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New York Times

The Color Black Dazzles in Raymond Saunders Retrospective

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. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.