Ben Cunningham

Resources of the Soil, study for a 1938 WPA mural by Ben Cunningham at the Ukiah, California, Post Office. Ben Frazier Cunningham (February 10, 1904 –April 5, 1975

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.

During World War II, Cunningham was trained as a naval architect, working on blueprints for destroyers and cruisers.

Cunningham's two-panel Scarlet Tesseract (1970) installed at a 90-degree angle in a corner. 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 silkscreen on poystyrol Scarlet Tesseract, produced in a limited edition by Domberger in Germany in 1970.

In conceptual geometry, a tesseract is produced by inserting one three-dimensional cube into another, creating a shape that can be perceived only when in motion. Here [in Scarlet Tesseract] Cunningham gave visual form to this theoretical shape by screenprinting two-dimensional renderings of intersecting cubes onto two translucent plastic panels that are to be installed in a corner at a ninety-degree angle. As the viewer moves in front of the piece, the form resolves into a tesseract. In works such as this, the artist sought to create images from colors and basic geometric shapes that appear to change as the viewer interacts with them.

In 1968 Cunningham took this concept a step further by painting the three panels of Jewels of the Medici, to be installed on a projecting corner.

MOMA acquired Equivocation for its collection,

Cunningham taught art classes at Newark School of Fine Arts, Cooper Union, Pratt Institute, and, from 1968 to 1974, at the Art Students League of New York.

Cunningham married Patsy Griffin in 1948. From 1955, they owned and resided at 44 Carmine Street in Greenwich Village. Survived by his wife, he died at a rest home in Hackensack, New Jersey in 1975 at the age of 71

Cunningham questioned the use of the word "poetic" to describe his work. "To say that a painting is 'poetic' makes as little sense to me as calling an architectural structure 'terpsichorean.' I would suggest that what all art forms do have in common and what gives them an enduring quality is an underlying order and structure—the projected structure and order of the human nervous system itself."

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 Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Blanton Museum in Austin, the Princeton University Art Museum, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Tweed Museum of Art at the University of Minnesota Duluth, Morgan State University, Baltimore, Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, The Neuberger Museum of Art at Purchase College, and the Birla Academy of Art and Culture in Kolkata, India. and at Syracuse University.