Layers of Being

To write about the art of Pittsburgh-born, San Francisco Bay Area-based painter Raymond Saunders is perhaps a foolish act, because as he said time and time again, “If we could speak it, we would not paint it.”

Opportunities to experience a large selection of Saunders’ work haven’t been frequent. His paintings—often a cryptic concoction of fine line drawings and scribbled text, or objects glued to a canvas—have been known to the art world for decades, but large-scale exhibitions of his work have been few and far between. Until now.

Pittsburgh audiences will have that chance in Raymond Saunders: Flowers from a Black Garden at Carnegie Museum of Art from March 22 through July 13. According to its curators, Flowers from a Black Garden is the most in-depth consideration of this 91-year-old artist’s oeuvre ever assembled. (Saunders is now retired, no longer making art, teaching, or giving interviews.)

It’s hard to pin down Saunders’ work because his paintings don’t really fit in, says Eric Crosby, who curated the exhibition for the Museum of Art with assistant curator Alyssa Velazquez. “They don’t conform to a specific movement or school of art that we might generally use to describe painting,” says Crosby.

For example, Layers of Being, a 1985 canvas that is part of the Museum of Art’s permanent collection, is chalkboard black, with colors splashed or smeared onto it in paint; there are notes stuck to it; calligraphic script written across it; a palette of color samples from a paint set stuck to the canvas; and equations and words scattered like a school blackboard’s residue. “He’s after a creative state where it’s hard to assign language to the process of painting,” Crosby notes.

Or, as Saunders himself has said, “I don’t want to know who I am. I paint  to try to access that.”

However, Crosby thinks there is at least one word that can help us enter into Saunders’ work.

“The word I always return to when I think about Saunders’ work is ‘love,’” says Crosby. “He has always related with such loving care to the visual languages of painting, those of his peers past and present. The way in which his work and personality—his very being—exude a love for the medium, and a love for those also engaged with it, is a very moving thing.”

There is love for painting as an art form. For example, in Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, American Painting from 1988, Saunders fixed the tools of his artistic practice—color tests and a stained plastic mixing tray for his pigments—against the black background for which he is well known. But just as often, that “love” takes the form of a passion for the expression that painting allows—endless color, variations of brushstrokes, and the vast collection of choices available to the artist.

“The word I always return to when I think about Saunders’ work is ‘love.’ … The way in which his work and personality—his very being—exude a love for the medium, and a love for those also engaged with it, is a very moving thing.”   

–Eric Crosby, Henry J. Heinz II Director of Carnegie Museum of Art

“Some of us have a hard time connecting with abstract art,” says Crosby. “But the immediacy of Saunders’ work is very emotional. He gives us many points of entry into his paintings—love for the medium, love for those who spend time with his works, and a love for oneself.”

A Homecoming

Saunders is no stranger to Carnegie Museum of Art. It’s a connection that goes far deeper than his work in the museum’s permanent collection or exhibitions such as his 1996 Forum Gallery showing that reintroduced the artist to hometown art lovers.

Born in Pittsburgh in 1934, Saunders attended Schenley High School and, in the early 1950s, studied under Joseph Fitzpatrick, the museum’s legendary art educator who also taught Andy Warhol, Philip Pearlstein, and others. The experience left an indelible mark on Saunders that resonated throughout his career.

Nearly half a century later, when asked about artists or people that had influenced him, he was still citing it as the formative moment of his artistic life.

“I’m from Pittsburgh and they had a very unusual and outstanding art program for kids,” Saunders said in a lengthy sit-down interview with SFMoMA in 1994. “I’m part of a tradition, an educational process—and that is the city, and it’s the association with the city and its people.”

As a child, Saunders attended the famed Carnegie International, which is the longest-running North American exhibition of international contemporary art. It was there that a young pre-teenaged Saunders discovered Matisse, Picasso, and other master painters through their actual art rather than through books.

“On Saturdays, I had to walk through the museum—through the dinosaurs, through the birds—and a lot of what is in my art is what is recalled from that childhood detailing of the art experience.”

–Raymond Saunders

Fitzpatrick’s Saturday-morning classes were reserved for the most artistically talented students in the Pittsburgh area, and there is no doubt Saunders was among them. By the age of 19, in 1953, Saunders had his debut solo exhibition at the Pittsburgh Playhouse Gallery in South Oakland. And while his post-university life was spent on the West Coast, Pittsburgh was never far from his heart, or his painting.

“On Saturdays, I had to walk through the museum—through the dinosaurs, through the birds—and a lot of what is in my art is what is recalled from that childhood detailing of the art experience,” he said in the 1994 interview. “There’s some retained thing that brings it into play—that’s been my life.”

That art experience reveals itself in the array of interests and images that Saunders combines in his work, but also more directly: In Joseph Fitzpatrick Was Our Teacher, from 1991, Saunders creates a palimpsestic canvas like a poster-covered city wall scattered with familiar Warholian subjects—Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley—as well as flyers and newspaper clippings from anti-war and anti-hunger protests.

