E. E. Cummings: Modernist Painter and Poet

E. E. Cummings: Modernist Painter and Poet
Author(s): Milton A. Cohen
Source: Smithsonian Studies in American Art, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Spring, 1990), pp. 54-74
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Smithsonian American Art Museum
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E.E.Cummings
Modenist Painterand Poet
As painters took down their canvases after the huge 1919 exhibition of the Society of Independent
Artistsin New York, one young artist eagerly wrote to his parents of
his success:
Milton A. Cohen
You may be glad to know that
Gleizes(the 'first cubist"-probably
the most individual,though somewhat cold, abstractpainter in
America,and-after Picasso-best
known among painters of a
type-was(to use Lachaise'sphrase)
"TAKEN
OUT OF HIS FEET"by the
two things of mine at the Independent. According to Nagle,he said
later on that they were the "best
things in oil" that he had seen
"in America".Mr. [Walter]Pach,
the director,was(as you may
imagine)highly pleased;and said
verypleasant things a propos
when Nagle and I came to take
away our things.1
The painter who penned these exuberant words was the twentyfour-year-old E. E. Cummings
(1894-1962), and this was his first
public exhibition.
One of the paintings that impressed Albert Gleizes (18811953) was a large, square oil
Cummings called Sound Number
1 (fig. 1). A casual glance reveals
an abstractformalism analogous to
the "defamiliarized"surfaces
Cummings was then devising in
his poetry, a style that placed him
in the orbit (though not in the acquaintance) of such contemporaries as Morgan Russell (18861953), AbrahamWalkowitz (1881-
Self-Portrait,1958. Oil on canvas, 20 x 15
in. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian
Institution
55
Smithsonian Studies in American Art
1965), Max Weber (1881-1961),
and Edward Bruce (1879-1943).2
Cummings's letter refers to three
highly influential artists in postwar
New York: the Cubist painter
Albert Gleizes, the sculptor Gaston
Lachaise (1882-1935), and the
painter and director of the Society
of Independent Artists,Walter
Pach (1883-1958). Their recognition-especially Gleizes's-of a
young painter's first public effort
is significant, and Cummings
seemed to be making important
contacts in the New York art
world only a few months after his
discharge from the army in January 1919. By this time, in fact,
Lachaisewas his close friend and
mentor, visiting Cummings's
studio often and offering him advice and encouragement. Two
weeks before Cummings wrote to
his parents about the exhibition,
Isabel Lachaise,the sculptor's wife,
had asked him: "How does it feel
to be the sensation of the Independent? That'swhat everyone is
telling me."3
Was Cummings the "sensation"
of the 1919 Independent? Besides
the opinions of Gleizes and Pach
that Cummings recorded, more
objective facts confirm that his
work was noticed. First, of the
more than six hundred canvases
vying for the attention of the journalists covering the exhibition,
Cummings's abstractions were
among the few that received specific mention: "The brilliant sally
in color by Mr. Cummings will
greatly impress those who have
1 Sound Number 1, 1919. Oil on canvas, 35
x 35 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Bequest of Scofield Thayer, 1982
arrived at an appreciation of the
abstract in art,"wrote a reporter
for the New YorkSun. Cummings
also received invitations to exhibit
elsewhere: at the Penguin Gallery,
where he showed Sound Number
2 (fig. 2) while the Independent
was still on, and, as a result of his
Independent entries, at an unnamed gallery in Greenwich Vil56
Spring 1990
lage. He was even nominated
(though not elected) as one of the
twenty directors for the next Independent exhibition.4
Whether these facts prove that
Cummings's premiere was a "sensation," they do suggest that by
April 1919, on the basis of his
public work, he was more likely
to have been known (if at all) as a
2
Sound Number 2, 1919. Oil on paper, 19 x
24 in. Memorial Art Gallenr of the
Universityof Rochester,Gift of a friend of
the gallery in memory of Hildegarde Lasell
Watson
painter than a poet. Outside of his
poems in the Harvard Monthly
and a conventional piece or two
in the Boston Evening Transcript,
Cummings's published poems by
1919 numbered eight, appearing
in a little-read, privately printed
volume, Eight Harvard Poets
(1917). Several years were to pass
before this public perception
would change. For those today
who know Cummings only as a
poet, however, his painterly identity in these years is intriguing.
