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| Earl Cunningham's hidden world revealed in folk paintings |
VOICE writes, " Earl Cunningham's hidden world revealed in folk paintings
BY MARK LONGAKER
American folk artist Earl Cunningham painted mainly to please himself. He had little interest in selling anything he made. In fact, when customers visited his curio shop in St. Augustine, Fla., and wanted to buy paintings of his displayed there, he flatly refused. If they insisted, he threw them out, saying the shop was closed for the day.
"Earl Cunningham's America," which opened this month at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, offers a look at the bashful artist, who was discovered in his mid-70s, though he painted virtually his entire life."
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Fifty of the 450 or so paintings attributed to him are on view, all fanciful landscapes in a detailed style recalling Grandma Moses. That similarity gave rise to the nickname "Grandpa Moses," though his colors are more audacious, leading critics to call him an "American fauve."
Born on a Maine farm in 1893, Cunningham left home at age 13, making his way as an itinerant tinker and peddler. By 16, he was painting images of boats and farms on scavenged wood with paint from five-and-dime stores. A love of the sea soon led him to hire on as a deckhand sailing commercial schooners between Maine and Florida.
The trip up and down the Atlantic coast was one he made many times, not only by sea but later by land, after he married a piano teacher named Iva Moses in 1915. They bought a camper and spent winters in Florida collecting coral and Indian artifacts, then would drive up the coast every spring to sell their finds to summer tourists in Maine.
When his marriage failed in 1937, Cunningham bought a farm in South Carolina and raised chickens, which he sold to the U.S. Army during World War II. He moved to St. Augustine in 1949 and opened his curio shop, called the Over Fork Gallery. That's where collector Marilyn Mennello first saw his work. She convinced him to sell her a painting in 1969, and a year later he had his first show, at what is now the Orlando Museum of Art.
Eventually, Mennello bought almost all of the artist's paintings, which now serve as the basis for the Mennello Museum of American Art in Orlando. Cunningham, though, enjoyed his newfound fame all too briefly. Afflicted with depression and feelings of persecution, even fearing arsonists would burn down his shop, he committed suicide in 1977.
His paintings provide a record of his travels, primarily along the Eastern Seaboard. They reflect his memory of the places he visited and portray each locale with more imagination than literal reality. For this reason, Cunningham is sometimes called a memory painter.
The pictures contain some strange juxtapositions. There are, for example, tropical shorebirds wading along the Maine coast. New England houses are plunked down at the edges of Florida swamps. And Everglades Indians wear the feathered headdresses found among Western tribes.
Still, they offer "a refuge, almost a Garden of Eden where tropical trees and waterfowl flourish, native people live in open huts, and large ships glide through protected harbors," as Smithsonian American Art Museum director Elizabeth Broun writes in the catalog.
The painting "Safe Harbor -- Perkins Cove" (about 1930) reveals many of the artist's idiosyncrasies, anachronisms and motifs. Its aerial view of the harbor contains geographical differences from the actual Perkins Cove on New Hampshire's coast. A lighthouse beacon beams over the peaceful scene, though it's broad daylight under blue skies. Indians paddle their birch-bark canoes in the foreground, while 20th-century schooners sit at anchor further back. Tropical white ibises wander in the marsh at the water's edge.
Though it mixes up time and place, the idyllic landscape presents a simplified world where care is banished. It is an ordered, unruffled realm, a haven not only from the vicissitudes of weather, but also from the vagaries of life.
"Earl Cunningham's America" will continue through Nov. 4 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Located at 8th and G streets NW, the museum is open daily from 11:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. 202-633-7970; americanart.si.edu.
"Contemporary Folk Art in America," a roundtable symposium presented in conjunction with the exhibition, will take place Sept. 6 from 1 to 3:30 p.m. It will feature panelists Bernard Herman (University of Delaware), Jane Kallir (Galerie St. Etienne) and Carolyn Weekley (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation) with moderators Lynda Roscoe Hartigan (Peabody Essex Museum) and Wendell Garrett (Sotheby's).
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Posted on Sep 26, 2007 22:36pm.
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