Edgar Tolson.
(1904-1984, Kentucky)
The Temptation.
c. 1970s. Unsigned.
Carved poplar figures with painted snake and carved cedar apples.
Early repairs to branches, otherwise excellent condition.
14.5"h x 12.5"d x 10"w.
Provenance: The Mike Dale Collection.
Est.$5,000-10,000.
Buyer is responsible for shipping.

Edgar Tolson was born on June 24, 1904, in Lee City, Wolfe County, Kentucky, to James Perry Tolson, a lay minister and sharecropper, and Rebecca Maddox. He was the fourth of eleven children. Tolson began carving at about age nine as a hobby. He finished the equivalent of sixth grade. As a young man, Tolson worked as a carpenter, stonemason, at local mines and sawmills, railroad jobs, farming, and chairmaker. Tolson married twice and fathered eighteen children.

In 1921 Tolson assumed the pastorship of a Baptist church in Holly, Kentucky. Tolson's father was a lay minister for six decades and Edgar certainly grew up knowing the difference between right and wrong. The carving offered here, The Temptation, is like a metaphor for Tolson's own life. He seemed to have an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, vying for his conscience and his soul. Sadly, the devil often won. He would abandon his family for long stretches and sneak away to enjoy his two primary vices: whiskey and women. In 1941, Tolson was sentenced to two years in the state penitentiary at La Grange for abandonment and failing to support his children. He was released after one year. When he got out of prison, his first marriage ended, Tolson continued to preach intermittently into the 1950s, but even Tolson himself could not abide the hypocrisy of what he was doing.

Tolson did not carve regularly until after a stroke in 1957. Determined to regain strength in his hands, he began to carve canes, animals, and dolls, which he gave away to friends.Tolson's carvings first came to national attention through the Grassroots Craftsmen, a 1966 VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) offshoot of the War on Poverty that helped Appalachian craftspeople sell their works. In 1967, Miriam Tusca and her husband John Tuska, an art professor at the University of Kentucky, saw Tolson's carvings at the Kentucky Guild Fair in Berea. After purchasing several Tolson carvings over several months, John Tuska asked Tolson if he would consider carving "Adam, Eve, tree, apple, snake? And Edgar said 'Naked?' and I said 'Yeah, naked.' And that was where he started." Through this association, Tolson expanded his repertoire from carving individual figures to carving complex tableaus with multiple figures, often with biblical themes.Tolson once remarked about these carvings: "God made the first Adam and Eve and I made the second. But I lack a long shot of being God."

Tolson was invited to participate in the Smithsonian Institution's Festival of American Folklife in 1968 and again in 1973. In 1968, Michael Hall, an assistant professor of sculpture at the University of Kentucky, saw Tolson's work and became his dealer. It was for Hall and his wife, Julie, that Tolson carved his most ambitious work: the "Fall of Man" Series, an eight-part tableau which is a frank, and often sexually explicit, retelling of the stories of Adam and Eve's idyllic life and temptation in the Garden of Eden. With Tolson's inclusion in the 1973 Whitney Museum's Biennial of American Art, he became one of the first American self-taught artists (after William Edmondson in 1937) to be included in a curated exhibition side by side with academic artists. Edgar Tolson died in Campton, Kentucky in 1984 at the age of 80.