Francis Cunningham

Cunningham, known for working across the genres of nude, landscape, and still life.

Cunningham attended the Art Students League of New York, where he studied drawing and anatomy with Robert Beverly Hale and painting with Edwin Dickinson. He became an influential master instructor, cofounding the New Brooklyn School of Life Drawing, Painting and Sculpture (1977–1983) and the New York Academy of Art in 1983.

When the American art world turned toward abstract art and action painting, Cunningham remained focused on figurative art and the human form. His interest never waned. This book chronicles his development over an astonishing seven decades.

Presented in a nonlinear order, the arc of his work is there for the discerning eye to see. Landscapes, still lifes, and human forms are interrelated. Cunningham’s work reveals the connection between abstraction and representation. Their coexistence is the material and subject of this book, disclosing a new understanding of American painting by a living artist.

Cunningham’s paintings have been presented in major exhibitions in the United States and Europe. He currently maintains studios in Manhattan and in the rural western part of Massachusetts, known as the Berkshires.

FRANCIS CUNNINGHAM

This is the first monograph devoted to American painter Francis

F R A N C I S CUNNINGHAM

CRITICAL ESSAYS AND ARTISTIC MILIEU

6

7

CRITICAL ESSAYS AND ARTISTIC MILIEU

6

7

SEEING FRANCIS CUNNINGHAM Christopher Knight

A brushstroke in a painting by Francis Cunningham is meant to be seen and not heard.

Conceptually, the background to Cunningham’s altar is located somewhere between a white painting by Robert Ryman, all dabs of light-absorbing and light-reflective

When he paints a still life composed of a worktable and tools — two-handed saw, com-

white paint on a resolutely flat surface affixed to an immovable wall, and a Renaissance

pass, scythe, hatchet, awl, and more — the assembled objects, composed across the

vision of Veronica’s veil by Hans Memling or a Baroque meditation by Francisco de

canvas with precision and care, refer back to what the artist is doing: building a picture

Zurbarán. An illusion of a wall and an actual one, simultaneously. The abstraction is

from scratch. The canvas is his metaphorical worktable, brush and paint his tools, con-

metaphorical — immaterial, yet an object as tangible and real as any depicted within

struction of a robust and durable painting his aim. Such a work of art must be made to last.

the painting.

Light and space are the pictorial workhorses. The weights and measures implied through

The letter and toolbox — like the other supporting players of magnifying glass, obscured

the presence of a protractor, compass, yardstick, or weighing scale find their natural

photograph, closed vessel, and exposed tools, plus the illuminated space in which they

counterparts in the visual masses and indications of paint and color applied, judiciously

are all shown to exist — refer back to the inherent nature of a work of art. Cunningham is

placed throughout the composition. Cunningham creates a surface that does not hide its

a philosophical painter, which speaks to his fondness for artists like Piero della Francesca

assembled marks of the brush. Yet the surface is not expressionist. A brushstroke does not

and Thomas Eakins, and for the uncanny mathematical harmonies of the golden section.

attempt to declare itself as something more than the inevitable result of responsive, well-

(A 1965 painting centered on a couple of plain, galvanized buckets and a milky glass vessel

used implements.

is titled Golden Section Still Life, cat. 70.)

In one worktable still life, David Potoff’s Tools (2003–2004, cat. 60), a blank paper envelope

Brushstrokes seen and not heard. Throughout his career, which spans nearly six decades,

stands upright against a sturdy metal toolbox. Unopened, it might or might not have a letter

Cunningham’s paint has worked against the dominant position first occupied by American

inside. Envelopes not being known to stand easily on edge, this is no casual arrangement.

art after World War II, as the prevailing modernist tradition shifted away from a European

Instead, the quietly eccentric compositional element, scarcely noticed at first, goes to unusual

continent that lay in ruin. The sometimes energetic, sometimes enervated, always expres-

lengths to frame a bare, unmarked envelope for what it is: a potential carrier of meaning.

sive brushstrokes of gestural art moved into the foreground of New York School painting, trailing the emotional residue of existential struggle.

The envelope is deliberately paired with the closed toolbox, another carrier with promises to keep. In front of and below them, a small magnifying glass also stands upright on edge.

Cunningham was born in New York in 1931, and he matured during Abstract Expressionism’s

The small glass, a tool for close looking, is at the apex of a triangular shadow cast on the

boisterous heyday. At the Art Students League from 1955 to 1959, he studied with artist

table by a covered metal pot nearby. It’s further positioned directly above a photograph,

Robert Beverly Hale, who was also a scholarly curator of American painting and sculpture

pinned with a thumbtack to the worktable’s side. What the photograph shows is fuzzy and

at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Edwin Dickinson — a painter’s painter, “perhaps

indistinct — apparently two people against a hazy blue sky, their identities and even gen-

America’s best-known, underknown artist” in the often-repeated words of critic Nancy

ders too vague to be ascertained. They are meaningful or the photo wouldn’t be tacked

Grimes. Dickinson’s observational technique, informed by a commitment to enlist the

there, but the precise meaning is unavailable.

ephemerality of light in a sure, unrehearsed way, would have a great and lasting effect on Cunningham’s art.

This picture’s right-hand side is an accumulation of inchoate mysteries, balanced on the left side by a compass and a scale — with all the levelheaded rationality those towering

The perceptual method, called premier coup (first shot), was a way to maximize that deep

and hefty devices here imply. The pivot between enigmatic right and just-the-facts left is

but fleeting awareness of complex visual experience by giving priority to color over line or

where the compass point meets the corner of the toolbox, both resting on the tabletop.

form. Adapted from European alla prima (to the first), it was handed down through twen-

There, Cunningham positions the work’s defining tool — a paintbrush, laid on a work-

tieth-century American art from William Merritt Chase, trained in Munich, Germany, to

bench that possesses all the inviolable gravity of an altar.

Charles W. Hawthorne and Dickinson and then to Cunningham. Premier coup is most self-evident in his landscape paintings, where the pictures fill with subtle spatial tensions

The objects chosen for depiction in this (or any) still life are of course vital to its being. Fully

within the amplitude of nature, rather than with singular trees or rocks or ground. But it’s

two-thirds of this large and imposing painting, however, is taken up by a mottled, off-

also plainly driving figure studies, too, such as the 1965 portraits of the artist’s young

white wall that forms the background to the depicted objects. It merges with the flat plane

daughters, Sasha and Katharine, engaged in the pensive act of reading (Sasha Reading and

of the canvas, the shifting tones and shadows of its hue informed by the silvery blue-grays

China Bowl, cat. 47, and Katharine Reading, cat. 38).

and rusty browns of the implements and the table. Wall and canvas plane are inseparable

8

from each other — a welter of short brush marks, as firm, deliberative, and declarative as

“Suspend the brain and allow the eye to see,” he has written, sounding as much like a

those in a still life by Cézanne, but, unlike his, entirely abstract.

phenomenological installation artist on the order of Robert Irwin as he does an easel

9

SEEING FRANCIS CUNNINGHAM Christopher Knight

A brushstroke in a painting by Francis Cunningham is meant to be seen and not heard.

Conceptually, the background to Cunningham’s altar is located somewhere between a white painting by Robert Ryman, all dabs of light-absorbing and light-reflective

When he paints a still life composed of a worktable and tools — two-handed saw, com-

white paint on a resolutely flat surface affixed to an immovable wall, and a Renaissance

pass, scythe, hatchet, awl, and more — the assembled objects, composed across the

vision of Veronica’s veil by Hans Memling or a Baroque meditation by Francisco de

canvas with precision and care, refer back to what the artist is doing: building a picture

Zurbarán. An illusion of a wall and an actual one, simultaneously. The abstraction is

from scratch. The canvas is his metaphorical worktable, brush and paint his tools, con-

metaphorical — immaterial, yet an object as tangible and real as any depicted within

struction of a robust and durable painting his aim. Such a work of art must be made to last.

the painting.

