Archie Rand's "Letter Paintings" are 20 years old, but in many ways they're as fresh as they were the day they were made. This is partly because these paintings are almost completely unknown. Painted between 1968 and 1971, before Mr. Rand began his exhibition career, they are only now having their first full-fledged exposure in a beautiful, bittersweet show at Exit Art in SoHo. In addition, these are precocious early works, made by an artist in his early 20's; they radiate the passion and directness of youth.
Eight "Letter Paintings" were seen in a small exhibition at the Museum of Art at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh in 1983; since then, they have acquired a healthy underground reputation that led Exit Art to organize this show of 25 works.
Mr. Rand, who has exhibited his art in New York since 1972, has always produced smartly impersonal paintings, as if he were more comfortable recycling the achievements of others than coming up with ideas of his own. In the 1970's, his paintings were informed by Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting; more recently, his mixings of abstraction and representation have seemed overly indebted to David Salle, Sigmar Polke, Julian Schnabel and a host of other Neo-Expressionists.
The paintings on display at Exit Art -- large horizontal rectangles often hung floor to ceiling -- tell a somewhat different story. As with Mr. Rand's 70's and 80's work, the "Letter Paintings" reflect the achievements of others, but they do so in openly stated tributes that combine the artist's double obsessions, painting and music. These tributes have a wonderful balance of reverence and irreverence; in addition, they are more original than most of his subsequent efforts.
The irreverence of the "Letter Paintings" lies in the way they bring together two conflicting styles of the late 1960's while ignoring their mutual antagonism. The paintings' glowing colors and robustly worked surfaces are in step with Color Field abstraction, whose followers used combs, big brushes and pastry guns to make thick, relieflike impastoes and believed fervently in "pure" painting. But the words written across these colorful surfaces are decidedly impure; they align Mr. Rand with Conceptual Art, whose emphasis on language and the world beyond art was anathema to the Color Fielders.
The reverential side of these paintings emanates primarily from these words, which convey an encyclopedic devotion to creators, both famous and obscure, of American music. The letters spell out the names of musicians, singers and groups from the fields of jazz, rhythm-and-blues, early Motown and country-and-western. Some, like Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Duke Ellington, are famous. Others, like Dupree Bowie and Tony Fruscella, two trumpet players who made only a few recordings in the 1950's, are almost arcane. Moving back and forth between these two extremes, Mr. Rand's paintings celebrate a musical tradition as elaborate as the painterly tradition he wants to be a part of.
The biggest painting in the show, which is 30 feet across, simply repeats (twice) the name Lavern Baker, singer of the 1958 rhythm-and-blues hit "Jim Dandy to the Rescue," in huge hand-drawn letters on a field of creamy beige paint. It's hard to explain the exhilarating lyricism of this painting, whose letters are as much an image as a name and as much a sound as a sight, but it can seem irresistible.
"The Groups" is a patchwork of colored rectangles, each featuring the name of an early rhythm-and-blues singing group: LeRoy Griffin and the Nutmegs, Pookie Hudson and the Spaniels, the Charts, the Del-Vikings, the Chantels, and the Marvelettes -- some of whom merit individual canvases as well. Again, the look and sound of the names and the music they conjure mingles with rich textures and tones of paint. Similarly, the relatively private act of looking at a singular handmade painting is animated by the more collective, widely accessible experience of music, its memories and associations.
Occasionally, painting's history enters the verbal picture. One of the earliest canvases in the show is simply a sizable quote from Clement Greenberg, the formalist art critic and primary supporter of Color Field painting. An especially long canvas juxtaposes the names of three singing groups -- the Cadillacs, the Videos and the Orioles -- with the names of four European painters: Arshile Gorky, August Macke, Eugene Delacroix, Edgar Degas. Are we to compare achievements symbolized by these names or simply savor the way the letters march across the canvas and their sounds roll over the tongue?
In a third canvas, most of whose text has been blocked out with white paint, Mr. Rand scribbles notes to himself about painting. At one point he writes "demand recognition."
The "Letter Paintings" demand a small but substantial place in the history of an unusually fertile period in American art, when Conceptual Art was helping to undermine the hegemony of abstract art. They keep the faith of painting without taking it too seriously, blending it not only with music, but also with the signpainter's and the cartoonist's skills. Although infinitely more painterly, Mr. Rand's canvases bear comparison to the more or less contemporary word paintings of Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari. They presage both the awkward directness of late 70's New Image Painting -- whose semi-naif images sometimes involved words -- and the street-smart stance of graffiti art, in particular Jean Michel Basquiat's use of the names of black musicians.