Peter Saul’s Bush at Abu Ghraib

Ron Morosan
December 2020

Peter Saul, Bush at Abu Ghraib, 2006, Acrylic on canvas, 198 x 228,5 cm,
Hall Collection, © Peter Saul, Courtesy Hall Art Foundation, Photo: Jeffrey Nintzel

For decades Peter Saul has been a bad boy of American painting, but for many years art world experts didn’t know it. It is only with the recent shift to a concern with societal issues that Peter Saul stands out as one of the only really socially critical artists of the last half century.

Now the art world is being made aware of Saul’s achievement with a retrospective “Crime and Punishment” at the New Museum on view until January 3, 2021. On display is the full scope of Saul’s development starting from the early 1960’s brash expressionist consumer society bashes to his recent technically sophisticated paintings that push the social comic cartoon to new levels of large scale outrage.

There are many portraits of famous political figures in his paintings but one of the most outstanding is George Bush at Abu Ghraib.

This work perfectly represents the best of Saul’s critical response to the outrages committed in the name of USA defense and security. If the term masterpiece still has any meaning in today’s commercial art world this  paintings belongs in that category.

This painting brilliantly brings together a subject and an event in such a way that an enormous number of implications flow out of and around it in an interpretive aura. It elucidates the event of the torture of Iraqi prisoners, the character of George Bush, and the reaction of the viewer simultaneously. In this multiple intersection of visual dialogue we enter into a region of humor, criticism, and cognitive short-circuiting that is difficult to grasp and rare in art.

The portrait of George Bush is rendered in a funky yet intense realism with a genuine vitality that for me brings to mind a Frans Hals’ drinker. Bush’s face has an alertness that is filled with a palpable glee that is identifiable in a way that is familiar to most Americans who have seen him get funny. His amusement is forced, but genuine and adolescent. It has that intoxicated energy of a drunken person doing something stupid.

For the viewer this comes off as funny, a cartoon spoof that causes us to join in that amusement, but then to Bush’s left we see the bizarre subject of his intense mirth, the bullet-riddled head and torso of an Iraqi victim hanging by a rope. There is a distortion that is familiar in this victim and it reminds me of a Francis Bacon figure that has been mutilated to become a butchered heap of meat; it seems to have extra eyes at the top and indented mouths and other bodily features that almost resemble female genitalia. The eyes are long and nearly alluring in an animal way and look female as well. Bush seems to be saying, “Lookie here! This one is blasted every which way.”

Bush is portrayed with his left arm around the victim almost embracing it. His finger is pushed up under the upper lip of the prisoner in a manner that seems to be inspecting its teeth. If we recall that Bush is a rancher in Texas and a sort of cowboy, that gesture of inspection is characteristic of how ranchers inspect the health and age of a horse. Good teeth mean a young and healthy horse.

George W. Bush was a president who couldn’t hide his feelings. Saul captures the little boy in Bush, that suggestion of a cruel child who enjoys juvenile savagery, a quality that is often seen in young boys who take out their brutality on small creatures. One might see this in a group of boys tearing the wings off a butterfly.

The planning of the invasion of Iraq was presented to the American public and the world as an example of military power carried out as a form of the art of war. The “shock and awe” that lit up the night sky over Baghdad was like a destructive art work, a flashing of exploding bombs in rhythmic sequence like a disco of destruction.

In this painting Saul captures the concept of war as a form of civilized perversion that we all become complicit in as citizens of the USA.

Bush was our president and his amusement at the mangled Iraqi victim is also our amusement, an amusement that is conveyed in metaphor in viewing the painting. It should turn us into anti-war activists, but it doesn’t. It is one of the best portraits of the perversion of war. Sadism is the real content of Bush at Abu Ghraib, but it is a philosophical sadism, the sadism that is rationalized like an Existential philosopher aware of the sadistic act and the sickness of humanity in committing sadistic acts of war on other people, yet can rationally justify it in accepting the savage nature of homo sapiens.

In looking for other compositions of a portrait composed in juxtaposition with an interpretive subject I am reminded ot Rembrandt’s Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer. This, too is a philosophical portrait with the subject  reaching out and touching the bust of Homer. Was Saul thinking of this when he painted Bush at Abu Ghraib? Probably not, but the concept of a portrait with an artwork being contemplated or an object being the focus of the portrait is a device that has been in use for many years particularly in the 17th and 18th centuries. In comic classic style Saul has reframed a traditional composition to a new and shocking purpose.

In this retrospective we see how Saul has turned his loose expressionist style of the 60’s into a controlled social criticism machine. He can take on any tabloid story or historical event and turn it into an elaborate mocking comic tirade of detailed celebration of the madness of humanity. He is in his own way the painter who embodies the spirit of the song “King of Pain” by the British band The Police.

Peter Saul: Crime and Punishment →

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