Peter Saul Research Paper

Peter Saul was born in 1934, in San Francisco. He was raised. Later in his life, when he came back to California in 1964 after living in Europe for eight years, Saul took inspiration from the Vietnam War in his artworks. With protests going on (where he participated in one himself) and conspiracy theories of John F Kennedy’s assassination in the Vietnam War. As well as other controversies such as the battles against drugs going on in the state, where it was found that the government was instrumental in funneling hard drugs into the country and policies of life in prison for one marijuana cigarette. As Saul states “It was a lot of fun and chaos, and everybody was going to shrink. Everybody was finding out the bad news about themselves”. The tension built between American citizens and the government during this time was what helped shape Saul’s …show more content…
In addition, with the bright colors he used in his artworks portraying acid-like psychedelic canvases, as well as in “The Government of California” he says, “Then I put the word ‘justice’ in there, I just put this stuff in without knowing what was going to come of it all” creating controversy and states of shock to his audience and testing limits. He currently lives and moves between New York, NY, and Germantown, NY for his work (“Peter Saul Biography – Peter Saul on Artnet”). And is known as one of the fathers of the Pop Art movement mainly because of his early use of pop culture cartoons in his work during the 1950’s and 1960’ s (“Peter Saul - Artists - Venus over Manhattan”). Because of this, we could consider “The Government of California” painting to have a shock function, as it is intended to shock the audience by criticizing and provoking the government of