“Consider the Source? at Cahoon Museum of American Art

Thursday, 17 August 2006 10:56

COTUIT, MA - One of the most famous Currier & Ives lithographs is “The Road – Winter,” featuring a couple riding in a horse-drawn sleigh.  When the Cape’s premier primitive artist, Ralph Cahoon, painted a spoof for a collector of Currier & Ives prints in 1973, he of course replaced the female figure with one of his signature mermaids.  Her fishtail and bare breasts are incongruities in the snowy landscape.

That Ralph and his wife, Martha, regularly looked back to 19th-century images for inspiration is clear from “Consider the Source: Influences on Ralph and Martha Cahoon’s Early Paintings.”  On view through Oct. 1, the show is the first Cahoon exhibition at the Cahoon Museum of American Art in two years.  Essentially a follow-up to 2004’s “In the Beginning: The Decorated Furniture of Ralph and Martha Cahoon,” it sheds new light on how the artists developed their styles as they made their highly successful transition from furniture decorators to primitive artists, starting in the early 1950s.

Having been furniture decorators and antique dealers for 20 years, the Cahoons were already very familiar with American folk art traditions.  They also shared a deep interest in history.  So it was natural for them to mine 19th-century folk art and a fascinating variety of other sources for ideas.  They drew upon paintings by famed Quaker artist Edward Hicks.  For years, Ralph did take-offs on Joseph H. Davis’s folk portraits of couples sitting at opposite ends of a table, always turning the wife into a mermaid.  He also had fun spoofing mourning pictures, with their funerary urns, weeping willows and weeping people.  Martha – in the spirit of Currier & Ives – loved doing country scenes that glorified the different seasons.  They both pored over Harper’s Weekly, articles in American Heritage and old engravings so that they could be authentic in their vintage costumes, boats and architecture, even as they were fanciful in their subject matter.  Often, their sources are obscure, but sometimes they blatantly borrowed from famous works by the likes of French naïve artist Henri Rousseau or even Michelangelo.

“Consider the Source” pairs key Cahoon paintings with images of the works that inspired them, and, in several instances, the actual sources are on view.  One is a tavern sign from the collection of Connecticut Historical Society Museum that pictures a military officer and a gentleman at table.  Ralph referred to it at least twice.  The first time – probably in the early ’50s – he stayed fairly close to the original in painting the design on the front of a small blanket chest.  Then, in the late ’50s, when he and Martha were developing a reputation as primitive artists, he did a painting of the same two gents being served by two mermaids.  This time the work has a whimsical tone. 

Visitors are sure to be fascinated as they compare the sources with the Cahoon’s interpretations of them.  What did the artists take?  What did they leave out? What did they add or change?  Visitors are also likely to be impressed with how the Cahoon’s originality shines brightly through, even at those times they were being most faithful to their sources.

“Consider the Source” has been made possible by generous funding from TD Banknorth Charitable Foundation.

Visit the Cahoon Museum of American Art at : www.cahoonmuseum.org/