The Modernist Painter
Perhaps the two signal facts about
Cummings's background as a
painter are that he was entirely
self-taught and entirely serious
about teaching himself. Although
he painted and drew from childhood, he began painting in earnest only during his last years at
Harvard,1915-16, when he became avidly interested in Modernism in all the arts.5Identifying
himself with the avant-garde,however, he equated academic instruction with creative suicide. In art
schools, Cummings wrote in 1920,
57
Smithsonian Studies in American Art
a pupil's originality is "irrevocably
diluted" if not "entirely eliminated." He cited both Lachaise and
Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) as
proof that "the man who by the
gods has been fated to express
himself will succeed in expressing
himself in spite of all schools."6
To nurture this independence
and self-expression-qualities he
cherished throughout his lifeCummings set about teaching himself the fundamentals of his craft
from a modernist perspective. A
determined autodidact, he devoured every available work on
modern painting, even translating
for himself A. J. Meier-Graefe's
Cezanne und sein Kreis (1918).
Cummings eagerly attended modernist exhibitions beginning with
the 1913 Armory Show in Boston,
and, more important, he studied
intensively on canvas, sketch pad,
and notepaper the way basic elements of painting interacted. His
notes on painting in these years,
preserved at the Houghton Library
at HarvardUniversity, are extensive and far exceed his notes on
poetry.
Of the Modernists whose techniques Cummings studiedCezanne, Pablo Picasso (18811973), Gleizes, Henri GaudierBrzeska (1891-1915), and the Futurists-Cezanne was clearly the
most influential. Quotations from
Cezanne's letters and his aesthetic
opinions, as recorded by Emile
Bernard or interpreted by W. H.
Wright and Meier-Graefe,turn up
often in Cummings's notes. But as
with his study of the other modernist masters, what Cummings
sought was not to imitate but to
develop his own style. Thus he
wrote to his mother in 1922, "In
great part I've been using the
world famous Cezanne palette ...
but employing it not a Cezanne in
his watercolors-feeling me out
with it, rather;me times water
times paper times dejaunir [?]so
to speak."7Shaping his mastery of
modernist techniques and his own
aesthetic principles into an original style was what mattered most
to Cummings the painter, as it did
to Cummings the poet.
Poetry was, of course, always a
full partner in Cummings's selfconcept as an artist.When he
moved into his first New York
studio in January 1917, he was
fully determined to pursue two careers simultaneously-and with
luck even support himself as well.
He composed poems and even
briefly held a conventional job
with a mail-order bookseller
during the day yet rallied his
energies to paint "8-12" each
night, as he informed his parents.
His constant reports home about
his painting suggest that, like so
many artists of middle-class families, Cummings had to convince
his parents (who were still paying
the bills, after all) of his vocational
intent and to free himself of their
well-intentioned urging that he
pursue the more rewarding career
of writing prose. The letter he
wrote to his mother on 2 March
1922, excerpted below, reveals his
exasperation.8
But his parents were not the
only ones Cummings had to convince: there was also himself. His
roommate at the time, William
Slater Brown, asked him (with the
frankness permitted a roommate)
why he should work so hard at
painting when he was far more
skillful at writing poetry. Cummings replied that because it was
harder for him to paint, "it was
artisticallymore important to
achieve something in the more
difficult medium."9The argument
seems contrived to convince himself as much as his roommate.
Similarly, Cummings's frequent
declarations of painterly intent to
his parents might be seen as protesting too much, bolstering his
own uncertainty.
But despite parental pressure,
the difficulty of the medium, the
nagging question of identity, and
two major interruptions-nine
months driving American ambulances and enduring internment in
French prisons in 1917 and six
months training in army boot
camp from 1918 to 1919-
Must I roar out that there are, live, eat, exist persons of
sensitiveness
stienesto whom the (as you infer)
intelligence
un-thorough-bred branches of my interest (e.g. poetry painting) ...
appear as a more formidable achievement than prose? Or does the
penchan[t] for running somebody else's mentality strike deeper than
? Not
aught else within thePatemal
heas
mat
heart'
sooth!
(Letterto Rebecca Cummings)
58
Spring 1990
3 Noise Number 5, 1919-20. Oil on canvas,
401/2x 401/2 in. State Universityof New
York College at Brockport Foundation
4
Cummings kept painting. By 1920,
he had worked on ten abstractions
in the series begun the year before, for his entries in the 1920 Independent exhibition were entitled Noise Number 5 and Sound
Number 5 (figs. 3, 4).