Light and space are the pictorial workhorses. The weights and measures implied through

The letter and toolbox — like the other supporting players of magnifying glass, obscured

the presence of a protractor, compass, yardstick, or weighing scale find their natural

photograph, closed vessel, and exposed tools, plus the illuminated space in which they

counterparts in the visual masses and indications of paint and color applied, judiciously

are all shown to exist — refer back to the inherent nature of a work of art. Cunningham is

placed throughout the composition. Cunningham creates a surface that does not hide its

a philosophical painter, which speaks to his fondness for artists like Piero della Francesca

assembled marks of the brush. Yet the surface is not expressionist. A brushstroke does not

and Thomas Eakins, and for the uncanny mathematical harmonies of the golden section.

attempt to declare itself as something more than the inevitable result of responsive, well-

(A 1965 painting centered on a couple of plain, galvanized buckets and a milky glass vessel

used implements.

is titled Golden Section Still Life, cat. 70.)

In one worktable still life, David Potoff’s Tools (2003–2004, cat. 60), a blank paper envelope

Brushstrokes seen and not heard. Throughout his career, which spans nearly six decades,

stands upright against a sturdy metal toolbox. Unopened, it might or might not have a letter

Cunningham’s paint has worked against the dominant position first occupied by American

inside. Envelopes not being known to stand easily on edge, this is no casual arrangement.

art after World War II, as the prevailing modernist tradition shifted away from a European

Instead, the quietly eccentric compositional element, scarcely noticed at first, goes to unusual

continent that lay in ruin. The sometimes energetic, sometimes enervated, always expres-

lengths to frame a bare, unmarked envelope for what it is: a potential carrier of meaning.

sive brushstrokes of gestural art moved into the foreground of New York School painting, trailing the emotional residue of existential struggle.

The envelope is deliberately paired with the closed toolbox, another carrier with promises to keep. In front of and below them, a small magnifying glass also stands upright on edge.

Cunningham was born in New York in 1931, and he matured during Abstract Expressionism’s

The small glass, a tool for close looking, is at the apex of a triangular shadow cast on the

boisterous heyday. At the Art Students League from 1955 to 1959, he studied with artist

table by a covered metal pot nearby. It’s further positioned directly above a photograph,

Robert Beverly Hale, who was also a scholarly curator of American painting and sculpture

pinned with a thumbtack to the worktable’s side. What the photograph shows is fuzzy and

at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Edwin Dickinson — a painter’s painter, “perhaps

indistinct — apparently two people against a hazy blue sky, their identities and even gen-

America’s best-known, underknown artist” in the often-repeated words of critic Nancy

ders too vague to be ascertained. They are meaningful or the photo wouldn’t be tacked

Grimes. Dickinson’s observational technique, informed by a commitment to enlist the

there, but the precise meaning is unavailable.

ephemerality of light in a sure, unrehearsed way, would have a great and lasting effect on Cunningham’s art.

This picture’s right-hand side is an accumulation of inchoate mysteries, balanced on the left side by a compass and a scale — with all the levelheaded rationality those towering

The perceptual method, called premier coup (first shot), was a way to maximize that deep

and hefty devices here imply. The pivot between enigmatic right and just-the-facts left is

but fleeting awareness of complex visual experience by giving priority to color over line or

where the compass point meets the corner of the toolbox, both resting on the tabletop.

form. Adapted from European alla prima (to the first), it was handed down through twen-

There, Cunningham positions the work’s defining tool — a paintbrush, laid on a work-

tieth-century American art from William Merritt Chase, trained in Munich, Germany, to

bench that possesses all the inviolable gravity of an altar.

Charles W. Hawthorne and Dickinson and then to Cunningham. Premier coup is most self-evident in his landscape paintings, where the pictures fill with subtle spatial tensions

The objects chosen for depiction in this (or any) still life are of course vital to its being. Fully

within the amplitude of nature, rather than with singular trees or rocks or ground. But it’s

two-thirds of this large and imposing painting, however, is taken up by a mottled, off-

also plainly driving figure studies, too, such as the 1965 portraits of the artist’s young

white wall that forms the background to the depicted objects. It merges with the flat plane

daughters, Sasha and Katharine, engaged in the pensive act of reading (Sasha Reading and

of the canvas, the shifting tones and shadows of its hue informed by the silvery blue-grays

China Bowl, cat. 47, and Katharine Reading, cat. 38).

and rusty browns of the implements and the table. Wall and canvas plane are inseparable

8

from each other — a welter of short brush marks, as firm, deliberative, and declarative as

“Suspend the brain and allow the eye to see,” he has written, sounding as much like a

those in a still life by Cézanne, but, unlike his, entirely abstract.

phenomenological installation artist on the order of Robert Irwin as he does an easel

9

men here fused into a single torqued and wary figure. Quietly agonized rather than histri-

Still Life with Finder and Engineer’s Rule (Art Students League), 1958 Oil on canvas 16 × 20 in.

Collection of the artist

onic, he wrestles not with profane writhing serpents but with the intimation of mortality emanating from the skull and bone laid out at his feet.

These Adam and Eve figures are theatrical, their delicately delineated muscularity and luminous nakedness lit up against an inky, abstract field. Their bodies strain, but those bodies are their own reward. “No ideas but in things,” as William Carlos Williams put it, and those things include bodies and the material reality of works of art.

Once in a while, still life/landscape/figure all merge together into a single painting: Studio Table, 1996–1997, cat. 59. A worktable of tools and vessels also sports incongruous, framed figure drawings; a landscape postcard showing an imposing farm is placed prominently at the pictorial bull’s-eye; a drop cloth draped from a high shelf, like a theatrical curtain pulled to the side to expose a stage, recalls painter Charles Willson Peale’s 1822 The Artist and His Museum, drawing back the curtain to reveal his perfectly organized display of natural history artifacts. The start of an orchestrated performance — a silent drama of looking — is announced.

The silent dramas in Cunningham’s paintings depart from the dynamic emotional unrest fueling much of Abstract Expressionism and its concurrent figurative analogues. At the time of his first New York solo exhibition in 1964, the nagging sense that the New York School was long since played out was widely felt. Pop and Minimalism were pushing aside the old painter. Still life, landscape, figure — Cunningham’s use of traditional subjects in rep-

bohemian verities of Pollock, Still, Frankenthaler, and de Kooning, upending tables. No one

resentational painting might change focus over time, but the conception does not.

would mistake Cunningham’s art for flamboyant Pop or astringent Minimalism, with the former’s modern art platitudes clothed in popular and commercial disguise and the latter’s

A toolbox in a still life is a barn in a landscape. The splayed legs of a nude repeat the form

reductive emphasis on locating art’s meanings within the context in which it resides.

of a draftsman’s open compass. A pair of cedar trees that rise up toward the sky from behind a hillock could as easily be harvest tools or pewter ware lined up before a wall, or

Nor should his work be seen as an insurrection against Abstract Expressionism, art’s last

even classical dancers engaged in the adagio of a grand pas de deux, limbs taut and spa-

big idea before the 1960s. Hale, after all, his teacher at the Art Students League, was

tially extended in a penché arabesque. (Cunningham briefly worked as a dance critic for

instrumental in navigating Pollock’s mural-size Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) into the

the Berkshire Eagle newspaper, writing about Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival.) In Still Life

stately pantheon of the Met museum’s permanent collection in 1957, just a year after the

with Finder and Engineer’s Rule (p. 10) from 1958, or Three Sonatas (cat. 72) from 1965, the

artist’s untimely death.

