Raymond Saunders at Hunter College

Art in America, Sept, 1998 by Eleanor Heartney

Raymond Saunders crams his paintings with chalk lettering and drawings, drips and swaths of paint, brushes clotted with dried pigment, plaster figurines, and images scavenged from newspapers, popular magazines and found photographs. This maximal esthetic brings to mind such equally heterogeneous artists as Johns, Rauschenberg, Basquiat and Dine. Recurring images of celebrity icons recall Andy Warhol, with whom Saunders shares Pittsburgh roots, a less-than-privileged background, and an introduction to art through art teacher Joseph C. Fitzpatrick, to whom this exhibition was dedicated.

These are consummately urban paintings. They conjure up city sights and sounds: walls layered with torn posters and defaced with splashes of paint and graffiti scrawls; the nighttime symphony of police sirens, car horns and loud radios; the visual jangle of billboards, street signs and flashing lights. References to such musicians as Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and Charlie Parker affirm an affinity with jazz, another urban art that thrives on nervous energy, improvisation and happy accidents. Black grounds peek through layers of collaged and painted images and serve as backdrops for delicate white-chalk drawings and scribbled numbers and words, which evoke blackboards and Saunders's years of classroom service teaching art at Hunter College.

Organized by guest curator W.H. Bailey, the exhibition sprawled over five distinctive rooms. The first was an installation with walls completely papered with torn posters. Saunders's paintings and drawings were hard to distinguish from the visual chaos. A scholastic theme was clear in another room, where paintings were arranged like blackboards around a child's school desk. A vitrine and shelf held children's books, toys and other memorabilia. The text Black Art and Culture in the Twentieth Century, attesting to the ongoing struggles of black artists, was included along with a copy of the most recent edition of Janson's History of Art, which contains a reproduction of one of Saunders's paintings, connoting one man's experience of that struggle. A large painting assembled of jazz photos, images of Black leaders, toy figurines in blackface, African sculptures and masks, and a tiny birdhouse seems to refer to the black roots of jazz. In a self-portrait of sorts, the artist's name is spelled out with children's blocks.

Other rooms showed different aspects of Saunders's output. One presented uncharacteristically restrained, lyrical paintings whose primary motif is a calla lily delicately rendered on a black ground. Another suggested his interest in Asian calligraphy, which he surprisingly successfully blends with more streetwise graffiti. Saunders operates between exuberance and poignancy, rude energy and elegance, muted outrage and gentle humor. This vibrant show provided a chronicle of pleasure, pain and inescapable contradictions.