Not surprisingly, these early abstractions bear the imprint of several Modernists whom Cummings
admired. Sound Number 5 recalls
the synchromist abstractions of
Morgan Russell such as Synchromy
in Orange: To Form (fig. 5).
Cummings learned of Synchromism through Willard Huntington
Wright'sModem Painting: Its
Tendency and Meaning (1915).
The brother of the synchromist
painter Stanton MacDonald-Wright
(1890-1973), W. H. Wright publicized the movement, explained its
aesthetics, and displayed its paintings at the important Forum exhibition of 1916, which Cummings
probably attended. From Wright's
discussions and Russell's applications, Cummings derived his interest in juxtaposing color planes
to achieve the "bumps and hollows" of three-dimensional form.
Sound Number 5, 1920. Oil on canvas, 42
x 36 in. State Universityof New York
College at Brockport Foundation
5 Morgan Russell, Synchromy in Orange: To
Form, 1913-14. Oil on canvas, 135 x
1211/2 in. Albrigbt-KnoxArt Gallery,
Buffalo, New York,Gift of Seymour H.
Knox, 1958
59
Smithsonian Studies in American Art
Russell may also have inspired
Cummings's penchant for biomorphic abstraction in submerging figurative motifs just
below the surface of an abstract
design. Both Sound Number 5 and
Synchromy in Orange abstract a
torso in contrapposto into large
color planes. Sometimes, in fact,
Cummings's figures break through
the abstract surface, as the elephant does in Noise Number 1
(fig. 6), his other entry to the 1919
Independent. Essentially, however,
he thought of his motifs as "organizations of colour and line."10
Picasso's Cubism, the Futurists,
and their American exponents also
informed Cummings's early aesthetics. He admired Picasso's
"elimination of [the] trivial, pretty,
[and] charming" in directly conveying "sensations of weight, solidity, Depth (hugeness)," and he
even devoted an entire poem to
Picasso, concluding, "You hew
form truly."But Cummings disliked Cubism's ponderousness and
stasis: Cubism created a "cold and
frozen grammar"and administered "an overdose of architecture
6
Noise Number 1, 1919. Oil on canvas, 36
x 36 in. State Universityof New York
College at Brockport Foundation
to the human form," he complained in 1918.11Futurist dynamism nicely compensated Cubist
stasis, but Cummings distrusted
the Futurists'posturing bravado:
early and late, he respected individuals, not groups. Among Futurist-inspiredAmerican painters,
he especially admired Joseph
Stella (1880-1946) and John Marin
(1870-1953). Cummings met
Stella in 1919, and Stella's Battle
of Lights:Coney Island (fig. 7)
probably inspired the tangle of
serpentine and jagged lines and
elliptical curves that Cummings
created a few months later in
Noise Number 5. Like Stella,
Cummings went to Coney Island
to "capture colour and motion."
And like Marin,he found New
York skyscrapers, such as the
Woolworth Building (fig. 8), alive
and dynamic-apt subjects for
paintings such as New York,1927
(fig. 9) and its poetic counterpart
"at the ferocious phenomenon of
5 o'clock i find myself."12For all
their indebtedness, however,
Cummings's early abstractions retain their individuality in the way
7 Joseph Stella, Battle of Lights:Coney Island,
1913. Oil on canzas, 76 x 84 in. Yale
UniversityArt Gallery, New Haven,
Connecticut, Gift of Collection Societe
Anonyme
60
Spring 1990
they transform these influences
into a unique whole. Their poised
tensions of planar solidity and dynamism, of an abstractdesign and
its figurative origins, embody aesthetic ideas Cummings had developed in his notes and applied to
his poetry as well.
The public response to
Cummings's entries at the 1920 Independent exhibition must have
exceeded his most optimistic expectations. This time reviewers
from four newspapers mentioned
his paintings. One called them
"a striking bit of post-impressionism." Another recommended
that Cummings's paintings be included in future exhibitions of abstract art. The most detailed review appeared in the Evening Post:
E. E. Cummings entitles one of
these [abstractions] "NoiseNumber
5" and the other "Sound Number
5". Of the two, we preferred the
noise; both of them are interesting.