two “steel-square” measuring tools are “finders” (viewfinders), two right-angled L’s, which also describe the unusual pose of outstretched arms that turns up as shapes found in

Instead, Cunningham injects something essential yet in short supply during the rambunctious,

1993’s Reaching (Regina), cat. 22, a nude lying face down on a wine-red blanket spread

even volatile, years of his first forays into serious, mature painting. With a mordant flourish, the

out on a diagonal across a rich field of browns and blacks.

medium of painting was soon to be declared “dead,” as it had been periodically since the arrival of photographs into art’s lexicon in the 1830s. (As if painting hasn’t always been so, and

According to the Book of Genesis, Adam and Eve were the first humans, created by God

the artist’s eternal job isn’t to give it life.) The death knell tolled for painting in the 1970s, reflect-

in his own image. No Edenic garden is seen anywhere in Cunningham’s two separate fig-

ing intense frustration with art’s inability to directly affect the anguished social traumas exposed

ure paintings of the life-size duo, Adam (Jeff), cat. 18, from 1985, and Eve (Sharon), cat. 17,

in the consuming upheavals of concurrent civil rights and anti-war movements.

of 1986; but the charged fruit delivered by the Tree of Knowledge lives within the compo-

10

sitions. Eve, her face hidden behind an upraised arm like a cross between the two protag-

What Cunningham’s paintings injected into the era’s contentious cultural discourse is

onists in The Expulsion from Paradise, Masaccio’s momentous Renaissance fresco, turns

humility, indispensable but so easily lost. Humility, by its nature, cannot be perfectly done

her back on a fragment of bone that looks like a broken pelvis merged with a mask. Adam

— which offers a weighty reason to keep on painting. In that, Cunningham is neither indif-

is posed like the Vatican’s famous Hellenistic sculpture of Laocoön and His Sons, all three

ferent nor irresolute but robust.

11

men here fused into a single torqued and wary figure. Quietly agonized rather than histri-

Still Life with Finder and Engineer’s Rule (Art Students League), 1958 Oil on canvas 16 × 20 in.

Collection of the artist

onic, he wrestles not with profane writhing serpents but with the intimation of mortality emanating from the skull and bone laid out at his feet.

These Adam and Eve figures are theatrical, their delicately delineated muscularity and luminous nakedness lit up against an inky, abstract field. Their bodies strain, but those bodies are their own reward. “No ideas but in things,” as William Carlos Williams put it, and those things include bodies and the material reality of works of art.

Once in a while, still life/landscape/figure all merge together into a single painting: Studio Table, 1996–1997, cat. 59. A worktable of tools and vessels also sports incongruous, framed figure drawings; a landscape postcard showing an imposing farm is placed prominently at the pictorial bull’s-eye; a drop cloth draped from a high shelf, like a theatrical curtain pulled to the side to expose a stage, recalls painter Charles Willson Peale’s 1822 The Artist and His Museum, drawing back the curtain to reveal his perfectly organized display of natural history artifacts. The start of an orchestrated performance — a silent drama of looking — is announced.

The silent dramas in Cunningham’s paintings depart from the dynamic emotional unrest fueling much of Abstract Expressionism and its concurrent figurative analogues. At the time of his first New York solo exhibition in 1964, the nagging sense that the New York School was long since played out was widely felt. Pop and Minimalism were pushing aside the old painter. Still life, landscape, figure — Cunningham’s use of traditional subjects in rep-

bohemian verities of Pollock, Still, Frankenthaler, and de Kooning, upending tables. No one

resentational painting might change focus over time, but the conception does not.

would mistake Cunningham’s art for flamboyant Pop or astringent Minimalism, with the former’s modern art platitudes clothed in popular and commercial disguise and the latter’s

A toolbox in a still life is a barn in a landscape. The splayed legs of a nude repeat the form

reductive emphasis on locating art’s meanings within the context in which it resides.

of a draftsman’s open compass. A pair of cedar trees that rise up toward the sky from behind a hillock could as easily be harvest tools or pewter ware lined up before a wall, or

Nor should his work be seen as an insurrection against Abstract Expressionism, art’s last

even classical dancers engaged in the adagio of a grand pas de deux, limbs taut and spa-

big idea before the 1960s. Hale, after all, his teacher at the Art Students League, was

tially extended in a penché arabesque. (Cunningham briefly worked as a dance critic for

instrumental in navigating Pollock’s mural-size Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) into the

the Berkshire Eagle newspaper, writing about Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival.) In Still Life

stately pantheon of the Met museum’s permanent collection in 1957, just a year after the

with Finder and Engineer’s Rule (p. 10) from 1958, or Three Sonatas (cat. 72) from 1965, the

artist’s untimely death.

two “steel-square” measuring tools are “finders” (viewfinders), two right-angled L’s, which also describe the unusual pose of outstretched arms that turns up as shapes found in

Instead, Cunningham injects something essential yet in short supply during the rambunctious,

1993’s Reaching (Regina), cat. 22, a nude lying face down on a wine-red blanket spread

even volatile, years of his first forays into serious, mature painting. With a mordant flourish, the

out on a diagonal across a rich field of browns and blacks.

medium of painting was soon to be declared “dead,” as it had been periodically since the arrival of photographs into art’s lexicon in the 1830s. (As if painting hasn’t always been so, and

According to the Book of Genesis, Adam and Eve were the first humans, created by God

the artist’s eternal job isn’t to give it life.) The death knell tolled for painting in the 1970s, reflect-

in his own image. No Edenic garden is seen anywhere in Cunningham’s two separate fig-

ing intense frustration with art’s inability to directly affect the anguished social traumas exposed

ure paintings of the life-size duo, Adam (Jeff), cat. 18, from 1985, and Eve (Sharon), cat. 17,

in the consuming upheavals of concurrent civil rights and anti-war movements.

of 1986; but the charged fruit delivered by the Tree of Knowledge lives within the compo-

10

sitions. Eve, her face hidden behind an upraised arm like a cross between the two protag-

What Cunningham’s paintings injected into the era’s contentious cultural discourse is

onists in The Expulsion from Paradise, Masaccio’s momentous Renaissance fresco, turns

humility, indispensable but so easily lost. Humility, by its nature, cannot be perfectly done

her back on a fragment of bone that looks like a broken pelvis merged with a mask. Adam

— which offers a weighty reason to keep on painting. In that, Cunningham is neither indif-

is posed like the Vatican’s famous Hellenistic sculpture of Laocoön and His Sons, all three

ferent nor irresolute but robust.

11

A CONVERSATION WITH FRANCIS CUNNINGHAM Edward Lifson

Francis Cunningham and arts writer Edward Lifson spoke over the phone in the spring of

EL: Well, we’ll get back to the idea of you painting an altarpiece later, an American

2020. Their conversation has been edited.

altarpiece. I think you have done one painting that’s even closer to being an altarpiece than this one.

Francis Cunningham: About six weeks ago, when Bill [Anawalt, Francis’s son-in-law] was

But let’s turn to another painting of one of your favorite models, Mimi Scherb.

here, I was going back into portfolios that had been tucked away, and what do I produce?

FC: Well, I have never seen anything more beautiful than Mimi Scherb’s body. Her skin

My mother’s portfolio! Well, my mother had gone to the Boston Museum School in the

tones! She went from golds to silvers to greens. Holy Mother of God!

