"While some flamers go mainstream, most don't; all thrash around regardless. A lifetime member of this confederacy and a founder of funk, is Peter Saul, who -- after living in Austin, Texas, for the last 20 years -- moved to New York last month. He's been exhibiting here since 1960, mostly at the Allan Frumkin Gallery, after first showing his work to the 57th Street dealer in the lobby of the Hotel Lutetia, in Paris.

"Saul's a voracious visionary and a painter of charged political subjects; at 66, he still paints with the fire of a young man. Everything Saul paints, he paints hot. A great unrecognized colorist, he brings outrageous levels of pictorial realization to his work. His compositions are undulating morasses of visual complexity; at the same time, they're shot through with something bracing and vivid. A go-for-the-throat antiformalist, Saul used incendiary subject matter 30 years before someone like Kara Walker. Leaving no sacred cow unskewered, he's painted a black girl sucking Ronald Reagan's cock, an Asian woman being eaten out by American soldiers and Martin Luther King as an octopus."