Of course, these irregular patterns
of sharp positive color are banners
of a small army of theorists,and
the theories will either entrance
8 John Marin, Lower Manhattan(Composing
derived from top of Woolworth), 1922.
Watercolor and charcoal with paper
cutout attached with thread on paper,
215/8 x 267/8 in. The Museum of Modern
Art, Lillie P. Bliss Bequest
9
you or set your teeth on edge, according to the bias of your theories. But if the paintings can be
looked at with the eye, if they can
be seen as frankly as one sees the
pattern of a roll of linoleum they
are bound to be admired.13
New York, 1927, 1926-27. Oil on canvas,
67 x 42 in. Published in E. E. Cummings,
CIOPW(New York:Covici-Friede,1931)
In the spring of 1920,
Cummings was busily developing
another outlet for his art and
writing: Dial magazine, which had
been recently taken over by his
two close friends, Scofield Thayer
(1890-1982) and Sibley Watson
(1894-1982). Under their superb
guidance, it would become the
best and most influential little
magazine of the 1920s, and
Cummings's work-poems, essays,
paintings, and twenty-two line
drawings-graced mary of its issues over the next nine years.
Here his poetic innovations often
appeared alongside his line drawings. The best of these drawings,
such as Charles Spencer Chaplin,
reveal Cummings's talent for compressing character and motion
into a few sinuous strokes (fig.
10). His fluent line fuses several
61
Smithsonian Studies in American Art
features of the comedian: his forlorn shuffle, legs and feet seeming
to fold into each other; his tragicomic nature in the rose and cane;
the ingratiating,waifish smile in
the subserviently bent head; and
his nimble dexterity both in balancing the rose and in seeming to
come toward the viewer with his
top half while moving away with
his bottom half.
Given the modernist audience
for these Dial drawings (not to
mention the distinguished company they kept with works of
Picasso, Andre Derain [18801954], Henri Matisse [1869-1954],
and others), and given that
Cummings's large abstractions
caught the eye-and usually the
approval-of journalists covering
every Independent exhibition he
entered from 1919 to 1924,
Cummings seemed well on his
way to establishing himself publicly, like Dante Gabriel Rossetti
(1828-1882) before him, as an
artist of two equal callings, a Modernist of poetry and painting. Indeed, in one of the first serious
studies of Cummings's poetry in
1923, the critic Gorham Munson
concluded that "a complete study
of Cummings should take penetrating account of his painting and
drawing, and no estimate of his
literary work can begin without
noting the important fact that
Cummings is a painter."14
Just how thoroughly Cummings
himself believed this "fact,"however, is open to question. Despite
his steady output of large abstractions (at least fifteen by 1921), his
early successes, and his declarations to his parents, peculiar
lapses in his emerging career as a
painter hint at professional uncertainty. For one thing, Cummings
was not aggressive in seeking exhibitions and one-artist shows in
the 1920s, settling instead for a
place in the yearly Independent
exhibition. The Dial, of course,
carried his line drawings to an influential readership, but reproductions in a magazine are no substitute for paintings in a gallery.
Moreover, the mediocre quality of
several drawings published in the
Dial (e.g., fig. 11) suggests that
Thayer and Watson may have
placed personal friendship over
their much-vaunted taste. Such
preferential treatment could have
stunted Cummings's ability to criticize his own work, judgment he
badly needed if no art teacher was
to look over his shoulder. Equally
important, after 1919 Cummings
did not generally associate with
painters. Certainlyhe knew of the
circle of Alfred Stieglitz (18641946) and probably visited
Stieglitz's gallery "291,"but he
made no contacts with this impresario who might have arranged a
one-artist show for him as he had
done for so many other young
Modernists. Apart from Lachaise
and his stepson, the painter
Edward Nagle (1893-?),
Cummings's friends were nearly
all writers or Harvardchums, and
he was aloof to gallery politics, a
10 Charles Spencer Chaplin, 1924. Ink
drawing published in the Dial 76 (March
1924): 248
11 A Line Drawing, 1922. Ink drawing
published in the Dial 72 (January 1922):
46
62
Spring 1990
loner. His distrust of coteries may
have prevented his making important contacts with other painters
and patrons, but his distrust of
himself probably explains his reluctance to seek out one-artist
shows. He may not have felt
ready yet.
