-historical heavyweights into one painting, De Kooning’s Woman Descends the Staircase (2025) plants de Kooning’s woman on Marcel Duchamp’s iconic geometric steps. With rolling cartoon eyes, a red smear of a mouth, and stippled orange locks, her body splashes apart on the way down. Duchamp’s 1912 nude shocked audiences with fractured motion. De Kooning’s Woman series (1950-1953) fused menace, satire, and intense sexuality into carnivorous smiles. Saul’s version knows both jokes and tells a third, while giving the woman thoughts of her own.
On the same wall, four standalone takes on Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) range from a tall burnt-orange canvas with rubbery figures in red heels tumbling down wooden steps to a hot-pink reduction to pencil preparatory drawings. Nearby, Selfwinding Softwatch telling the time (2025), reimagines Salvador Dalí’s melting clock as a grinning creature on sky-blue, its numbers sliding off the bottom edge while a lizard-esque hand turns the dial on its crown.
Upstairs, a smaller gallery holds works with no canonical source to decode. Woman’s Arts (1981-82) pokes at one of art history’s oldest genres, “studio scenes,” which had almost exclusively belonged to men. The cartoonish distortion, its bold color, and irreverent humor are all quintessential Saul, but the subject also exposes something he has always circled: the tension between art-making and art-world politics. To its left, Self Portrait Red Ground (1982) is the artist looking inward. Brightly colored and a little violent, the figure twists against deep crimson, knotted and sobbing, while wielding a paintbrush.
“I’m not trying to insult these artists,” Saul has said. “I just want to make sure my picture is looked at.”
“Peter Saul’s Art History” is on view through April 18 at 530 West 21st Street, New York, NY.