"Every one of my
paintings are brothers and sisters.
I can't separate my family of paintings."
Earl Cunningham
I can't separate my family of paintings."
Earl Cunningham
Eleven years after his death, the America self described “primitive
artist” Earl Cunningham
was described in a 1988 lecture by the then director of the Museum of American
Folk Art, Robert Bishop, as a "truly great painter [whose work is] not in
many ways unlike that of [Henri] Rousseau from France." A remark that no
doubt would have delighted Cunningham, whose long held ambition, was to have a museum
dedicated to his art, although he started painting from a pecuniary necessity.
At the age of 13 Cunningham started to make his own way in
the world as a tinker and peddler to which he added paintings of boats and landscapes in later teenage
years which he sold for 50 cents. After obtaining a license as a river and
coastal pilot Cunningham traveled the Eastern seaboard of the United States from
Maine to Florida. During the Second World War Cunningham raised chickens for
the US Army and afterwards opened his gallery and curiosity shop "The Over
Fork Gallery" in St Augstine Florida.
Amongst the bric-a-brac and antiques Cunningham displayed
his paintings along with a prominent sign stating "These paintings are not
for sale."
About which the art historian Robert Hobbs states in his
monograph Earl Cunningham: Painting an American Eden, “In works filled with a sense of fantasy
about the past as well as a subtle and disarmingly charming critique of the
present, Cunningham presents a new symbolic genesis of America. His paintings
re-create the past to give a halcyon view of what America could have been and
might still be.”
Hobbs further argues that whilst being self taught, Cunningham
was a painter who embodied the ideals of modern art first articulated by the 19th
Century French poet Stephane Mallarme. Mallarme asserted that poems are made of
words not ideas. A concept, that inspired the Cubists, the Futurists, the Dadaists
and Surrealists amongst others in their quest to have colors and shapes define
their work; an environment they could control.
Hobbs wrote “For Cunningham, symmetry was a system for
transforming his unique experience into a universal equation…Patterns order his
dreams with identifiable and repeated elements that help to establish rhythmic
harmonies throughout a given work…While this sense of order partially stems
from Cunningham's seafaring days, when every object aboard ship had to be
accounted for and given a place, his continuance of it in his art and in his
antique shop indicates a desire to maintain control over his environment.”
A selection of Cunningham’s work is on permanent display at Orlando’s
Mennello Museum of
American Art.
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