Such reluctance may also partly
explain Cummings's decision to
leave America in 1921 and settle
in Paris for the next three years.
To judge from the hundreds of
drawings he made abroad, he apparently felt the need to rethink
his aesthetics and rework his techniques.15In Paris he had easy access to his favorite artists, and the
sketch pad was a convenient place
to work out compositional ideas
gleaned from the Bernheim-Jeune
Gallery and the Luxembourg Museum. But in America, Cummings's
painting virtually disappeared. The
Sounds and Noises yielded to silence, and only a few of his watercolors were exhibited.
At the same time, however,
Cummings's literary reputation
blossomed with the publication of
The Enormous Room in 1922, Tulips and Chimneys in 1923, and
poems in numerous little magazines. And unlike his abstract
painting, which belonged to a
broader modernist movement, his
poems had indeed "done something FIRST,"as he boasted to his
father. His typographical innovations sparked an immediate and
lasting controversy, and Cummings
was soon known for them. Thus
we find the potent irony that
when he returned to America in
December 1923, Cummings still
considered himself "primarilya
painter," as he wrote to his father,
yet to a journalist reviewing his
painting at the 1924 Independent
exhibition, he was already "better
known as a poet and novelist."16
What heightens this irony is
that Cummings's painting had matured during his Parisianhiatus.
12 Noise Number 12, 1924. Oil on canvas, 50
x 40 in. Iconography Collection, Harry
Ransom Humanities Research Center,
Universityof Texas at Austin
13 Noise Number 13, 1925. Oil on canvas,
5912 x 43 in. Private collection, New York
His Noise Number 12 of 1924 and
Noise Number 13 of the following
year are markedly superior to the
earlier abstractions in their fluency
of line, concentrated force, and
balance of planar weight and dynamism (figs. 12, 13). The noise of
Noise Number 12, for example, is
clearly jazz, conveyed not only by
the central figure suggesting a saxophone and the silhouetted hints
of toe tapping and faces and hands
making music, but also by the
flowing, twisting, and jaggedly syncopated rhythm lines.17The aural
metaphor of these visual images
63
Smithsonian Studies in American Art
impressed a reporter from the
New YorkSun and Globe as being
especially apt: he gave Noise
Number 12 premier mention in
reviewing the 1924 Independent.18
If Noise Number 12 portrays
fluent rhythms,Noise Number 13
emphasizes conflicting tensions of
expansion and contraction. Tubes
and cones push in toward the
center, spirals spin out toward the
edges and coil inward to suggest
three-dimensional depth, and the
foreshortened cylinder at bottom
center leads down into the design
to convey height. These conflicts
14 sea, 1944. Oil on canvasboard, 12 x 16 in.
State Universityof New York College at
Brockport Foundation
15 View from Joy Farm:Mt. Chocorua, 1941.
Oil on canvas, 38 x 48 in. Private
collection
of directional force and dimension
create (to quote from Cummings's
play Him) "a kinesis fatally composed of countless mutually dependent stresses, a product-andquotient of innumerable perfectly
interrelated tensions." Cummings
liked this oil well enough to have
it reproduced several times: in the
1925 Independent catalogue, in
the Dial of August 1927, and in his
1931 art book, entitled CIOPW
64
Spring 1990
(charcoal, ink, oil, pencil, watercolor). But it proved to be his farewell to modernist abstraction:late
in 1926 he revealed, in a letter to
his mother, that he hoped "to resume Painting but in a new
direction."19
The "new direction" developed
in New York, 1927, an ambitious
oil that superimposes a largerthan-life nude over a Marinesque
melange of tulips, chimneys, and
skyscrapers (see fig. 9). Clearly
Cummings was seeking a style that
would reconcile the figurative and
abstractwithout sacrificing either.
In this retreat from modernist abstraction, he was certainly not
alone. Indeed, by 1926 scarcely
any American painter besides
ArthurDove (1880-1946) and
StuartDavis (1894-1964) maintained the abstractstyles of the
teens. As the critic Sam Hunter
observed, "The rapid decline of
American experimental art [in the
early 1920s] left a vacuum which
increasingly all but the most resolute innovators filled by relaxing
into less demanding styles of realism or eclecticism."20But just as
with his development of a modernist style, external fashion mattered far less to Cummings than
did a personal aesthetics, which
abstraction could no longer fulfill.
