Crime and Punishment

Crime and Punishment is the catalogue accompanying Peter Saul's 2020 exhibition of the same name at the New Museum in New York, the painter's first survey at a New York museum.

Phaidon co-published the book with the New Museum. It carries new essays by Robert Cozzolino, Matthew Israel, Dan Nadel, Nicole Rudick and John C. Welchman, plus interviews with Saul and with the critic Thomas Crow, and is edited by Massimiliano Gioni, Gary Carrion-Murayari and Israel. Gioni and Carrion-Murayari curated the show, bringing together around sixty paintings spanning Saul's career, from his early Paris abstractions to the pop-inflected, cartoon-derived satire that became his signature.

Saul was born in San Francisco in 1934 and earned a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis in 1956. Working independently of Pop art, he combined Surrealism, history painting and vernacular illustration, drawing on the Surrealist painter Roberto Matta and on MAD magazine, to take aim at American politics and history: Vietnam War-era paintings, reimagined scenes such as Washington crossing the Delaware, and portraits of sitting presidents. His work has had retrospectives at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt and the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, both in 2017, and at Les Abattoirs in Toulouse in 2019.