1920s, along with my godmother; they were best friends. I had a portfolio of hers, after she died, and I didn’t look at it; it got stuck in a back corner. Six weeks ago, when we opened it up, I just fell right off! I am absolutely knocked out by her work. They are tonal,

EL: You make Whitman want to be there . . .

FC: Mimi Scherb 1970 (cat. 14) was an important painting for me.

EL: A breakthrough?

like my work. I tell you, there is such a thing as heredity. Now I realize that I come out of

FC: Yes. She’s nude, in a bare room, but the context is — her full humanity is present. And

something — you can say, I am a born tonalist.

she is not telling a religious or historical story. Her story is her own. This is the final one of

But my mother stopped painting and drawing early in life. Later she said that her art was

ten paintings I did of her. Her husband, Milton, had recently died that spring, and it was just

her garden. Why she quit drawing, I do not know. I wish I did.

pure grief. I said, “Mimi, see me in the fall, if you will,” and she did. Grief had changed to resignation, and there it all is.

Edward Lifson: Speaking of where we come from, let’s talk about your painting

EL: That takes us to Francois Delsarte [1811–1871]. Delsarte studied movement, and

Three Figures (1992–1999, cat. 23). Let me tell you what I see in it.

you cite him as a great influence. One of Delsarte’s principles is the law of corre-

You and I have spoken of our shared respect for the writings of Ralph Waldo

spondence: that our movements and gestures and poses correspond to and express

Emerson, who was related to your godmother, and I see in this painting

our emotions and our interior lives. And he spoke of trinities and of the intercon-

Emerson’s American Adam — that is, like you, a man who constructs himself

nectedness of mind, body, and soul. I see all that in your portrait of Mimi.

and does not rely on received wisdom. This man’s body proudly displays

FC: Yes, that’s Mimi! With her, it was always there. The inside and the outside. She was pure

American brawn, and you paint an American Eve, a beautiful Eve of color. Like

poetry no matter what she did, even just sitting in a chair.

Emerson and Walt Whitman, you celebrate the New World and its people. Adam

This gets me into something about my work that is different from Italian Renaissance and

and Eve look to the west, as unfolds the American story, and there, in the back

ancient Greek work. Mine shows a particular individual body, and that body — and this is

of your painting, on a pedestal, is the figure of Europe. Alas, Europe is exhausted.

crucial — is also anatomically functional. What I mean by that is that you feel that Mimi

She is the past, she sleeps. But in our New World, with our new beginning and

could get up and walk out of her chair.

a break from Europe, the new Adam and Eve’s eyes are wide open. They gaze

You can check this for yourself: there is not a single figure in the Renaissance that can do

up, over the horizon; they are poised for action, and art that lives again and

that. My speculation is that they can’t do that because of their idea of perspective. They

seeks truth is possible.

had to organize the painting as seen from a single station point, and for me, the whole point of the Mimi business and the anatomical function thing is to paint from multiple

FC: You know, that’s so exciting to me. You’ve done what rarely but occasionally hap-

12

station points, and the work is to be seen from multiple station points. Each anatomical

pens — somebody takes a look at a painting and gives me their view. That is what I want

part of the body is seen head-on in its true objective proportion. And so the figure sug-

more than anything else — the engagement of somebody looking at it to make their

gests that it can move wherever it wants. And I really discovered that with Mimi.

own story, which is why I don’t like fancy titles. I don’t like even “Adam and Eve.” I want

EL: For me, what animates this painting are the various angles. Yes, she could stand

you to look at it on your own. You see something I’ve done, and I’m not even aware of

up, but at the same time, she is resigned.

it. You, the viewer, see it in your own way. You tell your story, you make this yours, and

FC: She is herself. When I am posing a model, I don’t get the model into a theatrical ges-

that pleases me more than anything.

ture, like a silent movie actress, no! I see what the model wants to do. What her body and

Emerson says if you’re reading Plato or Shakespeare you’re at one with them. You are

her face want to say. And, especially in my later work, I tried to paint the expression of

equal with them. It’s an equal dialogue. We’re equal, you see. The viewer and the

movement, its source in mind and emotion.

painting meet on equal terms. You’re communicating, and it seems to me that we just

This is why I love dance so much, and this is why I haven’t studied dance, because I don’t

share a common humanity and we’re on an equal footing. It’s present to you and

want to spoil it with my bloody mind! Dance is an experience of everything coming

you’re present to it.

together expressively; everything that matters in a human being is right there, but said

This painting does have a European connection. I was on the train, coming back from

through the body, without any words. It’s absolutely staggering. I go to modern dance,

having seen the big, great 1990 Titian show at the National Gallery of Art, and on the back

ballet, ethnic dance, Hindu dance — I had it all. I had a splendid dance training, so to speak,

of an envelope I made a sketch of these three figures. It was a response to the show, and

with Ted Shawn and Jacob’s Pillow, and in New York, and all I can do myself is a higgy jig.

it’s as close to an altarpiece as anything I’ve ever made, but it ain’t no European altar.

So, you become observant of these things on a very day-to-day basis.

13

A CONVERSATION WITH FRANCIS CUNNINGHAM Edward Lifson

Francis Cunningham and arts writer Edward Lifson spoke over the phone in the spring of

EL: Well, we’ll get back to the idea of you painting an altarpiece later, an American

2020. Their conversation has been edited.

altarpiece. I think you have done one painting that’s even closer to being an altarpiece than this one.

Francis Cunningham: About six weeks ago, when Bill [Anawalt, Francis’s son-in-law] was

But let’s turn to another painting of one of your favorite models, Mimi Scherb.

here, I was going back into portfolios that had been tucked away, and what do I produce?

FC: Well, I have never seen anything more beautiful than Mimi Scherb’s body. Her skin

My mother’s portfolio! Well, my mother had gone to the Boston Museum School in the

tones! She went from golds to silvers to greens. Holy Mother of God!

1920s, along with my godmother; they were best friends. I had a portfolio of hers, after she died, and I didn’t look at it; it got stuck in a back corner. Six weeks ago, when we opened it up, I just fell right off! I am absolutely knocked out by her work. They are tonal,

EL: You make Whitman want to be there . . .

FC: Mimi Scherb 1970 (cat. 14) was an important painting for me.

EL: A breakthrough?

like my work. I tell you, there is such a thing as heredity. Now I realize that I come out of

FC: Yes. She’s nude, in a bare room, but the context is — her full humanity is present. And

something — you can say, I am a born tonalist.

she is not telling a religious or historical story. Her story is her own. This is the final one of

But my mother stopped painting and drawing early in life. Later she said that her art was

ten paintings I did of her. Her husband, Milton, had recently died that spring, and it was just

her garden. Why she quit drawing, I do not know. I wish I did.

pure grief. I said, “Mimi, see me in the fall, if you will,” and she did. Grief had changed to resignation, and there it all is.

Edward Lifson: Speaking of where we come from, let’s talk about your painting

EL: That takes us to Francois Delsarte [1811–1871]. Delsarte studied movement, and

Three Figures (1992–1999, cat. 23). Let me tell you what I see in it.

you cite him as a great influence. One of Delsarte’s principles is the law of corre-

You and I have spoken of our shared respect for the writings of Ralph Waldo

spondence: that our movements and gestures and poses correspond to and express

Emerson, who was related to your godmother, and I see in this painting

our emotions and our interior lives. And he spoke of trinities and of the intercon-

Emerson’s American Adam — that is, like you, a man who constructs himself

nectedness of mind, body, and soul. I see all that in your portrait of Mimi.

and does not rely on received wisdom. This man’s body proudly displays

FC: Yes, that’s Mimi! With her, it was always there. The inside and the outside. She was pure

American brawn, and you paint an American Eve, a beautiful Eve of color. Like

poetry no matter what she did, even just sitting in a chair.

