Raymond Saunders, painter who rejected racial pigeonholes, dies at 90

Boston Globe

5 days ago

Mr. Saunders prided himself on his independence from movements. In 1967, he published a now-famous polemical pamphlet, 'Black Is a Color,' which rebutted an article by poet Ishmael Reed, a leader of the Black Arts Movement. Breaking with the collective spirit of the '60s, Mr. Saunders argued that Black artists should not feel obligated to share social goals, or to use their work to lobby for political change. He wanted to be seen as an American artist rather than be ghettoized as a Black one.
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'Can't we get clear of these degrading limitations,' he wrote, 'and recognize the wider reality of art where color is the means and not the end?'
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Still, he was not averse to exploring questions of identity in his work. 'He wasn't throwing his fist in the air,' artist Dewey Crumpler, a friend of his in Oakland, observed. 'It was more subtle.'
Mr. Saunders was known for elegant paintings that usually began with an all-black background and ended up as semiabstract compendiums of chalk-scrawled notations and paper scraps. They were often compared to the 'combine paintings' of Robert Rauschenberg, whose voluptuous accumulations of castoff objects exemplified the material plenitude of postwar America.
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Yet Mr. Saunders had a restrained and almost spartan touch. When he glued a choice morsel of collage material — say, a torn-off scrap of Chinese calligraphy, or a panel from a Flash Gordon comic book — to a canvas, he left lots of empty space around it, isolating and framing his finds as if to call attention to their radiance. You could say he foregrounded the magic of art and left blackness in the background.
His work was underrecognized for years, but it achieved a new visibility in 2022, when the Andrew Kreps Gallery gave him his first show in New York since 1998. At a time when the art world was determined to correct the racial slights and oversights of the past, Mr. Saunders was an obvious candidate for reappraisal.
Last year, Kreps joined forces with the powerful David Zwirner Gallery to organize an expanded view of Mr. Saunders' work in New York. A well-received retrospective followed in short order at the Carnegie Museum of Art, in Pittsburgh, Mr. Saunders' hometown.
Mr. Saunders did not attend the shows in New York or Pittsburgh, his friends said. 'His community was here, in the Bay Area,' said Julie Casemore, who represents his work at her Casemore Gallery in San Francisco. 'His home was here.'
Mr. Saunders had settled in the Bay Area in 1968 and lived in the Rockridge section of Oakland, in a two-story house that also served as his studio. The interior was crammed with bric-a-brac and mounds of source material for his work, much of which he had gathered on sojourns in Europe and Asia. He did his painting in his yard, on a bright white wooden deck that was designed to receive direct sunlight for most of the day. He called it 'the arena.' A stylish dresser, he liked to exchange his paint-stained duds for the pleated garments of Japanese designer Issey Miyake when he went out at night.
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Mr. Saunders lived within walking distance of the California College of Arts and Crafts (now the California College of the Arts), where he taught painting from 1987 until his retirement in 2013. He was known to invite an entire class to accompany him on his trips to galleries and restaurants, or to stop for lunch at his house.
Kevin Demery, a former student of his who now teaches at the Kansas City Art Institute, recalled an afternoon when he and his classmates were seated in Mr. Saunders' dining room sharing 'a robust charcuterie board.' Midway through lunch, the students were alarmed to realize that their professor had disappeared.
'I walked into his living room and saw through the windows that he was painting on his deck,' Demery said in an interview. 'Once we became a vibrant community, he let us thrive without him.'
An elusive figure who seldom gave interviews, Mr. Saunders declined to muse on the meaning of his paintings or to disclose details about his childhood, even among friends. He was so private that his friends say they aren't sure whether he was ever married or not.
Raymond Jennings Saunders was born on Oct. 28, 1934, in Homestead, Pa., a borough of Allegheny County just across the Monongahela River from Pittsburgh. He and his three sisters were raised by their mother, Emma Marie (Hewitt) Saunders, who struggled to support them on her income as a maid. The family eventually moved into public housing, in the Hill District of Pittsburgh. His nephew Frank said that Mr. Saunders never learned the identity of his father.
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In addition to Frank Saunders, Raymond Saunders is survived by a number of other nephews and nieces and his younger sister, Rossetta Burden.
Bucky, as Raymond was nicknamed as a boy, found an early supporter in Joseph C. Fitzpatrick, a white educator who taught art at Schenley High School in Pittsburgh and who also presided over a class for gifted art students every Saturday morning at the Carnegie Institute.
Fitzpatrick offered essential encouragement to budding artists, including Andy Warhol, Philip Pearlstein, and Mel Bochner. In later life, asked to name the artists who had shaped his work, Mr. Saunders instead credited his schooling.
'I am from Pittsburgh,' he said, 'and they had an unusual and outstanding program for kids.'
By the time he had graduated from Schenley, Mr. Saunders was decorated with awards. Moving to Philadelphia, he attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts on a scholarship from the National Scholastic Art Contest. In 1959, he returned to Pittsburgh and transferred his college credits to the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon), where he received his bachelor's degree in fine arts the next year.
After living in California for a year to earn a Master of Arts in fine arts at California State University, Hayward (now East Bay), Mr. Saunders moved to New York, the country's art capital. Most established galleries declined to exhibit work by Black artists in that era, but Mr. Saunders found an ally in Terry Dintenfass, a well-regarded gallerist on East 67th Street in Manhattan who represented Jacob Lawrence, an older and much-acclaimed painter of Black life and history. Dintenfass gave Mr. Saunders his debut show at the gallery, in 1964. Reviewing it in The New York Times, critic Brian O'Doherty described Mr. Saunders as 'essentially a conservative painter with a good eye.'
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Mr. Saunders returned to California to join the faculty of Cal State in Hayward. He continued teaching, he said, less to earn a paycheck than to repay the educational advantages of his hardscrabble youth. A fervent traveler, he purchased a second home in Paris, a former fire station in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood on the Left Bank, where he hosted art classes in the summer.
But his influence extended not only to his students. Among his admirers was Jean-Michel Basquiat, the precocious art star who emerged in the New York art boom of the early 1980s. Some of Basquiat's paintings, with their graffiti-style markings and floating masks inscribed against flat fields of blue, bore a curious similarity to Mr. Saunders' tastefully disjointed imagery.
Basquiat made multiple attempts to contact Mr. Saunders, apparently without success, before his untimely death in 1988.
'Basquiat tried to reach Raymond Saunders when he came to San Francisco,' Ishmael Reed, with whom Mr. Saunders had sparred decades earlier, told The Amsterdam News of Harlem in 2022. Poet Bill Berkson, who taught at the now-closed San Francisco Art Institute, related that he once offered a scholarship to Basquiat but the artist demurred. 'I'll only come if you get Ray Saunders to teach there,' Berkson quoted him as saying.
Mr. Saunders, with his usual aversion to discussing his work and its critical reception, had little to say about Basquiat's regard for his work.
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Crumpler, his Oakland friend, once tried to draw him out on the subject.
'When I looked at Basquiat's work for the first time, I knew he was biting Ray,' Crumpler said in an interview. 'I told Ray, 'Basquiat is biting your work all day and night.' Ray just smiled.'
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