William Wallo, one of Cannon’s teachers at the University of Central Oklahoma, in the early seventies, described him as having two sides: he was “a reticent Indian/cowboy,” always up for partying, and “an amazingly serious and sober veteran, aged far beyond his years, and incredibly dedicated to study . . . bittersweet, haunted, and mystifying.” Romantically handsome, Cannon had affairs and one brief marriage, all the while tormented, he reportedly said, by “the inability to fall out of love.” He skirted politics, for the most part, but readily acknowledged Native ordeals. (You will not forget, though you may wish you could, a shocking drawing in marker ink, “John Wayne’s Bullet,” from 1973, in which an Indian looks down in horror at the abundant blood spurting from his chest.) Remarkably, Cannon seemed more deeply embedded in his heritage the more he embraced modern art, though at a cost of alienation from aesthetically conservative Native communities. (In Anadarko, Oklahoma, in 1970, the local audience for a show that included his work excoriated him for incorrectly detailing tribal dress.) In one self-portrait, made in 1973, he appears with long hair and sunglasses, in cowboy duds, next to a landscape painting by van Gogh. At the edge of another are glimpses of a Matisse and an African mask.
This show—superbly curated by Karen Kramer, of the Peabody Essex Museum, where it first appeared—could not be better timed. Years ago, Cannon’s work would have seemed marginal to both the art world and the wider culture. Today, it gains drama from a perfect storm of relevance, meshing with a general turn among younger painters toward storytelling figuration, serving an aroused interest in formerly scanted artists, and usefully complicating the imbroglios of identity politics with what might be called identity culture—sharing transcendent pleasures from a fated point of view. Cannon dealt directly with being at once Native and American and, while he was at it, a citizen of the world. He did so in the name of a higher, though difficult and lonely, allegiance. He wrote in a letter from Vietnam, “How thoughtful of God to provide such a life-stream such as art.”