Earl Cunningham’s America @ SAAM
Folk art is a debatable curiosity. In terms of painting, on the one side huddles a mass that does not understand why so much fuss is made over artists that cannot "paint well." On the other side is an audience that clamors at how well these artists cannot paint. Spurious claims about the reinvention of painting are casually tossed about. What should never be in question about folk art is its quality: it is neither academic in nature nor is it avant-garde. It never intends to be either. Because of this, it is very easy to become immediately dismissive or immediately seduced.
By the time Earl Cunningham took his life in late December of 1977, at the age of 84, he had seduced many with the nearly 450 paintings he produced. 50 of these works will be on display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum beginning today. His life is as interesting as the content of his many paintings. Born in Maine in 1893, he left home at the age of 13 to work odd jobs fixing things. Before the first World War, he had earned licenses as an auto mechanic and a river pilot. He traveled the Eastern coastline, collecting odd trinkets and curiosities with his wife. During the Second World War he raised and sold 9000 chickens to the U.S. Army.
By 1949 he opened a curio shop in St. Augustine, SC, which he called the Over Fork. Passersby, noticing his paintings in the window, would walk into the shop and ask if they could buy the paintings. Cunningham would say no, and then tell the customers they had to leave.
His paintings play on certain devices. All depict a coastline. Schooners sail with the horizon, and seldom against it. Two sides are visible on nearly every house. The horizon is in the upper half. He liberally mixes content. Native Americans might paddle a Viking ship. Black figures and white figures work side-by-side on schooners and docks or paddling canoes. Seminole Indians are given Plain Indian head dresses. The lighthouses of Maine find homes in the swamps of Florida. Flamingos rest in the waters along the deciduous dotted shores of Maine. The sense of scale is unimportant; a bird resting on a tree in the distance might be larger than a ship in the foreground.
What overwhelms all of his paintings is the use of color and composition. Blue is rarely used as a device color for the water or the sky; instead, his skies and oceans are more often filled with golds, reds, and oranges, placid lavenders, and murky browns. His style may be simple, but his compositions are complex, asserting a wonderful rhythm between busy details and quiet patches of sky and water. Adding to his sensitivity, he is mindful of the reflection of objects in that water, and those reflections give the illusion that the paintings are radiating. In all their character, they become a record of the co-mingled memories within this man’s mind – history and myth balancing on opposite sides of the vision he holds of America.
Earl Cunningham’s America runs August 10 through November 4 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 8th and G Streets, NW. The gallery is open daily from 11:30 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Images courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.