earl cunningham:
caribbean flavor,
yankee values
by Alan Moore
The self-proclaimed "primitive" painter
Earl Cunningham saw himself in contest with
his contemporary, "Grandma" Moses (in fact,
the Galerie St. Etienne paired them last
year), and his painting, like the farm
wife's simple landscapes, which evolved
from needlework and derived from popular
prints, self-consciously recalls the past
of folk Americana. His waterside landscape
scenes are set in a past in which commerce
and labor were dominated by horse- and
sail-power. They are overt fantasies, but
they borrow the homespun mystery of 19th-
century decorative painting, their charm
wrought from a long-vanished visual
culture.
A selection of Cunningham's paintings is
currently on view at Beacon-Hill Fine Art,
which deals primarily in 19th-century
academic American art. To put Cunningham's
work (and work by other vernacular artists)
alongside "high" art carries on the work of
"revisionist" history, part of the
curatorial impulse that seeks to broaden
the presented picture of American
experience across old lines of race and
class. Born in Maine, Earl Cunningham
(1893-1977) worked as an itinerant peddler,
a sailor then a captain, an Indian relic
hunter and finally an antique dealer. Since
boyhood he painted. As Robert Hobbs' fine
monograph (1994) makes clear, Cunningham is
a 20th-century inheritor of that line of
19th-century vernacular image-makers whose
work so delighted the modernist artists who
summered in Maine in the 1920s. He was a
hobby painter whose commitments were first
to labor, then to trade. Nevertheless he
was a dedicated, self-conscious artist who
after 1949 kept his paintings all together
without selling them in a museum next to
his antique store. With this move
(considered eccentric by neighbors),
Cunningham held his art apart from commerce
in a locked gallery, deliberately insisting
upon a "purity" for his painting project
that allied him with modernism, and
ultimately provoked serious attention.
The work itself is remarkable, and well
rewards close looking. Cunningham worked
through his deficiencies as a
representational painter, turning his
limited mimetic capacities to account
within a painterly style based on patterned
topographical composition and bold
coloristic effects. Like many vernacular
painters, Cunningham tries effects he can't
render: the light in yawning warehouse
interiors, tropical water flowers growing
thick under wharves, the sun-catching
ripples of water around a fishing line, and
always the shadows and reflections of boats
in the water. His painting is ambitious
even beyond his means, a style which
economically evokes the real.
The works are overtly simple. All land is
clearly visible. All ships are shown in
shooting gallery profile. As in the
draftsmanly ship portraits done by the Bard
brothers and other 19th-century painters,
Cunningham's ships are never coming or
going, but always passing by. All paths and
roads are shown entire, as lines without a
break. The rendering is cartographic--you
can't get lost--nor can Earl's figures,
those little blobs with hats and eyes.
In the larger landscapes different types of
land are sharply demarcated--swamp, forest,
farm, grassland, front lawn. This country
is parceled up for use; it is a pictorial
order within which private property is
scrupulously respected. Fringing the parsed
land at water's edge are docks, landings,
anchorages, warehouses--a busy waterfront
where people are mostly either at work
filling up the warehouses or fishing on
their day off. (In this painting, "line"
has a literal meaning: all anchorage cables
and fishing lines are clearly and grossly
shown.)
Cunningham's work might be read as the kind
of pictorial wish-making that is fulfilled
by property ownership. In fact, he yearned
for a houseboat. His painting is a
decorative topography of specified uses,
unified by startling atmospheric color,
weird skies, exotic waters, the color of
fantasy. Yet for all its coloristic
brilliance, Cunningham's is a world ordered
by work--Caribbean flavor, Yankee values.
This world of travel and commerce is
preeminently the sailor's, with its boats
in harbors and bays, all in prospect, seen
from afar, from above, a panoramic aerial
view like the macrocosmic establishing shot
that opens a cinematic narrative. Earl's
paintings, seen in ensemble as he
originally displayed them, might be like a
sort of latter-day proletarian novel, a
romantic rural version of the working-class
history-painting produced during the era of
the Federal Art Project. But these exotic
scenes evade this kind of mechanical social
reading, just as they do not entirely
accord with the notion that they depict
good government as seen by the jolly tar--
an "American Eden," the "simple life,"
"carefree," "peaceful, idyllic." There is
too much strange here.
A constant trait of Earl's painting--and it
is traditional--is the odd mix of sizes in
the objects he depicts. Big and little
ships and houses, people and birds are
stuck into the composition like decals in a
scrapbook, or toys set up on a playroom
floor. (He sometimes plays with these
anomalies, so a distant small boat becomes
a weathervane on a house.) The order of
size within these works has to do with
recession into space, but only roughly.
Often it is as if a few different scenes
were done one on top of another, all going
on simultaneously, with different casts of
characters. Overall spatial unity is rare;
instead, the paintings are welded together
by hot tropical color.
Cunningham's art has aspects of both
allegory and history painting, an effect
that is seen most explicitly in his
representations of Indians. While some of
his Florida scenes of Seminoles seem
correctly observed, many more of his
depictions of Native Americans are a
pastiche of plains and woodland usages,
including canoes, teepees and feather
headdresses. These are generic "Indians,"
and may be understood as markers of a
primeval American past, signposts to an
earlier habitation. Indian Chiefs
Procession is an emblem, with paddling
figures forming up symmetrically, like
heraldic figures blazoned upon a landscape
ground. But what about these dusky gray
Norsemen? Viking explorers often join the
Indians, or their dragon boats move among
modern ships. In Florida Everglades, the
big complicated picture Earl sent to Jackie
Kennedy (now at the JFK Library in Boston),
the Norsemen have landed. A woman sits
within a bower attended by two men and
three children. Through these figures
Cunningham's landscapes are exploring the
territory of American origins, the land's
discovery, immigration and the many
ethnicities that make up the nation.
In 1949 Earl moved to Florida. Alice Ford,
in her book Pictorial Folk Art, opted for
the term "primitive" to describe vernacular
American artists. (To this day antique
store owners denominate this painting
either "folk" or "primitive.") Ford
pointed to Joseph Pickett (1848-1919) whose
"work forms an arc between the painting of
the 19th century and modern times."
Cunningham's work much resembles Pickett's,
a Pennsylvania grocer whose paintings were
acquired and exhibited by the Museum of
Modern Art. (The MoMA's commitment to
popular painting did not outlast Barr's
tenure; today the only sign of it is the
presence of Henri Rousseau.) Cunningham
started painting during Pickett's last
years. He is positioned similarly, as the
heir to a tradition of workmanly vernacular
view-painting, an artist working through
the era of high modernism and self-
consciously incorporating pictorial
innovations as he became aware of them
through the popular press.
Is this positioning deliberate or
inadvertent? Is it an artifact of
Cunningham's "discovery," or of his canny
self-creation? Ford writes, "The
appreciation of folk painting in our time
[1949] is a phenomenon of far more subtlety
than the painting itself." This position
invites a condescension which can gag the
art. What kind of voice will Earl's
painting be allowed in today's chorus? Is
this work the "other" of the modernist and
post-modernist painting of its day, the
subducted voice of the vanished academy, or
the difference split?
(my thanks to Ralph Sessions)
Earl Cunningham at Beacon Hill Fine Art,
Jan. 17-Mar. 1, 1997, 980 Madison Avenue,
New York, N.Y. 10021. A traveling
exhibition of his work is also on view at
the Westmoreland Museum, Greenburg, Pa.,
Feb. 16-Mar. 29, 1997.
ALAN MOORE is a New York critic and art
historian.
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