Nude Descending a Staircase

For over fifty years, Peter Saul’s acid-colored paintings have melded a cartoon sensibility with mordant commentary on cultural and political issues. In the late 1970s he turned his gaze to the pretentions of art history, creating satirical interpretations of canonical works such as Rembrandt’s Nightwatch, Picasso’s Guernica, or, here, Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2). Duchamp’s 1912 work presents successive views of a nude figure moving down a staircase, a revolutionary attempt to depict motion through space in the static medium of painting. In Saul’s version, the cubic, mechanical forms of Duchamp’s figure give way to pink, tube-like appendages with a Play-Doh quality. With her curvaceous figure, sultry gaze, and high heels, Saul’s figure brings an Americanized, comic book eroticism to Duchamp’s nude. 

 

Saul taught in the Studio Art program at UT Austin from 1981 to 2000.