Ben Cunningham (artist)

Ben Frazier Cunningham (February 10, 1904–April 5, 1975) was an American artist and teacher. In his early career he was a painter of murals at sites including Coit Tower in San Francisco. In his later career he explored color and perception in works sometimes labeled op art. His works are in the collections of major institutions including MOMA, the National Gallery of Art, and the Smithsonian.

Resources of the Soil, study for a 1938 WPA mural by Ben Cunningham at the Ukiah, California, Post Office.

Early life and education

Cunningham was born in Cripple Creek, Colorado, in 1904. His family moved to Reno, Nevada in 1907, where Cunningham graduated from Reno High School and briefly attended the University of Nevada, Reno during the fall of 1922. In 1925 he moved to San Francisco, where he studied intermittently at the Mark Hopkins Art Institute (now the San Francisco Art Institute) until 1929. Along with painting, he studied weaving and tapestry design. He then briefly returned to Reno to work for a mining company before moving back to the Bay Area in 1930.

Career

Detail of Cunningham's Outdoor Life mural in Coit Tower.

Cunningham participated in his first professional group show at the Beaux Arts Gallery in San Francisco in 1930, and began to gain recognition from his peers. He found his first actual employment as an artist working at Coit Tower in San Francisco in 1934, where he painted the Outdoor Life mural depicting picnickers, bathers, photographers, and hikers.

He was elected president of the San Francisco chapter of the Artists Congress in 1936. That same year, he was appointed supervisor of mural painting for Northern California under the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project.

In 1931 he married artist Marion Osborn Cunningham. They divorced in 1937.

in 1939 Cunningham met Hilaire Hiler, who was to become a major influence on his thought and work. Hiler sought a bridge between science and art, to create work without intentional political or ideological content in which color is used to transmit forms and sensations in space with the aim to create extra-optical perceptions. Hiler introduced Cunningham to Wilhelm Ostwald's color theory, which became a touchstone for Cunningham as he explored the relationship between pigments and color perception.

Cunningham moved to New York in 1944 and continued his increasingly complex work in hard-edge geometric, emotionally low-key compositions. He worked his way through existing modernist precepts before arriving at his mature style, of which Corner Painting (1948-50) is emblematic. Veils of geometric shapes on two canvases, placed in a corner, create the illusion that space extends beyond the walls. This effect was achieved again in a larger work, Six Dimensions of Orange (1965), and in the two-panel screenprint on plastic Scarlet Tesseract, produced in a limited edition by Domberger in Germany in 1970. In 1968 he took this concept a step further by painting the three panels of Jewels of the Medici, to be installed on a projecting corner.

With the advent of op art in the 1960s, he was invited to exhibit at major venues, including MOMA, the Whitney, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where it became apparent that there was a similarity between his style and that of Victor Vasarely. According to his biographer, Cindy Nemser, Cunningham was unaware of Vasarely's work when he developed his own color compositions. "It was coincidental that he and Vasarely developed interest in similar problems in painting at the same time. Their paths crossed during this particular period but took quite different directions before and after this short interlude."

Cunningham taught art classes at Newark School of Fine Arts, Cooper Union, Pratt Institute, and, from 1967 to 1974, at the Art Students League of New York.

Cunningham resided at 44 Carmine Street in New Yok. He died at a rest home in Hackensack, New Jersey in 1975.

In Museums

Cunningham's works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Blanton Museum in Austin, the Princeton University Art Museum, the Lilley Museum of Art at the University of Nevada, Reno, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and the Birla Academy of Art and Culture in Kolkata, India.

Cunningham's papers are preserved at the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art and at Syracuse University.

Bibliography

• Evans, Ingrid. "Ben Cunningham (1904-1975)" in Nevada Historical Society Quarterly, volume 33, number 2, Summer 1990.
• Nemser, Cindy. Ben Cunningham: A Life with Color, Post, Texas: JPL Art Publishers, 1989.
• Zakheim, Masha and Beatty, Don. Coit Tower, San Francisco: Its History and Art, San Francisco: Volcano Press, 1983.

External links

Works by Cunningham can be seen online at these museum web pages:

• Resources of the Soil (Mural Study, Ukiah, California Post Office) (c. 1938), Nevada, from the United States Series (1948), Nevada, from the United States Series (1949), Dematerialization (1957), and Spring Summation (1967) at the Smithsonian American Art Museum
• After Image of Brittany (1940) at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
• Equivocation (1964) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York
• Modulus (1962-1967) at the Blanton Museum, Austin
• Scarlet Tesseract (1970) at the Princeton University Art Museum
• The Desert (1939), Nevada II (1971), and Pyramid Lake (1971) at the Lilley Museum of Art, Reno