On Thursday, October 17, artist Peter Saul, whose work is currently on view in Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962, and lead exhibition curator Debra Bricker Balken will present an engaging, informal conversation about Saul’s fruitful time in Paris from 1958 to 1962, his interactions with other expats such as William Copley, his responses to French culture, and how these combined experiences have animated his celebrated and groundbreaking career over the past six decades. Space is limited and registration is required.
Peter Saul was born in 1934 in San Francisco, California. Since his first solo exhibition in 1961, Saul’s work has been exhibited throughout the world. His paintings are found in numerous museum collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Recent important exhibitions include Peter Saul at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt (travelling to Deichtorhallen Hamburg); Pop, Funk, Bad Painting and More at Les Abattoirs in Toulouse (travelling to Le Delta, Namur); and his first retrospective in New York, Peter Saul: Crime and Punishment at the New Museum. In November 2024, Flunking the Talent Test, an exhibition of new paintings, will open at Michael Werner Gallery in Beverly Hills. In 1993, Saul received the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. In 2008, Saul received the Artist’s Foundation Legacy Award. In 2010, Saul was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Peter Saul lives and works in New York City and Germantown, New York.
Debra Bricker Balken is an independent scholar, writer, and curator who works on subjects relating to American modernism and contemporary art. Her award-winning books include Philip Guston’s Poor Richard (University of Chicago Press, 2001) and Abstract Expressionism: Movements in Modern Art (Tate Publishers, 2005), as well as exhibition catalogues such as Philip Guston’s Poem-Pictures (Addison Gallery of American Art and the University of Washington Press, 1994), Arthur Dove, A Retrospective (Addison Gallery of American Art, The Phillips Collection, and MIT Press, 1997), The Park Avenue Cubists (Grey Art Gallery/NYU and Ashgate, 2003), Edna Andrade (Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 2003), Dove/O’Keeffe: Circles of Influence (Clark Art Institute and Yale University Press, 2009), After Many Springs: Regionalism, Modernism and the Midwest (Des Moines Art Center and Yale University Press, 2009), John Storrs: Machine-Age Modernist (Boston Athenaeum and University Press of New England, 2010), John Marin: Modernism at Midcentury (Addison Gallery of American Art and Yale University Press, 2011), Mark Tobey: Threading Light (Addison Gallery of American Art and Skira Rizzoli,2017) and Barbara Takenaga (Williams College Museum of Art and Prestel/Delmonico, 2017).
Recipient of an Inaugural Clark Fellowship at the Clark Art Institute, a Senior Fellowship from the Dedalus Foundation, and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, she brought out Harold Rosenberg, A Critic’s Life for the University of Chicago Press in fall 2021 with additional grants from the Getty Research Institute and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts/Art Writers Grant.
Balken has taught at Brown University, the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, and the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2005, she served as the Sterling and Francine Clark Visiting Professor in the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art.
Balken’s many exhibitions have travelled to venues both domestically and internationally, including the Peggy Guggenheim Collection/ Venice, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and the Princeton Art Museum, among others.
In addition, she has contributed essays to numerous exhibition catalogues on modern and contemporary subjects, including the Centre Pompidou/ Paris, Metropolitan Museum of Art, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art/ Sarasota, St. Louis Art Museum, and the Williams College Museum of Art, among others.
Balken also recently brought out Arthur Dove, A Catalogue Raisonné of Painting and Things with Yale University Press in 2021 and Alex Katz, Collaborations with Poets (GRAY Gallery, Chicago and D.A.P, 2023.)
She is currently the lead curator on Americans in Paris, Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962 which opened at the Grey Art Museum, NYU, March 2024, with an accompanying publication distributed by Hirmer and the University of Chicago Press. In 2027, an overview which is she curating of the work of Irene Rice Pereira will open at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.
