One of the most idiosyncratic and skilled American self-taught artists of the Twentieth Century, Earl Cunningham (1893‱977) used broad, flat space and vivid color to create imaginary, Edenic landscapes filled with the unexpected and unlikely. A folk modernist who drew on his vision of an ideal, sublime past, he painted an unspoiled, serene America.
Whether depicting familiar places in Maine or Florida or recreating historical scenes, Cunningham delighted in taking liberties with perspective, details and the actual appearance of places to construct his whimsical, make-believe world. Thus, pink flamingos roam the Maine Coast; New England saltbox cottages sit at the edge of Florida swamps; Viking ships share harbors with Native American canoes and Yankee schooners, and Seminole Indians wear feathered headbands associated with Maine’s Passamaquoddy tribe.
Such juxtapositions suggest Cunningham’s idealized view of an integrated nation, where life was simple and elements of modern life were absent.
After years in oblivion, Cunningham’s art has become recognized in recent years, culminating in “Earl Cunningham’s America,” organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where it was on view last year, and now at the American Folk Art Museum’s Branch Gallery at Lincoln Square through August 31. Organized by American Art Museum senior curator Virginia M. Mecklenburg, the exhibition showcases nearly 50 of the more than 400 pictures Cunningham created.
Born in Edgecomb, Maine, and raised on a farm in nearby Boothbay, Cunningham fiddled with drawings and paintings growing up. Leaving home at 13, he worked at odd jobs and crewed on J.P. Morgan’s family yacht and on large schooners plying the Atlantic coast from Maine to Florida. Early on, he began painting boats and farms on driftwood, which he sold for 50 cents.
After World War I, Cunningham spent time digging for Indian relics and collecting opalized coral in the South, which he sold in Maine. In the 1920s, he organized a museum on his 25-acre Maine farm, “Fort Valley,” where he exhibited small paintings on scraps of wood and sold antiques gathered on his travels.
In a typical early work, “New England Autumn,” 1928, a 16-by-10-inch oil on fiberboard, vivid colors animate a depiction of solid white houses with lavender roofs set among leafless trees adjacent to rocky terrain, with a brilliant yellow-red sky reflected in an inlet with boats.
Moving to St Augustine, Fla., in 1949, Cunningham opened a quirky curio shop, The Over Fork Gallery on St George Street, where he sold antiques, bottles, china and tools. He displayed his paintings in one store window and kept scores of others in a back room where a sign read, “These paintings are not for sale.”
“Every one of my paintings are brothers and sisters,” he said. “I can’t separate my family of paintings.” Cunningham believed they should be kept together and eventually housed in a museum devoted to his art.
A reticent, cantankerous man, subject to bouts of depression and paranoia, Cunningham lived in fear of harassment by neighborhood youths and that arsonists would set his gallery on fire. He was known as the “Dragon of St George Street.”
In spite of his reluctance to show †and, more so to part with†his artwork, word got out about the colorful, imaginative works. “The Everglades,” acquired by Jacqueline Kennedy for President John F. Kennedy in 1961, hung prominently in the White House, where it could be glimpsed during presidential television interviews. Today, it is in the collection of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, and it is included in the current exhibition.
In 1969, art collector Marilyn Mennello noticed several Cunningham paintings in a dusty window of his shop, and, after much persuasion, convinced him to sell her one. She acquired a few others during his lifetime and hundreds more after he committed suicide in 1977. Fulfilling the artist’s dream, the Cunningham collection forms the nucleus of the Mennello Museum of American Art in Orlando, Fla., which opened in 1998.
Mennello helped organize a few exhibitions of Cunningham’s work before he died, but it was not until she and her husband, Michael, began to campaign for recognition of his accomplishments and organized traveling shows over the last decade or so that he came to general public attention. As Smithsonian American Art Museum director Elizabeth Broun observes, Marilyn Mennello “saved his art for us to cherish, and she gave back to&⁛Cunningham] an unshakeable trust in his achievement.”
Those efforts, augmented by the current exhibition and catalog, put Cunningham in the front ranks with such American self-taught titans as Edward Hicks, Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses and Horace Pippin. While his work contains elements reminiscent of those artists, Cunningham †in his art as in his life †was defiantly his own man.
“Cunningham developed a distinct and personal lexicon that evoked his nostalgic version of an idyllic Nineteenth Century world,” observes curator Mecklenburg. “Recurring motifs †Seminoles, Viking ships, swamps and harbors †are the unlikely ingredients in Cunningham’s ideal model of America, which calls for coexistence, optimism, serenity and racial harmony.” Adds Mecklenburg, “Like Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers, Cunningham’s images offer the old and the ordinary as an antidote to change.”
Cunningham’s vision of the world was shaped by his frugal, hardworking Yankee upbringing, his agrarian and maritime experiences, and his reverence for the natural world. Having spent so much time around water, he frequently incorporated the Atlantic Ocean and its harbors, lakes and inland waterways of Florida in his images. There is so much going on in these works †on shore as well as on water †that it seems unfairly limiting to call him a marine painter.
Drawing on his imagination and real life observations, he populated waterways with Native American canoes, Norse vessels and late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century sailing ships. He grew up hearing tales about Norsemen exploring the Americas, had a special affinity for Indian culture and artifacts, and was familiar with a variety of sailing vessels.
Like the Hudson River School painters, Cunningham depicted trees felled by human hands as signs of man intruding in pristine nature in paintings such as “Sanctuary,” 1934, and “Island Farm,” 1935. He likely learned that concept from Currier & Ives prints rather than paintings by the likes of Thomas Cole.
