Lonnie and Marie Lived Together

Inscriptions

Signed, lower right: RAYMOND SAUNDERS. Label on reverse from Terry Dintenfass Gallery, New York: LONNIE AND MARIE LIVE TOGETHER 1966

Label

Raymond Saunders, like other progressive artists working in the mid-1960s, often combined abstraction with images and paint with collage, pushing the boundary between representation and the thing represented. In Lonnie and Marie Lived Together we can see recurring geometric designs of red, yellow, and blue shapes as well as numerals, bottles, and fruit. The painting oscillates between what we can recognize and what we can sense. In this way, the artist combines traditional approaches with vanguard ideas about art and painting.

Lonnie and Marie Lived Together emerged from an intense period for the artist. He had been in Rome for an extended time after winning the Prix de Rome in 1964. In this painting we can see echoes of the myriad visual sources he encountered during his stay, ranging from Roman painting to African textile design. It was a moment when the artist wrestled with the desire to address universal artistic themes and avoid the growing pressure to address his African American heritage through painting. In his seminal 1967 essay “Black is Just a Color,” Saunders expressed his desire to be freed from having to engage with his African American heritage in his art. “Racial hang-ups, he wrote, “are extraneous to art. No artist can afford to let them obscure what runs through all art—the living root and the ever-growing aesthetic record of human spiritual and intellectual experience.” Saunders insisted on the right to create personal, expressive paintings devoid of cultural or political engagements. He continues to do so today.

From the 2019 exhibition The Expanding Universe of Postwar Art, curated by John R. Stomberg Ph.D, Virginia Rice Kelsey 1961s Director

Course History

SART 25, Painting I, Tom Ferrara, Fall 2013

AAAS 88.19, Contemporary African-American Artists, Michael Chaney, Summer 2021

SART 31.01/SART 72.01, Painting II/III, Tom Ferrara, Fall 2022

Exhibition History

Churchill P. Lathrop Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, February 8-August 25, 1994.

Churchill P. Lathrop Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, March 30-September 20, 1999.

Churchill P. Lathrop Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, March 31, 1992-February 22, 1993.

Churchill P. Lathrop Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, October 1, 1996-June 22, 1997.

Contemporary Art from the College Collection, Jaffe-Friede Gallery, Hopkins Center Art Galleries, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, August 31-September 10, 1972.

Modern and Contemporary Art at Dartmouth: Highlights from the Hood Museum of Art, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, September 26,2009-March 15, 2010.

Ray Saunders, Beaumont-May Gallery, Hopkin Center Art Galleries, Dartmouth College, May 15-June 8, 1969.

Second Stage of Modernism: Art from 1945 to the Present, William B. Jaffe, Evelyn A. Jaffe Hall, Churchill P. Lathrop, Friends, and Owen Robertson Cheatham Galleries, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, June 6-August 16, 1987.

The Expanding Universe of Postwar Art, Northeast Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, January 26-December 1, 2019.

Publication History

Ray Saunders [brochure], Hanover: Trustees of Dartmouth College, 1969, checklist no. 3.

Brian P. Kennedy and Emily Shubert Burke, Modern and Contemporary Art at Dartmouth: Highlights from the Hood Museum of Art, Hanover: Trustees of Dartmouth College, 2009 p.57, no.33.

Provenance

The artist [arranged through Terry Dintenfass Gallery, New York]; sold to present collection, 1969.

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