Ben Cunningham (artist)

[3][4] Cunningham participated in his first professional group show at the Beaux Arts Gallery in San Francisco in 1930, and began to gain recognition from his peers.

He found his first actual employment as an artist working at Coit Tower in San Francisco in 1934, where he painted the Outdoor Life mural depicting picnickers, bathers, photographers, and hikers.

That same year, he was appointed supervisor of mural painting for Northern California under the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project.

[7] Cunningham moved to New York in 1944 and continued his increasingly complex work in hard-edge geometric, emotionally low-key compositions.

This effect was achieved again in a larger work, Six Dimensions of Orange (1965), and in the two-panel silkscreen on poystyrol[8] Scarlet Tesseract, produced in a limited edition by Domberger in Germany in 1970.

[6] In an art scene dominated by abstract expressionism, Cunningham's minutely calculated and delicately calibrated explorations of space color were out of the mainstream.

He was doubly pleased when the curator William Seitz chose his painting Equivocation for inclusion in "The Responsive Eye" exhibition to be held early in 1965 at the Museum of Modern Art...On the basis of this one extraordinarily intricate painting, the artist...was labeled the father, or even more reverentially, the grandfather of Op Art.

[11]MOMA acquired Equivocation for its collection,[12] and Cunningham was invited to exhibit at other major venues, including the Whitney and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

"[16] Observing that 90% of the neurons in the human nervous system are in the eyes, Cunningham said that his goal as a painter was "to organize, to communicate, to delight, to teach new ways of seeing, especially in the realm of color.

"[16] Cunningham's 1950 painting Elusion, in which a small, haloed form is cradled within a larger ethereal shape, was taken by some viewers to depict a madonna and child.