Eddie Arning

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About the artist

1898–1993, lived and worked in and around Austin, Texas

Born in 1898 in Germania, Texas into a German-speaking Luthern family, Eddie Arning spent the majority of his adult life in institutions and nursing homes. He lived and worked on his family’s farm until 1928, when a series of violent behaviors, culminating in an attack on his mother, led to a year of treatment at Austin State Hospital. He was released briefly only to be committed in 1934 after a relapse of symptoms diagnosed as schizophrenia. However, Arning only began his artistic activities three decades later, in 1964, at age sixty-six. Helen Mayfield, a hospital employee who practiced an early form of art therapy, encouraged her patient to draw, and though initially hesitant, Arning went on to produce over 2000 drawings in about nine years. His early work was in crayon, depicting largely still lives, animals, and landscapes inspired by memories of farm life. By 1966, he had incorporated human figures, and in 1969, he switched his medium to craypas, which allowed for denser and more varied color choices and textures.
     A committed collector of sundry items that caught his eye, Arning eventually began to work exclusively from clipped magazine advertisements and photos, translating these banal but strikingly composed images of commerce into heavily stylized and highly personal arrangements of simplified, abstract shapes and bold planes of color. Arning’s distinctive iconography encompasses both geometric abstraction and narrative work. His mature style involved a definitively limned twisting of perspective that flattens the subject to satisfy the artist’s hungry eye. Arning interprets the internal logic of the subject, distilling its entirety to the essential shapes and formal relationships that he wished to emphasize. Drawn frames edging the paper are characteristic of his desire to cover a whole surface and present a completed work––what he called “a nice picture”––that transcended the source material. Arning stopped working in 1973, when he was asked to leave the hospital for unspecified bad conduct. The sale of his work had paid for his hospitalization and achieved for him a certain degree of fame, but despite subsequent stays in various nursing homes, he never picked up crayons or craypas again in the last twenty years of his life. His work can be found in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the National Museum of American Art, and the Museum of American Folk Art.
—Brendan Greaves

Bibliography

Abernathy, Francis Edward, ed. Folk Art in Texas. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1985.

Common Ground/Uncommon Vision: The Michael and Julie Hall Collection of American Folk Art. Milwaukee, WI: Milwaukee Art Museum, 1993.

Contemporary American Folk Art: The Balsley Collection. Milwaukee, WI: Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, 1992.

Contemporary Folk Art: A View from the Outside. Boca Raton, FL: Adolph & Rose Lewis Community Center, 1995.

Drawing Outside the Lines: Works on Paper by Outsider Artists. Oceanville, NJ: The Noyes Museum, 1995.

Driven to Create: The Anthony Petullo Collection of Self-Taught & Outsider Art. Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum, 1993.

Eddie Arning. New York: Hirschl & Adler Folk, 1988. Eddie Arning. New York: Giampietro, 1997.

Eddie Arning: Selected Drawings 1964–1973. Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1985.

Expressions of a New Spirit: Highlights from the Permanent Collection of the Museum of American Folk Art. New York: Museum of American Folk Art, 1989.

Hartigan, Lynda. Made with Passion: The Hemphill Folk Art Collection in the National Museum of American Art. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990.

Hemphill, Herbert W., Jr., and Julia Weissman. Twentieth-Century American Folk Art and Artists. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1974.

Johnson, Jay, and William Ketchum, Jr. American Folk Art of the Twentieth Century. New York: Rizzoli, 1983.

Let It Shine: Self-Taught Art from the T. Marshall Hahn Collection. Atlanta, GA: High Museum of Art, in association with the University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, MS, 2001.

Maresca, Frank, and Roger Ricco. American Self-Taught: Paintings and Drawings by Outsider Artists. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.

Muffled Voices: Folk Artists in Contemporary America. New York: Museum of American Folk Art, 1986.

Outside: In, Outsider and Contemporary Artist in Texas. Austin, TX: Laguna Gloria Art Museum, 1994.

Rumford, Beatrix, and Carolyn J. Weekley. Treasures in American Folk Art: From the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center. Boston: Little, Brown/Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1989.

Russell, Charles, ed. Self-Taught Art: The Culture and Aesthetics of American Vernacular Art. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001.

Self-Taught Artists of the 20th Century: An American Anthology. New York: Museum of American Folk Art, in association with Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 1998.

Spirited Journeys: Self-Taught Texas Artists of the Twentieth Century. Austin, TX: University of Texas at Austin/Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, 1997.

The Ties that Bind: Folk Art in Contemporary American Culture. Cincinnati, OH: The Contemporary Art Center, 1986.

A Time to Reap: Late-Blooming Folk Artists. South Orange, NJ: Seaton Hall University/Museum of American Folk Art, 1985.

Tree of Life: The Inaugural Exhibition of the American Visionary Art Museum. Baltimore: American Visionary Art Museum, 1996.

Yelen, Alice Rae. Passionate Visions of the American South: Self-Taught Artists from 1940 to the Present. New Orleans: New Orleans Museum of Art in association with University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, 1994.

Artwork


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