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Two exhibits at the Carnegie Museum of Art explore the highly personal perspectives of two important 20th-century artists — one of whom hails from Pittsburgh.
In January, the museum opened “Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery,” featuring 85 works by the Chicago-based artist best known for her starkly surreal oil paintings from the 1930s through the ’50s. The show, the first nationally touring presentation of her art, was co-organized by the Carnegie and Colby College Museum of Art.
And in March, the Carnegie debuted “Raymond Saunders: Flowers from a Black Garden.” It includes three dozen works the museum says comprise the most in-depth showcase to date for vibrant mixed-media paintings by the internationally exhibited Hill District native, who turned 90 last year. The show was co-organized with the Orange County Museum of Art.
Of the two, Abercrombie’s works are, on the surface, more easily read. Most of her paintings are on the small side, and depict either tidy interiors or sharply delineated outdoor landscapes; in either case, they’re populated by only a few people, animals or objects each. Moons recur; so do watchful owls, tethered cats, long, winding dirt paths and crenellated castle towers, all ambassadors from some realm of dreamed symbols.
Many a lone dead tree haunts many a lifeless meadow, but no figure reappears more than that of Abercrombie herself, pale, slender and intense, in different guises: a queen, a shadow, a nude, a magician’s assistant floating in mid-air, a sitter whose gaze challenges the viewer to stare back. In 1950’s eerie “Strange Shadows (Shadow and Substance),” a long-gowned Abercrombie standing with an outstretched arm casts the shadow of a tree with an (otherwise unseen) owl perched on its one perpendicular limb, while to the right a blue chalice on a pedestal throws the shadow of an (otherwise unseen) Abercrombie holding that same vessel.
By contrast with Abercrombie’s, Saunders’ paintings are vast — often several feet tall and sometimes even wider — and often teeming. Typically they come together on surfaces painted matte black, like a chalkboard, onto which Saunders overlays everything from his own figurative or abstract mark-making to assemblages of mass-marketed religious imagery, political posters, calendars, natural-history illustrations (flowers, alligators), Ebony magazine covers, Sunday funnies, popcorn bags, racist Sambo and mammy figures, news photos of Malcolm X, even an entire print of a Jan Breughel floral still life.
Saunders was born in 1934, a full quarter-century after Abercrombie, and made art well into the new millennium. He frequently employs the phrase “post no bills” in his work, and it appears in “Untitled,” a 2000 painting whose deep-red top half features those words written then scratched out above a three-pointed crown (surely in homage to Basquiat); the stunning bottom half is anchored by a black vase holding flowers that seem to deliquesce into molten swirls of pure color.
But if these two artists are thoroughly distinct, parallels emerge. Both have a thing for salvaged wooden doors: Abercrombie painted images of the ones she saw arrayed as barriers around demolition sites, and both artists painted on such doors, especially Saunders.
Abercrombie, who was white, was part of Chicago’s mid-century jazz scene, and friends with Black musicians like Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Sarah Vaughn. Saunders, a Black graduate of Schenley High School who later studied at Carnegie Tech, has lived most of his long life in Oakland, Calif., but he’s often spoken and made art about his formative artistic experiences in Pittsburgh (including in the Carnegie’s own youth art classes).
And while no less than Gillespie called Abercrombie “the bop artist,” it’s Saunders’ works that sometimes overtly reference jazz, even incorporating whole vinyl LPs. (Though one of Abercrombie’s pieces is titled “Charlie Parker’s Favorite Painting.”)
Available in the gallery is a handout that excerpts text from “black is a color,” Saunders’ 1967 riposte to poet Ishmael Reed’s then-recent brief for the Black Arts movement. Saunders chafed at being pigeonholed as “a Black artist,” writing, “some angry artists are using their arts as political tools, instead of vehicles of free expression. using his art and his anger in such a way, the artist makes himself a mere peddler, when he might be a prophet.” (Saunders’ full essay is even more scathing.)
Both Saunders and Abercrombie might be called visual diarists. She translates her psychological landscape into cleanly limned archetypes, while he expresses himself with both abstraction and the arrangement of actual objects collected from his lived-in world.
In any case, each of these exhibits provides a long, rewarding look inside the artist’s mind. “The World Is a Mystery” closes June 1. “Flowers from a Black Garden” continues through July 13.
