Peter Saul

American, b. 1934

Businessman
1962

Mixed media on paper
34.375 x 39 x 1.75 in.
Gift of the Marie Eccles Caine Foundation
2003.17

Peter Saul’s incendiary drawing Businessman provides a master class in artistic nonconformity. Made in 1962, this piece of Boschian iconoclasm, while ostensibly depicting a CEO in his corner office, takes on all comers—corporate America, the worship of money, abstract expressionism (once the nation’s official counterculture), and just about every other representative of the status quo.

An artist committed to crafting what George Orwell called “significant mental rebellions,” Saul’s work has long defied easy classification. Despite the fact that his paintings have sometimes been seen in the context of San Francisco’s funk movement in the 1960s, Chicago’s loose “Hairy Who” group in the 1970s, and, more durably, the pop art aesthetic, his work has garnered its own cult status for more than five decades. Saul’s output during that time has been remarkably consistent: year after year of deftly shocking drawings and paintings done in his signature cartoon style.

Like nearly all of Saul’s works, Businessman blends various clashing and complementary elements. These include charcoal and colored pencil, a free-flowing approach to drawing, garish color combinations, and acid political commentary. Throw in the influence of American comics, Continental surrealism, and an inchoate antipolitical correctness, and this picture acquires the dynamism of an animated feature film. The work’s grotesqueries nearly leap off the paper.

Featuring a gas canister, a cigar, several hatchets, a toilet emblazoned with the words “head office,” and a dollar- green homunculus wearing a rep tie seated at an orange desk, Businessman presents an acerbic parody of late twentieth-century American corporate culture. Yet, like the figures animating Pieter Breugel’s Triumph of Death (1562–63), Saul’s company man is not just a bad actor in a conventional capitalist sense, he’s a demon sent down to terrorize the earth.

Christian Viveros-Fauné

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This object has the following keywords:

• blinds - Flexible or removable devices used to obstruct or regulate vision or light consisting of horizontal or vertical slats that can be opened or closed, often with the angle of the slats adjustable to admit varying amounts of light. For heavier coverings, often of wood, permanently affixed to buildings, use "shutters." For assemblies of adjustable blades, slats, or baffles, use "louvers." Prefer "shades (coverings)" for flexible screens, usually of paper, cloth, bamboo, or similar materials and sometimes mounted on a roller, used to obstruct or regulate vision or light.
• Caricatures and cartoons
• dollars - Paper money representing standard monetary units in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, historically from states in the USA, and other places; each equal to 100 cents. Originally from a silver coin that circulated in many European countries.
• funnels - Utensils consisting of an inverted cone with a narrow tube at the apex, used for conducting liquids or other substances from one container to another, usually with a narrower opening; sometimes combined with strainers.
• hatchets - Wood-handled tools having a steel head flattened at one end suitable for striking or driving; formed at the other end into a wide sharp blade used for chopping. The underpart of the blade may be notched for pulling nails.
• knife
• suit
• tongue

This object was included in the following exhibitions:

• Bang! Thwack! Plop! Comics: An Influence on Contemporary Art , 6/14/2011 - 7/26/2012
• Collecting on the Edge , 9/15/2018 - 5/4/2019
• Collecting on the Edge Part II Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art , 1/17/2019 - 5/4/2019

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