With flat planes of saturated color and abstract shapes, Eddie Arning created drawings based on both memories and pop culture. Although his practice spanned only a decade, from 1964 to 1974, he evolved his ideas from simplified forms of animals, windmills, and flowers based on his childhood in a German Lutheran farming community in Texas into increasingly complex compositions inspired by advertisements and photographs in magazines and newspapers. His earliest pieces are mostly in wax crayon that densely fills the entire sheet of paper. Later works, made with oil pastels, are more luminous. He also experimented with collaging found materials such as postage stamps. All of his drawings were made within institutions to which he had been committed for symptoms that would likely now be classified as schizophrenia; his creative transformation of source material from popular media reflected his ability to push his art forward even in a place of isolation.
Arning was born in 1898 in Germania, Texas, to German immigrants. He was institutionalized at Austin State Hospital in his twenties. In 1964, Helen Mayfield, an artist volunteering at the state nursing home to which he had been transferred, introduced him to crayon-on-paper drawing. Mayfield and Alexander Sackton, an English professor at the University of Texas at Austin, were pivotal in supporting the development of his art through their friendship over the years. Sackton donated works to several museums across the United States, helping to secure Arning’s recognition.
This is how Arning's drawings came to the American Folk Art Museum. Some are accompanied by their original sources of inspiration, which provide a demonstration of how, in his hundreds of drawings, Arning was never simply replicating what he saw. A Lucky Strike ad is transformed into an unnaturally hued portrait of a woman, a cigarette pack hovering dreamlike by her purple shoulder, and a travel illustration from Look magazine informs a detailed scene of an angular female figure and an airplane, the abstracted flowers in her hand echoing the geometric shapes of the landing gear. Arning largely stopped drawing when he left to live with his sister in McGregor, Texas, in the early 1970s; he died in 1993. During his lifetime, his work was exhibited locally and nationally, including a solo show in 1985 at the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center in Williamsburg, Virginia.
Allison C. Meier, 2025
Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
