VAM galleries including this work:
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Temptation is part of Kentucky folk artist Edgar Tolson’s Fall of Man Cycle (which also includes Adam and Eve in Paradise, Original Sin, The Expulsion, and Cain Slaying Abel). He began carving the series at the suggestion of Lexington collectors John and Miriam Tuska. While Tolson’s repertoire included such common American folk art subjects as animals, Noah’s ark, Uncle Sam, and other popular figures, his illustrations of Adam and Eve became his signature theme. In this work, the nude, blocky figures of Adam and Eve approach a black serpent that is coiled around the trunk and branches of an apple tree.

About the Artist

Woodcarver Edgar Tolson was born into a large family in Lee City, KY, in 1904. He began whittling at the age of 9 or 10, starting with a table setting complete with coffeepots and other accessories. He spent the majority of his adult life in Campton, KY, working as a farmer, cobbler, chair maker, blacksmith, and lay preacher.

Many of Tolson’s early adult carvings were decorated functional items such as hammer handles, fireplace posts, and embellishments to the stone steps of his house. Animals were frequent subjects, but he also rendered standing men and women attired in the suits and dresses of the time. Wood was his preferred medium, although he did occasionally carve stone. Tolson’s tableaux of Adam and Eve and the various events of their story were among the most popular with his collectors. (He reputedly once said, “God made the first Adam and Eve and I made the second.”) He died on September 7, 1984, in Manchester, KY.

Tolson’s work is represented in the collections of the Kentucky Folk Art Museum in Morehead; the Huntington Museum of Art in West Virginia; the Museum fir Volkskunde in Basel, Switzerland; the Museum of American Folk Art in New York; the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, NM; and the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American Art in Washington, DC. Fred Rogers, of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood fame, devoted a segment of his 1980 television series, Old Friends, New Friends, to Tolson.

Classroom Ideas

Discussion: Why do you think Bible stories are such a common theme in American folk art? What story does this work show? Do you think it is an apt depiction of the story? How does the medium used (wood) affect the portrayal? Compare this work to other works based on Bible stories in the Kentucky Virtual Art Museum (such as Noah’s Ark in the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft gallery and Adam and Eve and Samson and Delilah in the Kentucky Folk Art Center gallery). Also compare this work to Tolson’s Unicorn in the Garden in the Owensboro Museum of Fine Art gallery.

Activity: Choose a well-known story from the Bible or folk tradition and create a work of art inspired by it. Let viewers guess which story the artwork is based upon.

Links

Read an interview with Julia S. Ardery, author of the book The Temptation: Edgar Tolson and the Genesis of Twentieth-Century Folk Art, at iBiblio.
[www.ibiblio.org/uncpress/newsbytes/march98/interview.html]

View a photograph of Edgar Tolson with one of his sculptures at the Museum of Art and Craft web site.
[www.kentuckyarts.org/exhibition.cfm?stepaction=category.cfm&gid=236&gscid=53]