"Strong, serene and assured."
-John Canaday, New York Times, 1968
Potoff’s Tools, 1973,
oil on canvas, 60 x 44 in., private collection
Cunningham positions the work’s defining tool – a paintbrush, laid on a workbench that possesses all the inviolable gravity of an altar.
“…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 white paint on a resolutely flat surface affixed to an immovable wall, and a Renaissance vision of Veronica’s veil by Hans Memling or a Baroque meditation by Francisco de Zurbaran.”
-- Christopher Knight, Pulitzer Prize winning
art critic for Los Angeles Times, 2019
"A most skillful painter."
- Washington Post, 1971
"He records the American scene – familiar yet transmuted."
- Stuart P. Feld, Harvard Alumni Bulletin, 1968
"Cunningham asks his viewers to confront their own mortality in these fellow
human beings."
- John Walsh, director emeritus of the J. Paul Getty Museum
"His work continues not only the Renaissance humanistic practice of
depicting the natural world and living men and women, but also the modern practice of discerning abstract forms in those things and letting those forms determine how they are painted.."
- John Walsh, director emeritus of the J. Paul Getty Museum
"An unusual quality of light seems to come from within his forms."
- Art News, 1966
"Extremely moving."
- SoHo Weekly News, 1975
"Bravura brushwork."
- Artspeak, 1989
"Both an avid lover of realism and a champion of geometric abstraction
could find pleasure in these canvases."
- Arts Magazine, February 1967