Francis Cunningham

Francis de Lancey Cunningham Jr. (born 1931) is an American figurative painter known for working across three genres – nude, landscape and still-life—and for being an influential teacher. He co-founded the New Brooklyn School of Life, Painting, Drawing & Sculpture, Inc. (1980–1983), and the New York Academy of Art in 1983. Early life and education Born in New York City in 1931, Francis Cunningham grew up in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where at the age of 16 he caught the attention of artist Ben Shahn. He was further encouraged by his godmother, the Boston draftsman and painter Polly Thayer Starr. He graduated from Harvard College in 1953. After two years as a lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps, he attended the Art Students League of New York (1955–1959), where he studied drawing and anatomy with Robert Beverly Hale and painting with Edwin Dickinson. Cunningham, as with Dickinson and Dickinson's teacher, Charles Hawthorne, is part of an unconventional approach to realism and representation in American painting that began in 1914. Cunningham and Dickinson share a way of looking and painting summarized in the term "color-spots" that Hawthorne invented, Dickinson practiced and taught, and that Cunningham developed and passed on as a technique. Career Cunningham has had one-man shows in Washington, Chicago and New York, where he exhibited at the Waverly, Harry Salpeter and Hirschl & Adler galleries. He has had one-man shows in Stockholm and Copenhagen and has participated in group exhibitions extensively in the U.S.