EARL CUNNINGHAM: American Fauve - Heather James Fine Art

EARL CUNNINGHAM’S
SELF-TAUGHT MODERNISM
Robert Hobbs
The paintings of the Maine-born self-taught marine painter Earl Cunningham (1893-1977)
are distinguished for incorporating significant aspects of mainstream modern art, particularly
the high keyed coloristic work of the Post-Impressionist Vincent Van Gogh and the French
Fauves. Known for his visionary scenes of both Maine and Florida, Cunningham created an art
that belies the once widely endorsed view regarding self-taught art’s presumed lack of erudition.
Although he was certainly an autodidact in his art and semi-literate, as his occasionally recorded
personal journal testifies, Cunningham’s work is not lacking in sophistication, and he himself
was not unaware of mainstream avant-garde art developments, as his own art so clearly indicates.
Since the 1920s Cunningham maintained a messianic zeal about his work, an approach
most clearly appreciated by considering his great desire to have a museum devoted to it. 1
Although he might have joked about this imaginary museum, he was also deadly serious about
it and his identity as an artist. Often he would wear a beret as a way of reinforcing his artistic
identity, and when he painted, he would don an artist’s smock with a crest emblazoned on its
back. The crest, with the addition of the words “Over Fork Over,” was the same family seal he
himself had devised and used to advertise the gallery comprised of his paintings, located next
door to his antique shop.
The museum as the legitimate future repository for Cunningham’s paintings can be
credited as a basis for his great desire to achieve a range of subjects in his marines, to create a
wondrous sense of fantasy about the past, and to achieve a subtle and disarmingly charming
critique of the present, thereby representing in his art a renewed symbolic genesis of the
United States’ history. His paintings re-create aspects of an idealized and fanciful past to
provide halcyon views of what America could have been and might still be. In many paintings
Cunningham symbolically reenacts America’s beginnings by bringing early Norse explorers
and Native Americans together with the late–nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century sailing
vessels of his youth. To reinforce the great antiquity of the Norse ships, the artist would often
paint patches on their sails.
The sense of nostalgia pervading these works is key to the way Cunningham re-presents
the world rather than merely reflecting it. Although the term “memory painter” is often used
for such individuals as Cunningham, in his case it is particularly confusing because it suggests
his creations are mere reflections of his youth rather than highly symbolic, even necessary
reconstitutions of it. Calling him a memory painter trivializes and invalidates his creations,
implying his broad cultural reassessments are merely charming and inaccurate recollections.
preferred to call him an “American Fauve” after the early twentieth-century group of French
colorists around Henri Matisse. While Cunningham was innocent of such established academic
techniques as one-point perspective and classical ways of rendering human anatomy, he was
sophisticated in employing a number of ideas germane to modern art, so his naiveté was very
knowing.
When Cunningham signed a painting “American Primitive” 2 and later when he had
business cards printed with the designation “Primitive Artist,” he set up tensions between
intuitive art and tongue-in-cheek postmodernist practices—those knowingly ironic approaches
often taking specific artistic categories and genres as subjects for their work—and he did so
decades before postmodernist art was developed and ratified as a critical approach. His self
-awareness of his special contradictory status indicates a sophistication at odds with the usual
expectations concerning vernacular artists, and this acute understanding of being both an insider
and an outsider points to the fluidity of language in the twentieth century, when naiveté and
sophistication are not always polarities.
By employing the term “Primitive Artist” to refer to himself, Cunningham doubles the
codes for vernacular art with the goal of employing one to reinforce the other. This designation,
however, which is characteristically used by a member of the mainstream culture to refer to
someone who is marginalized, serves the reverse function in Cunningham’s case of questioning
the authenticity of his work. The doubling of sophisticated and vernacular codes continues to be
evident in his re-appropriation of the so-called folk-art forms employed by many modern artists,
including the Fauves, and in his reliance on the tradition practiced by Edward Hicks, Grandma
Moses, and Joseph Pickett. Depending on one’s point of view, Cunningham’s approach can be
considered an appropriation of modernism, a re-appropriation of the vernacular that modern art
itself had appropriated, a revival of the American folk-art tradition as seen in the works of Hicks
and others, and a survival of the nineteenth-century traditions Cunningham himself continues.
Of course, his tactic is representative of all these attitudes, considered singly or in combination.
Although Cunningham was self-taught, he was definitely not naïve; and although he was selfaware
of his status as a vernacular artist, he remained an intuitive painter who attempted to
synthesize his experiences in a visual form. Thus, Cunningham was both marginalized and
mainstream at the same time. Perhaps, because of this contingent status, Cunningham put
a great deal of emphasis on his handmade frames, modeled on nineteenth-century American
Empire-style ogee ones, so that they were imposing enough to circumscribe and separate his
Left: Earl Cunningham in the gallery of his shop, 1970. Photo by Jerry Uelsmann
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