Emerson and Walt Whitman, you celebrate the New World and its people. Adam

This gets me into something about my work that is different from Italian Renaissance and

and Eve look to the west, as unfolds the American story, and there, in the back

ancient Greek work. Mine shows a particular individual body, and that body — and this is

of your painting, on a pedestal, is the figure of Europe. Alas, Europe is exhausted.

crucial — is also anatomically functional. What I mean by that is that you feel that Mimi

She is the past, she sleeps. But in our New World, with our new beginning and

could get up and walk out of her chair.

a break from Europe, the new Adam and Eve’s eyes are wide open. They gaze

You can check this for yourself: there is not a single figure in the Renaissance that can do

up, over the horizon; they are poised for action, and art that lives again and

that. My speculation is that they can’t do that because of their idea of perspective. They

seeks truth is possible.

had to organize the painting as seen from a single station point, and for me, the whole point of the Mimi business and the anatomical function thing is to paint from multiple

FC: You know, that’s so exciting to me. You’ve done what rarely but occasionally hap-

12

station points, and the work is to be seen from multiple station points. Each anatomical

pens — somebody takes a look at a painting and gives me their view. That is what I want

part of the body is seen head-on in its true objective proportion. And so the figure sug-

more than anything else — the engagement of somebody looking at it to make their

gests that it can move wherever it wants. And I really discovered that with Mimi.

own story, which is why I don’t like fancy titles. I don’t like even “Adam and Eve.” I want

EL: For me, what animates this painting are the various angles. Yes, she could stand

you to look at it on your own. You see something I’ve done, and I’m not even aware of

up, but at the same time, she is resigned.

it. You, the viewer, see it in your own way. You tell your story, you make this yours, and

FC: She is herself. When I am posing a model, I don’t get the model into a theatrical ges-

that pleases me more than anything.

ture, like a silent movie actress, no! I see what the model wants to do. What her body and

Emerson says if you’re reading Plato or Shakespeare you’re at one with them. You are

her face want to say. And, especially in my later work, I tried to paint the expression of

equal with them. It’s an equal dialogue. We’re equal, you see. The viewer and the

movement, its source in mind and emotion.

painting meet on equal terms. You’re communicating, and it seems to me that we just

This is why I love dance so much, and this is why I haven’t studied dance, because I don’t

share a common humanity and we’re on an equal footing. It’s present to you and

want to spoil it with my bloody mind! Dance is an experience of everything coming

you’re present to it.

together expressively; everything that matters in a human being is right there, but said

This painting does have a European connection. I was on the train, coming back from

through the body, without any words. It’s absolutely staggering. I go to modern dance,

having seen the big, great 1990 Titian show at the National Gallery of Art, and on the back

ballet, ethnic dance, Hindu dance — I had it all. I had a splendid dance training, so to speak,

of an envelope I made a sketch of these three figures. It was a response to the show, and

with Ted Shawn and Jacob’s Pillow, and in New York, and all I can do myself is a higgy jig.

it’s as close to an altarpiece as anything I’ve ever made, but it ain’t no European altar.

So, you become observant of these things on a very day-to-day basis.

13

The whole idea of anatomical function is to bring the feeling of the figure present, in the

EL: And Whitman. He wrote about “the tools lying around, the augur . . . The main

room with you, and that’s what I want my figures to do, clothed or nude. To achieve that, you

shapes arise! Shapes of Democracy . . . Shapes braced with the whole earth.”

have to stand in multiple places to create the work of art. That’s what classical Greek sculp-

FC: These were made in a day when blacksmiths made metal tools and they were used,

tors did. And that’s why the Doryphoros, or “spear-bearer,” struck me. When I traveled through

and the farmers knew what to use for the handles. You don’t use hickory for an axe handle,

Italy and got down south to Naples, the Doryphoros wiped out Michelangelo and all the boys.

that’s too brittle.

It was infinitely more alive. Why? Because it was also anatomically functional. And I later fig-

EL: Follow the laws of nature.

ured out it has a harmonic relationship of height to width. Now, it was also idealized, it was a

FC: Floyd was a pro with that sort of thing.

EL: These are not factory made. They tell stories — of the people who made

god, and I don’t do that. I stay with what is suggested with each individual person.

EL: An individual person and yet an everyman, an American everyman — that is your

them. They carry embodied wisdom, just as the landscape contains the wisdom

portrait of Floyd Woodbeck (cat. 35) to me. There he is, wearing his own clothes.

of natural law.

FC: Floyd was very down to earth as a woodsman. He knew plants and he knew the woods.

FC: — and of the people who used them. You’re talking about the landscape. Every time

I can remember when I started working with him. My mother had decorative barberries

I’m looking at a landscape, the whole damn thing I’m looking at is a fresh world.

around the house, and they made a nice transition between the house and lawn. She had

EL: Let’s talk about how you capture a landscape and how they connect to the per-

two beautiful gardens leading to the front door.

son you are.

FC: There was a small Shaker village on Jerusalem road, Tyringham, up on the hill . . .

I thought, growing up right next to a farm, that I knew something about nature. Well, I

EL: Sounds like the start of a great American story.

didn’t know anything. So you’re out in ole’ Mother Nature with Floyd and you’re learning

FC: Yes! My friends had a house there, and you looked down and you saw the Tyringham

some things that you don’t know when you’re not out in nature. And Mother Nature doesn’t give two damns about what you think. So, you better tune yourself. I didn’t know that barberries in the wild will take over your land and you will have to fight them.

So, I go out there, and I’m working with Floyd. Well, he’s a great man with the axe, he can do anything with the axe. He chopped trees and I hauled brush, and at the end of the day

Valley.

EL: A lonesome valley, like Woody Guthrie sang about. “There ain’t no one can walk it for you, you’ve got to walk it by yourself.”

FC: I was painting on a Sunday. That day my friends were entertaining guests. I was setting

I’m exhausted. Floyd wasn’t. So I would start to imitate Floyd. Instead of dashing around, I

up in their yard, looking at what you see in the painting. They had a classics professor

would walk very slowly, resting on my way back from the brush heap . . .

there. He said, “That’s classical.” Well, you bet it’s classical! I used the golden section in it!

Most of what I’ve learned is from people who haven’t been to college. I figure if you hav-

But then, on the right-hand side, where there were cornfields, I painted it out.

en’t had some radical experience to wise you up, you’re so polluted that you can’t experience anything for yourself.

EL: Floyd, in his portrait, is looking right at you.

EL: Leaving out the cornfield makes this American landscape more virginal.

FC: There’s a tremendous beauty to the landscape. There’s this harmonic that goes on between the various elements.

FC: Floyd came after Mimi, right after Mimi. I did a nude and a clothed figure and a land-

EL: I feel the harmonic. You paint stillness, an eloquent stillness. Do you purposely

scape and then a still life and I said, “My god, I’m on my way, here I come! It has finally all

paint silence into your work?

come together.” What I learned from one or two good teachers, the intellectual aspects,

FC: Not consciously, it just comes about as sometimes I use geometry in a landscape,

the form theory, the perspective, about sight and seeing, and the color spectrum — now I

sometimes I don’t. Each thing calls for itself. I was not trapped into trying to get just the

could say it has finally all come together.

appearance. I could move in all kinds of ways. Years after that painting of the Tyringham

EL: In harmony, Delsartian harmony, with the figure expressing the inner life.

