Native American original
THE PAINTINGS OF T. C. CANNON
T.C. Cannon (1946-1978) forged an enduring legacy as a young painter and printmaker, influencing generations of Native artists who came after him. Of God and Mortal Men: T.C. Cannon, the first significant treatment of Cannon in decades, was recently published by the Museum of New Mexico Press to coincide with an exhibition based on the collection of Nancy and Richard Bloch at the Heard Museum in Phoenix. Edited by Ann E. Marshall and Diana F. Pardue of the Heard, with contributions from Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday and others who knew Cannon, the book chronicles the artist’s life and major works, adding insights into his aesthetics. On the cover is Cannon’s 1971 lithograph On Drinkin’ Beer in Vietnam in 1967, 22 x 30 in., Heard Museum Collection 3314-1. Pictured at right are, from left to right, Cannon, Fritz Scholder, and Earl Biss in the 1970s, courtesy the Archives of the Institute of American Indian Arts. Both images are from Of God and Mortal Men: T.C. Cannon, courtesy Museum of New Mexico Press. Reproduced by permission of the Estate of T.C. Cannon. © 2017 Estate of T.C. Cannon.
IN 1995, author Joan Frederick published T.C. Cannon: He Stood in the Sun, her biography of the Native artist. It was the last book on Cannon’s life and work until Of God and Mortal Men: T.C. Cannon came out last fall, published by Museum of New Mexico Press and coinciding with a major exhibition at the Heard Museum in Phoenix. As David M. Roche, the Heard’s director and CEO, states in his introduction, the exhibition title, Of God and Mortal
Men, was taken from Cannon’s own artist statement from a show mounted at the Heard in 1974. “I must dwell in places where I am always in awe of God and mortal men,” Cannon writes. But, as hinted at in the title, it isn’t difficult to imagine Cannon, who made great strides as a young artist only to meet with an untimely death in an automobile accident at the age of thirty-two, as something of a legend. In the contemporary work being produced at the Institute of American Indian Arts, where Cannon made his mark, his influence can still be seen nearly 40 years after his death. Another book, Roche argued, was due.
The book, as well as the exhibition, draws from the collection of Nancy and Richard Bloch, centering on nine major canvases, including the artist’s Collector #5 (Man in a Wicker Chair) from 1975, Turn of the Century Dandy (1976), and A Remembered Muse (Tosca), which was among the last paintings he made before his death in 1978. Roche discusses some of Cannon’s more well-known works in the context of his early modernist influences like Post Impressionist painter Henri Matisse, the Expressionist Egon Schiele, and Gustav Klimt and his style of Art Nouveau. Roche cites conversations with Santa Fe gallerist David Rettig, a friend of Cannon’s who contributes a chapter to the book, that prove these artists were indeed specifically inf luential. “As Matisse so often did, Cannon creates a stylized salon- style portrait that is filled with decorative motifs and characterized by mixed patterns and vibrant colors,” Roche writes of the artist’s Self Portrait in the Studio from 1975, but he may as well be speaking of any one of a number of Cannon’s portraits.
One of the strengths of Of God and Mortal Men is in the way it traces Cannon’s development and experimentation in different styles. The artist’s influences provide the context in which this development took place. Born Tommy Wayne Cannon in Lawton, Oklahoma, in 1946, he was of Kiowa and Caddo ancestry. At midcentury, several Kiowa painters, particularly the Kiowa Six — Jack Hokeah, Monroe Tsatoke, Spencer Asah, James Auchiah, Stephen Mopope, and Lois Smoky — developed what become known as the Kiowa style: a linear style of figuration on plain backgrounds, with flat, solid colors, influenced by older, traditional forms such as ledger art. But Cannon, who was from a younger generation than the Six, took his Native subject matter in another direction. “American Indian painters of Kiowa ancestry served as a starting point for Cannon’s work as well as a point of departure,” Roche writes. And though the manner of dress of Cannon’s subjects is, at times, traditional, the contexts in which they’re placed, like those of Fritz Scholder, one of his instructors at IAIA, are contemporary. Roche, however, draws some distinctions between how each of these painters approached the contemporary Indian as a subject.
Ann E. Marshall, director of curation and research at the Heard, presents a more intimate biographical portrait of Cannon following conversations with his sister Joyce. Marshall’s essay in the book includes selections of Cannon’s poetry, such as his “Mother Pickin Cotton,” that draw from personal experience. As related to the Heard staff by his sister, Cannon’s Oklahoma boyhood included seasonal hard labor in the cotton fields. He contracted Rocky Mountain tick fever as a child and nearly died. “After nearly losing her little brother, Joyce said she spoiled him a bit,” Marshall recounts. “But not too much. When Tommy saw her with an Eskimo Pie, he wanted it. She said he could have it for ten cents but accepted his counter
offer of a nickel. After taking two or three bites, he gave it back to her — little brothers!”
