At the age of 85, the artist Peter Saul continues to defy categorization. His cartoonishly iconoclastic paintings, which interrogate American history by rendering comically distorted political and cultural figures in Day-Glo colors, smack of Pop Art, Surrealism, and Expressionism, yet exist independently from the narrative confines of 20th-century art. That’s perhaps why he has yet to receive a New York museum survey until now, with the New Museum bringing together approximately 60 paintings across his long career. Early pieces, which responded to Vietnam War–era atrocities and the dissolution of the counterculture, perhaps forecasted today’s Trumpian reality, making the case that Saul’s lifetime of work amounts to a poignant expression of the present. —Ryan Waddoups