FC: You feel in the room with Floyd! The figure is both very abstract and very real at the

Valley, I went even further. I painted the Wilcox barn, and no bush ever looked like that bush. It has a shape as if it’s a flaming torch or whatever. I don’t know what!

same time; and people have always remarked on that. A friend said, I can see exactly who

EL: That flaming bush, as you say, and Wilcox’s barn — there’s something divine

this man is. He has had asthma. And he was right!

about them.

EL: What is this painting saying? What is its message?

14

Marcia Davis Cunningham, Model Holding Jewelry, c. 1923 Charcoal on paper 25 × 19 in.

Boston Museum School art class

FC: Well, there is to me.

FC: It’s saying to you: use your eyes and you tell me what it’s saying to you. I don’t

EL: The barn is a basilica, and I love how you paint the pitch of its roof as part of the

preach. I don’t have messages. I can’t stand messages! I can’t stand being preached to!

mountain range. Those openings it has to the heavens — my gaze, my soul flies

I see what I see, and to me it is so astoundingly beautiful — it’s metaphysical and physical

right in and up and into the beyond. Your landscapes tell us the story of America

at the same time.

having divine purpose; it’s the new garden of Eden.

EL: Delsarte also wrote about the Trinity and how meaningful trinities can be, and

FC: I can look at anything. I can look at a curtain and I can see the most beautiful design

we see that in so many of your paintings. Such as Harvest Tools (cat. 53) from 1973.

that makes me excited and want to paint.

FC: These are Floyd’s tools! Look at all those triangles! Talk about Delsarte, he’d love this

I remember what my mother said to me at the age of fourteen: “Well, you’re not going

one, wouldn’t he?

to be a Michelangelo.” And I can remember we were standing in the front of our house,

15

The whole idea of anatomical function is to bring the feeling of the figure present, in the

EL: And Whitman. He wrote about “the tools lying around, the augur . . . The main

room with you, and that’s what I want my figures to do, clothed or nude. To achieve that, you

shapes arise! Shapes of Democracy . . . Shapes braced with the whole earth.”

have to stand in multiple places to create the work of art. That’s what classical Greek sculp-

FC: These were made in a day when blacksmiths made metal tools and they were used,

tors did. And that’s why the Doryphoros, or “spear-bearer,” struck me. When I traveled through

and the farmers knew what to use for the handles. You don’t use hickory for an axe handle,

Italy and got down south to Naples, the Doryphoros wiped out Michelangelo and all the boys.

that’s too brittle.

It was infinitely more alive. Why? Because it was also anatomically functional. And I later fig-

EL: Follow the laws of nature.

ured out it has a harmonic relationship of height to width. Now, it was also idealized, it was a

FC: Floyd was a pro with that sort of thing.

EL: These are not factory made. They tell stories — of the people who made

god, and I don’t do that. I stay with what is suggested with each individual person.

EL: An individual person and yet an everyman, an American everyman — that is your

them. They carry embodied wisdom, just as the landscape contains the wisdom

portrait of Floyd Woodbeck (cat. 35) to me. There he is, wearing his own clothes.

of natural law.

FC: Floyd was very down to earth as a woodsman. He knew plants and he knew the woods.

FC: — and of the people who used them. You’re talking about the landscape. Every time

I can remember when I started working with him. My mother had decorative barberries

I’m looking at a landscape, the whole damn thing I’m looking at is a fresh world.

around the house, and they made a nice transition between the house and lawn. She had

EL: Let’s talk about how you capture a landscape and how they connect to the per-

two beautiful gardens leading to the front door.

son you are.

FC: There was a small Shaker village on Jerusalem road, Tyringham, up on the hill . . .

I thought, growing up right next to a farm, that I knew something about nature. Well, I

EL: Sounds like the start of a great American story.

didn’t know anything. So you’re out in ole’ Mother Nature with Floyd and you’re learning

FC: Yes! My friends had a house there, and you looked down and you saw the Tyringham

some things that you don’t know when you’re not out in nature. And Mother Nature doesn’t give two damns about what you think. So, you better tune yourself. I didn’t know that barberries in the wild will take over your land and you will have to fight them.

So, I go out there, and I’m working with Floyd. Well, he’s a great man with the axe, he can do anything with the axe. He chopped trees and I hauled brush, and at the end of the day

Valley.

EL: A lonesome valley, like Woody Guthrie sang about. “There ain’t no one can walk it for you, you’ve got to walk it by yourself.”

FC: I was painting on a Sunday. That day my friends were entertaining guests. I was setting

I’m exhausted. Floyd wasn’t. So I would start to imitate Floyd. Instead of dashing around, I

up in their yard, looking at what you see in the painting. They had a classics professor

would walk very slowly, resting on my way back from the brush heap . . .

there. He said, “That’s classical.” Well, you bet it’s classical! I used the golden section in it!

Most of what I’ve learned is from people who haven’t been to college. I figure if you hav-

But then, on the right-hand side, where there were cornfields, I painted it out.

en’t had some radical experience to wise you up, you’re so polluted that you can’t experience anything for yourself.

EL: Floyd, in his portrait, is looking right at you.

EL: Leaving out the cornfield makes this American landscape more virginal.

FC: There’s a tremendous beauty to the landscape. There’s this harmonic that goes on between the various elements.

FC: Floyd came after Mimi, right after Mimi. I did a nude and a clothed figure and a land-

EL: I feel the harmonic. You paint stillness, an eloquent stillness. Do you purposely

scape and then a still life and I said, “My god, I’m on my way, here I come! It has finally all

paint silence into your work?

come together.” What I learned from one or two good teachers, the intellectual aspects,

FC: Not consciously, it just comes about as sometimes I use geometry in a landscape,

the form theory, the perspective, about sight and seeing, and the color spectrum — now I

sometimes I don’t. Each thing calls for itself. I was not trapped into trying to get just the

could say it has finally all come together.

appearance. I could move in all kinds of ways. Years after that painting of the Tyringham

EL: In harmony, Delsartian harmony, with the figure expressing the inner life.

FC: You feel in the room with Floyd! The figure is both very abstract and very real at the

Valley, I went even further. I painted the Wilcox barn, and no bush ever looked like that bush. It has a shape as if it’s a flaming torch or whatever. I don’t know what!

same time; and people have always remarked on that. A friend said, I can see exactly who

EL: That flaming bush, as you say, and Wilcox’s barn — there’s something divine

this man is. He has had asthma. And he was right!

about them.

EL: What is this painting saying? What is its message?

14

Marcia Davis Cunningham, Model Holding Jewelry, c. 1923 Charcoal on paper 25 × 19 in.

Boston Museum School art class

FC: Well, there is to me.

FC: It’s saying to you: use your eyes and you tell me what it’s saying to you. I don’t

EL: The barn is a basilica, and I love how you paint the pitch of its roof as part of the

preach. I don’t have messages. I can’t stand messages! I can’t stand being preached to!

mountain range. Those openings it has to the heavens — my gaze, my soul flies

I see what I see, and to me it is so astoundingly beautiful — it’s metaphysical and physical

right in and up and into the beyond. Your landscapes tell us the story of America

at the same time.

having divine purpose; it’s the new garden of Eden.

EL: Delsarte also wrote about the Trinity and how meaningful trinities can be, and

FC: I can look at anything. I can look at a curtain and I can see the most beautiful design

we see that in so many of your paintings. Such as Harvest Tools (cat. 53) from 1973.

that makes me excited and want to paint.

