Few have done more with the color black than Raymond Saunders. The Pittsburgh-born painter and professor emeritus, now in his early 90s, has spent most of his career in Oakland, Calif., covering canvases and other flat surfaces with a dense, inky backdrop that dazzles the eye. Then, by adding a dizzying array of mixed-media elements, from Ouija boards and found children’s drawings to appropriated advertisements and exhibition posters, he really makes it sing: Mere expanses of black paint, in his treatment, become both imaginative universes and art-historical chalkboards, capable of summoning up and subsuming just about anything he can think of.
Still, it was thoughtful of the Carnegie Museum of Art director, Eric Crosby, and the assistant curator Alyssa Velazquez, who put the show together, to start the artist’s largest ever museum retrospective with a pair of 1962 canvases that accessibly demonstrate the birth of his central insight. Called “Raymond Saunders: Flowers From a Black Garden,” the exhibition features nearly three dozen works of art.
“Winterscape” is a simple coastal landscape about four feet wide. A wet, gray sky runs across its top edge, with a brighter, slicker strip beneath it serving as water. A brief thickening of the boundary line between those grays might be a foggy island. Beneath the water, covering most of the painting’s surface, is a dense tangle of marshy grass — and that’s it.
Because the view is into the light, the grass is in shadow, which allows Saunders to render it all with broad, overlapping strokes of black. The organic wiggle of these brushstrokes, and their raggedy, grasslike top edge, are unmistakable. At the same time, though, the whole area, with its gestural pirouettes and scratchy, reflective textures, functions almost as an abstract monochrome. Ignore the top edge and you’ve got something very much like one of Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings. Except that it’s better, because it’s all that and figurative, too.
In “Night Poetry,” made shortly after “Winterscape,” a thin bundle of pale turquoise flowers stands in front of an even more vigorous background. This time the black is thin but velvety, matte but glittery, and complicated enough to seem like a forensic record of a gleaming, painterly intelligence at work. But can a background that steals the show like this still be called a background? Can the mere absence of hue evoke printer’s ink and outer space and shadows all at once? It can; and as Saunders would go on to realize, it can make the rest of a painting magical, too.
Nearly every one of the major paintings in the exhibition, which fills all three of the museum’s Heinz Galleries, is a knockout. On single canvases, constructions that use multiple canvases, and wooden doors — and even on a few rare excursions into red or silver — Saunders marshals wooden crosses, snippets of Chinese-language banners, place mats, candy boxes, loops of chalk, botanical illustrations, maps of the Los Angeles transit system, blotches of yellow and turquoise, strips of masking tape, and reproductions of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley à la Andy Warhol.
Depending on how he orchestrates this expansive core sample of American visual culture, Saunders can achieve a maximal or a minimal effect, though I’m not sure I could say which is which. The paintings in the exhibition’s first gallery, which date from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, are much less busy, but that leaves more room for the expansive quality of the black itself, which often felt as if it were billowing out of the frame like a vinyl balloon.
In later work, Basquiat-like graffiti enters the picture, as do more explicit references to the racial meaning of the word “black,” though as he made clear in his scorching 1967 essay “Black is a Color,” race is no more compelling to Saunders as a subject than any other aspect of being alive. Paradoxically, though, in these works the collaged elements are so loud that they almost cancel one another out, lapsing into a kind of visual white noise.
If possible, I recommend heading to Pittsburgh immediately to see all of them. Failing that, one painting that I can describe to exemplify Saunders’ work is “Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, American Painting,” which is about 7 feet square and was made in 1988. On this one, scribbles, scrawls, a used plastic palette, a calendar, a rectangle of white paper covered in muddy paint (along with another, smaller piece of paper), two sideways Chinese characters, a carefully drawn coffee service and some decorously painted lemons orbit a couple of modest but eye-catching areas of flat, bright yellow. Saunders also wrote the names of the titular two iconic Black painters before partially crossing them out.
Is this piece an aesthetically driven painting for painting’s sake, or a bold, political retort to that kind of formalism? A palimpsest of 20th-century art history, or a reinvention of it? Is it an undigested mass of notes and ideas, a perfectly balanced composition of colors and shapes, or a mixed-media explosion designed to knock you on your heels? Are we meant to look at the details or the whole? The answer, of course, is yes.
Raymond Saunders: Flowers From a Black Garden
Through July 13. Carnegie Museum of Art, 4400 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh; 412-622-3131, carnegieart.org.
Will Heinrich writes about new developments in contemporary art, and has previously been a critic for The New Yorker and The New York Observer.
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