White Nurse

Peter SaulWW-1965-131491

1965·Oil pastel and colored crayons, and fiber-tipped and ball point pens, with graphite, on ivory wood pulp board·137.4 × 102 cm (54 1/8 × 40 3/16 in.)

<p><em>White Nurse</em> provides a psychedelic road map to political conflict in the 1960s. At the center of the work, a dripping splash of red punctuates an image representing America’s perception of communism’s encroachment. Above it, the titular white nurse—a casualty of the nation’s military-industrial complex—is crucified by high-ranking officers from America and elsewhere in the name of money and religion. Peter Saul used grotesque and exaggerated caricatures to emphasize his distaste for the violence of the Vietnam War, the intensity of Cold War propaganda, and the rapid growth of militarized society.</p>

Catalogue

Year: 1965
Medium: Oil pastel and colored crayons, and fiber-tipped and ball point pens, with graphite, on ivory wood pulp board
Dimensions: 137.4 × 102 cm (54 1/8 × 40 3/16 in.)
Collection: Art Institute of Chicago
Artist: Peter Saul

Artist

Peter Saul

Painting

Peter Saul is an American painter known for aggressive, densely layered figuration that combines carnival grotesquerie with political satire. Working in acrylic and oil since the 1960s, he developed a maximalist approach to the canvas, filling pictorial space with writhing forms, garish color, and deliberately crude distortions of anatomy and proportion. His work emerged within postwar American painting but resists the period's dominant abstraction, instead pursuing a deliberately vulgar and confrontational figuration rooted in comic art and low culture. Saul's paintings function as visual polemics, channeling rage and absurdity into formally expansive, visually overwhelming compositions.

San Francisco, CA, USA

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