FC: These are Floyd’s tools! Look at all those triangles! Talk about Delsarte, he’d love this

I remember what my mother said to me at the age of fourteen: “Well, you’re not going

one, wouldn’t he?

to be a Michelangelo.” And I can remember we were standing in the front of our house,

15

out by the big walnut tree. I did not know enough to say, “Well, growing up in Pittsfield,

And there’s some of Floyd’s tools on the left-hand side, stacked up in the corner, and var-

Massachusetts, in 1940 is not the same as growing up in Florence, Italy, in 1440!” But I

ious boards. I use these boards for still lifes. And the crucifix just kind of got in there, you

did say to myself, “Why goddam it, I’m going to be better than Michelangelo!” How’s

know, so why the hell not? Just to kind of shake you up.

that! [laughs] EL: You are of your time and place. Tell me about your education at Harvard.

FC: I went to Harvard, where I heard enough bullshit to last a whole lifetime. And then the

surprising thing.

EL: We go from “In the beginning . . .” to the crucifix. Life is what we do in between.

Kitty and went to the Art Students League of New York. I had two great teachers there,

Then in the center, on the floor, an empty pot. Do we fill it with whatever we want?

Robert Beverly Hale and Edwin Dickinson. Hale taught about form and the body. But Hale

Like the blank canvas, and like ourselves when just born?

had us draw from memory. Dickinson taught us to use our eyes and to see what is really

FC: That isn’t a Shaker pot. It is a pewter pitcher, beautiful, and belonged to my mother.

in front of us — with no preconceptions.

The Shakers were crucial to me. I find their pots and baskets to be just wonderfully elegant

Studio 5 at the Art Students League, I loved the look and the smell of it! Dickinson told us

shapes. I just love them. They’re made by man. They have a purpose and a very simple,

you owe it to the profession to teach, and I did and I found that I enjoyed it. And the way

plain beauty to them. Floyd got a whole bunch of tools from the Shakers and I painted

to do it is to teach the profession to all comers. I taught for more than twenty years and

them. I’m reading a wonderful book right now on the Shakers that Thomas [Anawalt,

co-founded two art schools with the sculptor Barney Hodes.

Francis’s grandson] got me.

The Shakers have been a confounded puzzle to me ever since I first went to the Shaker Village.

FC: Well, the Marine Corps came at a time when — I graduated in 1953 — Korea was

It’s been a puzzle because I cannot figure out how anything can be so beautiful and so

still going and we had to do some kind of service. And if you went into the Marine

simple and how all the parts fit. And I try to make an annual visit to the Shaker Village of

Corps as an officer, first class, you got out in eighteen months as opposed to twen-

Hancock, to kind of get my batteries recharged.

ty-four as a flunky in the army. So, you see, that’s kind of what my sense of duty led me to do! [laughs] EL: What books were important to you?

EL: And the Oblates.

FC: Ah, the Oblates, also very important to me. I was brought up an Episcopalian, but I found that when I went off to a Benedictine monastery — Mount Saviour outside of Elmira,

FC: The big thing that has made a difference to me was Bernard Berenson, and that was

New York, and which is open to everyone — I had hit pay dirt. Anyone can go and all are

when I was in art school and all my friends were modernists. They were all into nonfigu-

welcome, but they do ask you not to take Communion if you’re not baptized.

rative work and modern this and modern that, and I read Aesthetics and History and I

What I did is, there are seven services throughout the day, beginning at 4:30 in the morn-

thought, well, Bernard Berenson is the archenemy of modernism and of what I thought

ing, with Vigils, and I would make every one. I lived a life as close to what the Brothers

then was contemporary living. Later on I said, “Oh god, this guy is on to something that is

were doing as I possibly could. Vigils was my favorite one because they go through the

true for the art of our period; it’s true for the art of any period.” He wrote of “tactile values”

entire psalter in two weeks. They’re chanted and you respond. It’s the greatest poetry. It’s

in painting, the psychophysical sense of touch by which you experience shape, volume,

just extraordinary. And the lessons are Old Testament and New Testament and set the

and form in a painting. And he understood movement in art. Since then I’ve re-read

whole pattern for the day.

Berenson every few years.

In the middle of the afternoon you stop whatever you’re doing — if you’re sweeping

But I’ve never been strong on books — book learning, that is. I’ve read continually, but as

the floor or if you’re out in the fields — and you go into the chapel and you have a

the spirit urges. I take the attitude about reading: I don’t want to worry my pretty little head

communal period. Between services you can be private. I was over fifty when I went

about it! [laughs]

there, and I started writing a journal, because you have so many thoughts and so

EL: Well, I know you are a reader, but let’s leave that mystery and let’s talk about

much is happening to you. You’re acted upon, and all you have to do is stay open. It’s

another — your painting Barn Studio Interior from 2009 (cat. 56).

what a painter does. And things happen to you and you’re receptive and you let it

FC: Here we are back in the same place as Harvest Tools, in my Sheffield studio.

EL: And these are artist’s tools! Why the blank canvases?

FC: Why not? They’re beautiful! One is a square. One is a rectangle. They’re inviting.

EL: Blank canvases. “In the beginning . . .”

16

FC: Well, every once in a while, you do something like that, you know? Why not? Life is a

Marine Corps, where you learn how to give orders and how to take orders. Then I married

EL: And why join the Marine Corps? Is that also from a sense of duty?

Marcia Davis Cunningham, detail from Man Called God, c. 1923 Charcoal on paper 25 × 19 in.

Boston Museum School art class

EL: That’s quite a major decision to put a crucifix in there, isn’t it?

come to you.

I would try to go twice a year to recharge my batteries and straighten my compass. The heck of it is, I used to walk miles. I would take off after dinner, which was in the middle of the day, and I would go on these tremendous walks. It’s the most beautiful countryside

FC: Painting white is a particular pleasure, I find. White drapery, white canvases, white

up there. It’s by the Pennsylvania border, and it’s kind of a raised peneplain carved out, so

anything. Because there’s so much color in the white. So much. And here you’ve got

that if you get up to the top of Dutch Hill there, oh my god, I mean you just can look for

all this stuff going on with the wood and then you have this simplicity. The simple

miles, over the deep valleys, north and south, so I would take these tremendous walks,

blank wall behind, with the shadows on it, you see the shapes. It’s elegant. It’s abso-

but I always would get back for None [pronounced “known”] at 3 o’clock. You just had a

lutely elegant.

very focused time — wonderful, wonderful.

17

out by the big walnut tree. I did not know enough to say, “Well, growing up in Pittsfield,

And there’s some of Floyd’s tools on the left-hand side, stacked up in the corner, and var-

Massachusetts, in 1940 is not the same as growing up in Florence, Italy, in 1440!” But I

ious boards. I use these boards for still lifes. And the crucifix just kind of got in there, you

did say to myself, “Why goddam it, I’m going to be better than Michelangelo!” How’s

know, so why the hell not? Just to kind of shake you up.

that! [laughs] EL: You are of your time and place. Tell me about your education at Harvard.

FC: I went to Harvard, where I heard enough bullshit to last a whole lifetime. And then the

surprising thing.

EL: We go from “In the beginning . . .” to the crucifix. Life is what we do in between.

Kitty and went to the Art Students League of New York. I had two great teachers there,

Then in the center, on the floor, an empty pot. Do we fill it with whatever we want?

Robert Beverly Hale and Edwin Dickinson. Hale taught about form and the body. But Hale

Like the blank canvas, and like ourselves when just born?

had us draw from memory. Dickinson taught us to use our eyes and to see what is really

FC: That isn’t a Shaker pot. It is a pewter pitcher, beautiful, and belonged to my mother.

in front of us — with no preconceptions.

