David Salle

Mr. Salle’s mission in How to See is to seize art back from the sort of critics who treat each painting “as a position paper, with the artist cast as a kind of philosopher manqué.” Mr. Salle is more interested in talking about nuts and bolts, about what makes contemporary paintings tick.

Salle is also a prolific writer on art. His essays and reviews have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Modern Painters, The Paris Review, Interview, and numerous exhibition catalogs and anthologies. He was a regular contributor to Town & Country magazine. His collection of critical essays, How to See, was published by W. W. Norton in 2016. Salle worked closely with fellow contemporary artists such as Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, and John Baldessari in creating this collection. According to Dwight Garner:

I don't have working drawings or maquettes. I start with one image, typically a photograph of the model I have been working with for ten years. I take pictures of her doing different things—usually in a strong, theatrical light. I never know what's going to come out of these pictures, if anything. Later I have the photographs and decide if one could be a painting. That's how it starts. The one image necessitates a second and the two together need a third..

I think we are getting to a point in the culture where the notion that something happened that wasn't supposed to happen—the notion of humor or the absurd, the unexpected, the irrational—that these notions of how to see one's life, and how to be involved with one's own life, conjoin to make a sensibility which is more accepting than the sensibility of previous generations. I'm thinking of an art that functions as an accidental trigger rather than a logical one. And that does have to do probably with certain things everyone has pointed out, like media glut, things like that. Like, ho ho, maybe we really are morally bankrupt. And maybe it's fun.

Salle's paintings and prints comprise what appear to be randomly juxtaposed and multilayered images, or images placed on top of one other with deliberately illogical techniques, in which he combines original and appropriated imagery. Imagery he uses includes items from popular culture, such as Donald Duck, and pieces from art history, such as parts from a Caravaggio painting. At a 2005 lecture, Salle said:

In 1995, Salle made his Hollywood directorial debut with Search and Destroy (1995 film), starring Christopher Walken and Griffin Dunne and produced by Martin Scorsese. The film met with mixed reactions. Salle now lives in East Hampton, New York.

Salle has also done set and costume design and directed films. In 1986 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for theater design, and directed the feature film Search and Destroy. He is a longtime collaborator with the choreographer Karole Armitage, designing sets and costumes for her ballets.

David Salle (born September 28, 1952) is an American painter, printmaker, photographer, and stage designer. Salle was born in Norman, Oklahoma, and lives and works in East Hampton, New York. He earned a BFA and MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California, where he studied with John Baldessari. Salle’s work first came to public attention in New York in the early 1980s.

David Salle was born to Russian Jewish parents on September 28, 1952, in Norman, Oklahoma, but grew up in Wichita, Kansas. He developed an interest in art at a very young age, spending his childhood and teenage years in art classes provided by a local art organization. At the age of eight or nine, he began taking life-drawing classes at the Wichita Art Association. During high school, he attended outside art classes three days a week.