In the same way that Saunders took in Picasso and Matisse alongside Renaissance and Impressionist art by wandering the halls of the museum, Crosby sees Flowers from a Black Garden as an opportunity for today’s audiences to encounter abstraction in a new way.

“When we think about the museum as a place where we can grow as individuals, grow our awareness of the world, art provides something immediate and visceral,” says Crosby. “And Saunders gives us that with intensity and passion. With each painting, you have such a sense of presence, of the artist and of yourself. It will be hard not to take that presence with you as you depart the museum—it can be an awakening to something just as it was for him.”

Black is a Color

Saunders’ career began to take off in the early 1960s. After earning degrees from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) and Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), in 1960 he left Pennsylvania for the last time and moved to Oakland, California, to earn his MFA. In the Bay Area, Saunders found his calling—a combination of his own deeply personal artistic practice and teaching art at California College of the Arts in Oakland and a few miles down the highway at Cal State, Hayward.

Soon after arriving in California, Saunders’ work was already displaying some of what would become his signature visual themes. His 1962 paintings Night Poetry and Winterscape show the artist beginning to work with a palette of blacks and grays, still life and landscape imagery peeking from behind rough brushstrokes and calligraphic lines; Something about Something is more colorful, with a trim of stenciled lettering. Within a few years, he was attaching objects and collages and writing in chalk on his large-scale paintings, like Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines.

But even among his colorful and object-laden assemblages, Saunders’ use of black became his signature. Within a few years, his canvases would become increasingly chalkboard-like, with matte black as their background and shades of black becoming dominant in many other works as well.

In 1967, the underground author and poet Ishmael Reed published an essay in Arts Magazine titled “The Black Artist: Calling a Spade a Spade.” Reed was aligned with the nascent Black Arts Movement and called for Black artists to make work that spoke directly to the Black experience in America, deriding those who didn’t as “retired humanists.” Saunders responded with an essay published in Arts Magazine and as a pamphlet called Black Is a Color.

In Black Is a Color, Saunders argues that to force all artists who are Black into the shoebox of “Black arts” is to do them (yet another) grave injustice; that he, for example, is Black and is an artist, but that these things aren’t always related to one another and shouldn’t have to be:

“I am not responsible for anyone’s entertainment. I am responsible for being as fully myself, as man and artist, as I possibly can be, while allowing myself to hope that in the effort some light, some love, some beauty may be shed upon the world, and perhaps some inequities put right.”

Saunders’ essay, in pursuit of a “wider reality of art, where color is the means and not the end,” proved influential. It arguably launched what became an in-print conversation over several years debating the meaning of “Black art.”

While Saunders says he has never wanted to “represent” Black culture with his art, Black identity has always been a key part of his work. Saunders often writes the names of Black artists on his canvases, as he does in the Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden painting. He’s also named pieces after Black icons Charlie Parker, Malcolm X, and Jack Johnson. Yet these paintings aren’t straightforward tributes: Malcolm X: Talking Pictures from 1994 doesn’t contain images of the civil rights leader; and while Jack Johnson (1971) is a portrait of the famed boxer—the first Black heavyweight champion of the world—he’s portrayed in an abstract field of oranges and reds, and relaxed in suit and tie rather than his more familiar fighting stance. This isn’t Jack Johnson, the boxer battling bigotry, but the retired success story.

It’s a complex attitude toward a question that is just as contemporary today as it was in 1967.

“It is a conversation that persists today: Should individual artists be expected to represent some essentialized idea of the experience of others?” says Crosby. “Saunders never provides easy answers.”

Being: An Artist

Saunders’ artwork does resonate with political and social questions—sometimes even directly.

In Black Men, Black Male, Made in the U.S.A. from 1994, images related to American racial and immigrant history (Sambo, the White Star Line) mix with Saunders’ abstract colors and painting-related ephemera. More often, however, references to Saunders’ politics are less overt. They are in the choices he makes, such as his black backgrounds or texts from protest fliers added to the canvas.

When asked to talk about those resonances, Saunders responded that he couldn’t—because, even while social and political issues are present in his work, he didn’t intentionally “put” them in there. When prodded on that topic in the 1994 SFMoMA interview, he says:

“I would say, tell me about the other resonances, because I’m sure that’s my intention. There are a lot of things going on, I’m an American, I’m Black, I’m a painter, so all those things enter into what it is that becomes what I present.”

Crosby suggests that these “other resonances” aren’t just outside of racial and social questions, but also outside of language itself.

“Saunders, in his artwork, is trying to inhabit a creative space that exists before our interpretation—before we assign it language,” says Crosby.

He adds that Saunders is trying to get at something that exists only in the abstract—something that he expresses without the ability to say it.

“We often hear about how abstract expressionist artists spill their emotional states onto the canvas,” Crosby notes. “When we talk about Pop art, we riff on the infinite reproducibility of the photographic image. Saunders dialogues with both—but he refuses to let the work conform.

“He’s after something deeper.”