The Shakers were crucial to me. I find their pots and baskets to be just wonderfully elegant

Studio 5 at the Art Students League, I loved the look and the smell of it! Dickinson told us

shapes. I just love them. They’re made by man. They have a purpose and a very simple,

you owe it to the profession to teach, and I did and I found that I enjoyed it. And the way

plain beauty to them. Floyd got a whole bunch of tools from the Shakers and I painted

to do it is to teach the profession to all comers. I taught for more than twenty years and

them. I’m reading a wonderful book right now on the Shakers that Thomas [Anawalt,

co-founded two art schools with the sculptor Barney Hodes.

Francis’s grandson] got me.

The Shakers have been a confounded puzzle to me ever since I first went to the Shaker Village.

FC: Well, the Marine Corps came at a time when — I graduated in 1953 — Korea was

It’s been a puzzle because I cannot figure out how anything can be so beautiful and so

still going and we had to do some kind of service. And if you went into the Marine

simple and how all the parts fit. And I try to make an annual visit to the Shaker Village of

Corps as an officer, first class, you got out in eighteen months as opposed to twen-

Hancock, to kind of get my batteries recharged.

ty-four as a flunky in the army. So, you see, that’s kind of what my sense of duty led me to do! [laughs] EL: What books were important to you?

EL: And the Oblates.

FC: Ah, the Oblates, also very important to me. I was brought up an Episcopalian, but I found that when I went off to a Benedictine monastery — Mount Saviour outside of Elmira,

FC: The big thing that has made a difference to me was Bernard Berenson, and that was

New York, and which is open to everyone — I had hit pay dirt. Anyone can go and all are

when I was in art school and all my friends were modernists. They were all into nonfigu-

welcome, but they do ask you not to take Communion if you’re not baptized.

rative work and modern this and modern that, and I read Aesthetics and History and I

What I did is, there are seven services throughout the day, beginning at 4:30 in the morn-

thought, well, Bernard Berenson is the archenemy of modernism and of what I thought

ing, with Vigils, and I would make every one. I lived a life as close to what the Brothers

then was contemporary living. Later on I said, “Oh god, this guy is on to something that is

were doing as I possibly could. Vigils was my favorite one because they go through the

true for the art of our period; it’s true for the art of any period.” He wrote of “tactile values”

entire psalter in two weeks. They’re chanted and you respond. It’s the greatest poetry. It’s

in painting, the psychophysical sense of touch by which you experience shape, volume,

just extraordinary. And the lessons are Old Testament and New Testament and set the

and form in a painting. And he understood movement in art. Since then I’ve re-read

whole pattern for the day.

Berenson every few years.

In the middle of the afternoon you stop whatever you’re doing — if you’re sweeping

But I’ve never been strong on books — book learning, that is. I’ve read continually, but as

the floor or if you’re out in the fields — and you go into the chapel and you have a

the spirit urges. I take the attitude about reading: I don’t want to worry my pretty little head

communal period. Between services you can be private. I was over fifty when I went

about it! [laughs]

there, and I started writing a journal, because you have so many thoughts and so

EL: Well, I know you are a reader, but let’s leave that mystery and let’s talk about

much is happening to you. You’re acted upon, and all you have to do is stay open. It’s

another — your painting Barn Studio Interior from 2009 (cat. 56).

what a painter does. And things happen to you and you’re receptive and you let it

FC: Here we are back in the same place as Harvest Tools, in my Sheffield studio.

EL: And these are artist’s tools! Why the blank canvases?

FC: Why not? They’re beautiful! One is a square. One is a rectangle. They’re inviting.

EL: Blank canvases. “In the beginning . . .”

16

FC: Well, every once in a while, you do something like that, you know? Why not? Life is a

Marine Corps, where you learn how to give orders and how to take orders. Then I married

EL: And why join the Marine Corps? Is that also from a sense of duty?

Marcia Davis Cunningham, detail from Man Called God, c. 1923 Charcoal on paper 25 × 19 in.

Boston Museum School art class

EL: That’s quite a major decision to put a crucifix in there, isn’t it?

come to you.

I would try to go twice a year to recharge my batteries and straighten my compass. The heck of it is, I used to walk miles. I would take off after dinner, which was in the middle of the day, and I would go on these tremendous walks. It’s the most beautiful countryside

FC: Painting white is a particular pleasure, I find. White drapery, white canvases, white

up there. It’s by the Pennsylvania border, and it’s kind of a raised peneplain carved out, so

anything. Because there’s so much color in the white. So much. And here you’ve got

that if you get up to the top of Dutch Hill there, oh my god, I mean you just can look for

all this stuff going on with the wood and then you have this simplicity. The simple

miles, over the deep valleys, north and south, so I would take these tremendous walks,

blank wall behind, with the shadows on it, you see the shapes. It’s elegant. It’s abso-

but I always would get back for None [pronounced “known”] at 3 o’clock. You just had a

lutely elegant.

very focused time — wonderful, wonderful.

17

89 | Basswood, 1967

142

90 | Hay Baler at Limestone Farm, 1965

143

89 | Basswood, 1967

142

90 | Hay Baler at Limestone Farm, 1965

143

91 | Hewins’ Fields, 1993

144

145

91 | Hewins’ Fields, 1993

144

145

93 | Iron Works Brook, 1975

92 | Two Cedars, Sheffield, 2002

146

147

93 | Iron Works Brook, 1975

92 | Two Cedars, Sheffield, 2002

146

147

94 | Pasture Road, 1971

148

95 | Hewins’ Barn, 1993

149

94 | Pasture Road, 1971

148

95 | Hewins’ Barn, 1993

149

5 Continents Editions Art Direction: Annarita De Sanctis Editorial Coordination: Elena Carotti in collaboration with Lucia Moretti Editing: Charles Gute Color Separation: Maurizio Brivio, Italy

All rights reserved – Francis Cunningham © The Authors for their texts For the present edition © 2020 – 5 Continents Editions Srl No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

ISBN 978-88-7439-906-2 Distributed by ACC Art Books throughout the world, excluding Italy. Distributed in Italy and Switzerland by Messaggerie Libri S.p.A. 5 Continents Editions Piazza Caiazzo 1 - 20124 Milan, Italy www.fivecontinentseditions.com

Photos credits: Thomas Anawalt, Cunningham Archivist and Photographer: Cover photo, pp. 6-7, 10, 15, 16, 22-23, 25, 31, 32, 36, 39, 40 (top left), 42-43, 240-241 Cat.: 1-16, 20-30, 32-35, 37-42, 44-46, 48-52, 54, 56-58, 61-62, 64, 67-71, 73, 75-87, 89-91, 94-95, 97, 100-101, 106-112, 116, 118-123, 125-127, 129-131, 133-134, 136-138, 140-145, 147-149, 151-153, 155-157, 159-181 Valentina De Pasca: p. 40 (right and bottom left) Bill Kipp: cat. 63, 93, 158 Will Michels: cat. 66, 72, 102 Jon Peters: cat. 36, 74, 104, 139 Blue Trimarchi: cat. 17-18, 43, 47, 53, 55, 59, 60, 88, 92, 98-99, 105, 124, 128, 132, 150, 154 Tom Warren: p. 35, cat. 19, 31

Cover: Chime Knife, Barking Spud, and Gourds, 1970 (cat. 64, detail) pp. 6-7: Crockett’s Cove, Vinal Haven, 2002 (cat. 152, detail) pp. 22-23: Triptych (center panel) – Studio Interior, 2019 (cat. 75, detail) pp. 42-43: Lenox Interior Red, Highwood, 1987 (cat. 78, detail)

Printed and bound in Italy in November 2020

by Conti Tipocolor – Calenzano, Florence, Italy, for 5 Continents Editions, Milan

pp. 240-241: Legs (Art Students League), 1958 (cat. 5, detail)