His Oklahoma upbringing is central to understanding Cannon’s work, according to author N. Scott Momaday, whose included essay “The Debt of Beauty” considers this factor, along with the impact that Northern New Mexico had on the artist. Momaday writes how both he and Cannon were born in the same Lawton hospital. “T.C. Cannon was at home in Oklahoma,” he writes. “He knew the muddy water of the Washita River and the bluffs of red earth that are the landmarks of a Native geography.” He describes a view of Cannon’s home landscape as it was also for himself, a place of oppressive summer heat and humidity, but also of a sky filled with scissortails and “clouds of butterflies.”
It was from this world that he came to Santa Fe, developing quickly into a skilled draftsman at IAIA. Several accomplished sketches he made while he was a student in the mid-1960s, including some self-portraits, are in the book and show confident representational skill. Cannon arrived at an auspicious moment in IAIA’s history — the mid-’60s through the early ’70s were an exceptional time for IAIA as an institution. As Momaday points out, Lloyd Kiva New, Charles Loloma, and Scholder were all on the faculty. John P. Lukavic, associate curator of Native arts at the Denver Art Museum, goes into more depth on this stage of Cannon’s career in his essay, “Tee Cee: The IAIA Years.” He explains how Lloyd Kiva New
impressed on the students the importance of building on one’s personal background. It’s unsurprising to read — in Cannon’s writings and poems from this period — a melancholy longing for the place where he was raised.
As I walked down the street today and thought sadly of days past My eyes shed not a tear to see my heart held firmly back I yearned to see my home again down Lamy station track.
Other students in the painting program, described by Lukavic as possessed with a stronger energy than the other departments in the school (though IAIA was, in all, a place of fiery creativity), looked up to Cannon, forming a clique around him. “They admired him,” said Robert Harcourt, who managed IAIA’s college- age men’s dormitory. “He was an informal leader.” Cannon’s star seemed to shine bright, even then, but he was not alone. Several of his contemporaries at IAIA would find success in their own right: Linda Lomahaftewa, Kevin Red Star, Earl Biss, and Alfred Young Man, for instance. Young Man and Bill Soza War Soldier, along with Cannon, made protest art on the campus on a scale never attempted there before. Lukavic quotes Soza, who stated, “The rebellious sixties gave us the platform to give back through our art.” These young artists took in the events happening in the country — the civil rights movement, the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, and, of course, the fight for Native rights at home — and brought them to bear on their work.
It is perhaps unfortunate that Scholder, who arrived to teach in the painting department at IAIA in 1964 during the same semester Cannon began his studies, was not as well liked. Lukovic cites identity politics as the reason. Scholder was only one- quarter Luiseño, an outsider who did not grow up in a Native community. “He has been maligned for t he past fifty-odd years for taking ideas from his students and passing them off as his own,” Lukovic writes. No student at the school is considered to have affected Scholder’s own evolution, r at her t han t he other way around, more than Cannon. A notable case, one discussed by Gilbert Vicario, Selig Family Chief Curator at the Phoenix Art Museum, in a late chapter in the book, is the telling similarity between Scholder’s Indian With Beer
Can from 1969 and Cannon’s
painted two years earlier. However, in direct comparison, the two paintings appear more as variations on a theme rather than as a copy versus an original. Lukovic argues that Scholder borrowed from everyone and, as Roche previously states, there were distinct differences in how each painter approached their work. Scholder’s style and technique was of greater import to the painterthan the subject matter, while for Cannon, it was the reverse, although he, too, was not beyond the reach of other artistic influences — Larry Rivers and Richard Diebenkorn, for instance — from the generation before him, not to mention those early 20th- century modernists. The impact of other artists on Cannon’s work is an essential point to consider, lest we risk seeing the artist through a lens of hagiography.
The social milieu was of great importance to Cannon as source material. In addition to political events of the 1960s and ’70s, Vicario lists film, Pop art, Bay Area figuration, and late 19th-century artistic movements as inspirations. There was no one aesthetic to which he held and although Vicario mentions his “pop-inflected palette,” this was part and parcel to a singular style that included other formal attributes: “his trademark puffy clouds; painted frames, usually covered in dots; and an almost comic-book approach that came to define his late work.” In 1975, he began working with a master Japanese woodblock carver, Kentaro Maeda, and a master printer, Matashiro Uchikawa. According to Vicario, Cannon’s interest in Japanese forms such as ukiyo-e woodblock printing entered into his own work in subtle ways. He didn’t copy or attempt to create in the style of older Japanese art forms, but still, as Vicario writes, “His simplicity of line and the flattening of figure to ground became increasingly sophisticated and defined an artistic vocabulary in the process of becoming something greater.” One need only look at Woman at the Window or A Remembered Muse (Tosca) to gauge the intuition in the painter’s sense of color, line, and form, and the rich vocabulary with which he infused his subjects, so far beyond what one would think possible in such a young artist. Although his life was cut short on that fateful day in May 1978, he had already achieved a mastery few artists ever know.