Frederick Sauls; L.A. Artist Wrote Avant-Garde Plays

Frederick Sauls, Los Angeles painter, sculptor, playwright and stage director, has died. He was 59.

Sauls died of cancer at his Hollywood home Thursday.

Productive in the creation of abstract visual art and avant-garde stage plays, Sauls was also a geologist by avocation and had been mining on land in Lone Pine, Calif., where he lived part of the year in a log cabin.

He had recently opened the R. Mutt art gallery in Hollywood and was a contributing art critic for the Art Scene Review at the time of his death.

Raised in Piedmont, Calif., Sauls graduated from Stanford University. After military service in Korea, he earned a master’s degree in art at UC Berkeley and later studied economics at the University of London.

Active since the early 1970s in the Los Angeles Equity Waiver theater scene, the onetime actor also produced, directed and wrote plays. He founded two small theaters, the Figtree and the Pilot, which helped create Santa Monica Boulevard’s busy Theater Row.

Sauls is survived by two children, Fritz and Karoline, a grandson and his former wife, Jacqueline. A memorial service will be held at 6 p.m. Wednesday in Studio B of the Hudson Street Theater Building, 1110 N. Hudson St., Hollywood, where Sauls lived and worked in the last years of his life.