EARL CUNNINGHAM: American Fauve - Heather James Fine Art

dream is moot. And this oscillation between extended dream and heightened reality may have
been one of the main attractions color had for Cunningham.
In most of his works Cunningham employed a dominant hue to form an embracing
ambience capable of imbuing and embracing all his pictorial elements as well as subsuming
them under its aegis. While the intensity of color in his painting is indebted to popular-culture
descendants of Fauvist art, his handling of it can be traced to the tradition of Tonalism, an elitist
artistic trend beginning in the 1880s and continuing into the teens of the twentieth century,
most notably through the leading example of Whistler’s nocturnes. Although Cunningham
did not perpetuate the blurred forms, grayed out colors, and poetic intimate scenes of the
Tonalists, he did sustain their embracing environments and closely aligned hues, albeit in a
heightened palette differing significantly from their overall gentle and genteel effect. Moreover,
he sustained the Tonalist desire to create protected and idealized retreats into the past, even
though his subject matter differs markedly from the aristocratic, neurasthenic women often
associated with works by such New England Tonalists as Thomas Dewing.
When Cunningham decided to create his self-taught art for a museum setting, he
internalized a range of the then current attitudes about these institutions, including making
art a special and restricted refuge from daily life. Even though he contextualized his paintings
in his gallery by creating a passageway to it through an anteroom of nautical equipment, his
works existed in a private space, which emphasized both their formal qualities and the ensuing
relationships between them. Just as a museum might transform crucifixes into sculpture, thereby
rendering the sacred prosaic, so Cunningham’s gallery reinforced the universal character of his
art and connoted its lasting value. While this attitude might be devastating for a venerated
religious object, it reinforced the idealism and abstraction found in Cunningham’s figurative
work and also exaggerated its symbolic import as an Edenic view of America’s past.
Even with the great amount of lucid detail populating his paintings, Cunningham
maintained a pervading interest in the ways objects function as symbols, and for this reason he
subsumed details under a general interaction of land and sea. Traditionally, the sea symbolizes
mobility, change, and freedom. It is an open-ended sign full of possibilities and limited in the
visual arts only by the horizon line or by land. The harbor often takes on the biblical overtones
of a safe refuge. Although essentially out of harm’s way, the harbors in Cunningham’s art are still
subject to the strong winds that cause sailing crafts to heel, revealing their red hulls. Land, in
this equation, is usually only an adjunct to the many harbors populating these scenes, and these
structures remain front-stage-center in these works. One could thus argue that Cunningham is
a preeminent painter of harbors rather than the sea, since the comforts and security they offer
are very important to him. In fact, the foreground areas of land adjoining his prominent harbors
in his marine paintings contain, control, and limit views of the sea, making this large body of
water subservient to them.
To conclude: more than a mere treasure trove of his own past experiences, Cunningham’s
museum of memories is an overall qualitative re-conception of them. His art distills not only
his own experiences but also for his understanding of America’s past. The result is a collection of
compelling metaphors of regeneration, attained through a harmonious reconciliation of notable
differences. With their many formal alliances with such modern art movements as Fauvism,
Cunningham’s oxymoronic works bespeak great sophistication within the limits of a self-taught
style, thereby demonstrating the fact that seemingly childlike forms do not necessarily connote
naïve approaches. Even though Cunningham was semi-literate and certainly marginalized from
the mainstream world, he was versed in aspects of modern culture and its traditions; in his art
he achieves a number of the idealistic values associated with an Edenic world that the dominant
culture lacked, thereby providing an implicit critique of it. Whereas some artists create viable
images of the future, Cunningham re-conceives the past in his art as a halcyon realm in which
the American genesis can be ritualistically reenacted. In his paintings he reinvigorates clichés,
imbuing them with conviction, thus enabling his viewers to see already familiar and at times
hackneyed cultural norms from a fresh perspective and thereby providing this audience a means
for engaging and even empathizing with them.
1 Several decades after his death, Cunningham’s dream was given tangible form by the perspicacious and assiduous collectors, the
Honorable Marilyn Mennello and her husband Michael Mennello, who began shortly after the artist’s death adding to their collection of
his art by acquiring as many works in the estate as possible plus his papers and the personal effects related to his art and his St. Augustine
antique shop on St. George Street called “Over Fork Gallery.” In 1998 the non-profit Mennello Museum of American Art opened its
doors, and its historical and cultural was recognized by members of the Orlando city counsel , when they assumed the ownership and
operation of the Museum.
2 Cunningham’s second museum exhibition in 1974 was subtitled “American Primitive.” The exhibition included over two hundred
paintings. According to museum director John Surovek, the artist determined the title for this exhibition.
3 Jerry Uelsmann, telephone interview with Robert Hobbs, 17 August 1991.
4 Ibid.
5 Although early snapshots of these paintings are extant, the works themselves have not been located.
6 C.G. Jung, Mandala Symbolism, trans. R.F.C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), p. 10.
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