Low Morals, Filthy Mind
While in the U.S., Saul’s work has been identified with Pop Art, in France, where the artist was based in the early 1960s, it was associated with the Narrative Figuration movement. Low Morals, Filthy Mind embodies Saul’s interest in artmaking as a form of storytelling and his bitingly satirical engagement with popular culture, portrayed as a sphere riven by violence and cloaked in absurdity. Here the motif of the toilet bowl evokes art historical references such as Marcel Duchamp’s famous readymade Fountain (1917), while punning on the meaning of the painting’s title: the male figure’s mind is "in the toilet." Recalling the darkly satirical comics of Mad Magazine and Zap Comix, the bucktoothed, acne-addled figure merges with the toilet plumbing into a hybrid object-subject recalling the early twentieth-century machine "portraits" of Francis Picabia. The electric power plant in the background and appearance of lightbulbs both reference the figure’s mind, while the emergence of one of the lightbulbs from a Coca-Cola bottle suggests that it is fueled by a toxic American postwar consumer culture.
Artwork Details
- Title: Low Morals, Filthy Mind
- Artist: Peter Saul (American, born San Francisco, California, 1934)
- Date: 1965
- Medium: Oil on canvas
- Dimensions: 66 1/8 × 74 1/8 in. (168 × 188.3 cm)
- Classification: Paintings
- Credit Line: Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 2025
- Object Number: 2025.613
- Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art
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