Cunningham sometimes used images of American flags or weathervanes as symbols protecting his glimpses of an American Eden. Creating fantastic images of a world of visual harmony seemed to offer a kind of refuge, a safe haven from the threatening world around him, as exemplified by “Safe Harbor †Perkins Cove,” circa 1930. “Island Farm” has the feel of a peaceable kingdom.
Although he was entirely self-taught and printed a business card identifying himself as a “Primitive Artist,” Cunningham actually developed a sophisticated understanding of color, light and atmospheric conditions that is reflected in his images. Preliminary drawings usually preceded carefully planned paintings, which were mostly on Masonite, a surface that enhanced their brilliance and highlighted details.
As Colonial Williamsburg’s director of museums Carolyn Weekley notes in her catalog essay, “Cunningham’s use of color for sunsets, nights, bright sunny days, coming storms and the like seem[s] grossly exaggerated and unnatural. Some probably are stronger, brighter and deeper in tone than they could be in nature. But these passages were real to the artist, and they were carefully constructed from his memory as personal experiences with the natural world as it seemed to him at specific times.”
Indeed, Cunningham’s vibrant palette, reflected in the vivid shades of blue, green, mauve and lavender in “Blue Sail Fleet Returns,” after 1949, is both daring and effective. Likewise memorable are the intensely colored sunrises and sunsets featured in “Seminole Village, Deep in the Everglades,” circa 1965, “Red Sky Over Folly Beach, S.C.,” circa 1975, and “The Twenty-One,” 1977. A highlight of the exhibition, the dramatic “Folly Beach” depicts an area near Pawleys Island, S.C. According to Mecklenburg, “This dreamy world reflects the sense, if not the actual appearance, of early morning along the coast.”
Early morning light, as exemplified by “Sunrise at Pine Point, Maine,” circa 1950, and sunny skies in “Summer Day at Over-Fork,” circa 1955, were Cunningham specialties. He drew on direct observation, as well, in depicting changing atmospheric conditions (“Gathering Clouds Off Little River Inlet,” 1962) and stormy skies (“The Big Storm,” 1970).
Art historian Robert Hobbs, noting the variety of techniques the painter employed, observes that his “preference for underpainting and for scratching and combing colors allies Cunningham’s work with that of Henri Matisse, and suggests that this semiliterate artist was aware of the subtleties and range of avant-garde work.”
Cunningham’s sense of whimsy animates a number of paintings, such as his inclusion of small stick figures †walking, fishing, manning a ship †in “Camp David,” circa 1940. His conservation instincts, roused by observing the deleterious effects of modern life on nature in Florida, are especially evident in his many depictions of the serene Everglades, often filled with identifiable birds, as well as fanciful, decorative species, which fly, wade and perch in trees.
Cunningham began visiting Florida around a time of increasing interest in the lifestyle, culture and fate of its Seminole Indians, increasingly threatened by “progress” and pressure to leave their traditional villages for reservations. In works like “Seminole Everglades,” circa 1945, “Seminole Indian Summer Camps,” circa 1963, and “Seminole Village, he captured the look of the murky, brown water flowing through South Florida swamplands and the tall trees and lush vegetation of these areas. “In each painting, the Everglades represents a place of security and cultural purity, free of the incursions of modern civilization that for many meant the pollution of an ideal and peaceful world,” observes Mecklenburg. She posits that Cunningham admired Seminoles because they, like himself, “elected to live on their own terms.”
Over the years, as he became more artistically sophisticated, Cunningham moved from smaller, somber paintings of figures and wide vistas of the 1920s and 1930s to larger, more close-up renderings in vivid hues. Some paintings during the last decade of his life measure more than 5 feet wide.
Cunningham framed all his works in pine and cypress, some highly varnished, some with military camouflage designs and some toned to match the hues of his work. Several are quite striking, consistent with Hobbs’s observation that “Cunningham obviously regarded the framing of his artwork as an integral component of its overall aesthetic effect.”
The late Robert Bishop, onetime director of the Museum of American Folk Art, which mounted a Cunningham exhibit in 1986, said then that he believed the artist would achieve a critical standing comparable to that of Grandma Moses. This exhibition suggests that Cunningham has reached that goal.
“There is&mple evidence,” says Weekley, “to place&⁛Cunningham] among the most creative and talented of America’s Twentieth Century folk artists.”
This exhibition confirms that Cunningham’s vibrant, offbeat, evocative images †painted in unforgettably bold colors †have enduring importance and appeal. His work, drawing on sources as diverse as marine painting and Fauvism, constitutes a delightful dialogue between an unspoiled past and modern art and culture.
One senses that Earl Cunningham would not be surprised by the posthumous vindication of his work and the fact that he now occupies a secure place among leading American self-taught artists. He believed all along that he deserved recognition †and he was right.
Following its presentation in New York City, the exhibition travels to the Mennello Museum of American Art, March 6⁁ugust 2, 2009.
The exhibition catalog contains an overview of American folk art by Wendell Garrett, a chapter by Mecklenburg that places Cunningham’s life and work amid the revival of interest in American folk art and an examination of the painter’s style in the context of evolving thought about American self-taught artists by Weekley. Published by Smithsonian American Art Museum in association with HarperCollins, it is priced at $45, hardcover.
The American Folk Art Museum Branch Gallery at Lincoln Square is at 2 Lincoln Square (Columbus Avenue between 66th and 66th Streets). For information, 212-595-9533 or www.folkartmuseum.org .