His "new direction," moreover,
did not evolve into a single style,
for he painted in several styles in
subsequent years, from the
expressionism of sea (fig. 14), to
the naturalism of Viewfrom Joy
Farm: Mt. Chocorua (fig. 15), to
the dreamy sort of night painting
of Untitled (fig. 16).
By "new direction," Cummings
meant less a new style than a new
orientation to the subject, one that
abandoned the detached objectivity of Modernism for an
engaged subjectivityand that
embraced nature as a medium of
self-expression rather than as an
accessory to an abstract design. As
in New York, 1927, he sought to
transcend categorical distinctions
between abstract and figural, natural and human: his trees twist anthropomorphically; his clouds
swirl apocalyptically.In his SelfPortrait with Sketchpad,for example, the tree trunk-a curving
feminine torso-extends a sheltering branch over the artist (fig.
17). Is she the artist's muse or the
Jungian complement, the anima, to
16 Untitled (Man Worshiping Moon), n.d. Oil
on cardboard, 15 x 8 in. State Universityof
New York College at Brockport Foundation
65
Smithsonian Studies in American Art
his animus, his identity as an
artist?For a poet and painter who
revered nature as deeply as
Cummings did-and who speculated in Jungian terms on the feminine side of his creativity-this
need to express the relation between self and nature, male and
female, was as essential to his artistic identity as his need to reconcile the figural and abstractwas to
his aesthetics.21
Cummings felt that his new direction suited his identity as an
artist. In encouraging spontaneity
and self-expression, it permitted
his painting "to live suddenly
without thinking," as he put it in
one early poem.22Expressive
freedom, in turn, encouraged stylistic uniqueness, an all-important
quality for this artist. For several
reasons, however, Cummings's
abandonment of modernist abstraction proved to be a critical
disaster. While he tinkered with
his new direction, he became
even more reticent to display his
work outside the yearly Independent exhibition. Not until 1931 did
he "go public" with two one-artist
shows and with his art book
CIOPW.By this time, however, he
had published five volumes of poetry, participated in a sixth, and
written a book-length narrative,a
play (produced in 1927), and
about two dozen short essays for
the Dial and Vanity Fair.
If Cummings was "better
known as a poet and novelist" in
1924, he was likely known only as
a writer by 1931. Critics who reviewed his one-artist shows in the
years thereafter-notably in 1934,
1944, and 1949-invariably expressed surprise on learning that
the bad boy of American letters
also painted; they thus viewed the
paintings as "AParenthesis to the
Career of a Poet," as Hilton
Kramerentitled a 1968 review.
The critics were also surprisedunpleasantly, for the most part-
17 Self-Portraitwith Sketchpad, 1939. Oil on
canvas, 43 x 311/2 in. Iconography
Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities
Research Center, Universityof Texas at
Austin
that Cummings's postmodernist
painting did not pose the visual
challenge of his writing. Henry
McBride's response to Cummings's
1934 exhibition is typical: "You
could never imagine [the paintings] to be by the author of 'Eimi.'
They are thin, uncertain, and separated by some curious wall of inhibition from the medium."23
Cummings's stylistic meandering in his later work strengthened the critics' misconception
66
Spring 1990
that painting was only a pastime
for him. In turn, their coolness to
his later work and misreading of
his seriousness probably kept him
from exhibiting more often (he
had ten one-artist shows after
1927) and impelled him after 1949
to seek safer havens, like Rochester, New York, when he did exhibit: thus the vicious circle of privacy causing misconception and
misconception causing greater
privacy.
Whether Cummings could have
succeeded in establishing a public
persona as a painter had he continued his modernist style is a
moot but interesting question. All
the abstractions he exhibited publicly proved their power to capture the eye, just as his early poetry did. His last abstractions,
Noise Number 12 and Noise
Number 13, moreover, demonstrate an impressive growth in stylistic confidence and suggest that,
had he continued in this vein, he
might have developed a distinctly
personal and recognizable brand
of Modernism, as StuartDavis did,
for example, even as modernist
abstraction faded from the American scene. But Cummings's failure
to develop his painterly potential
in the early 1920s to match his
burgeoning reputation as a writer
and his abandonment of Modernism later in the decade effectively consigned his later painting
to obscurity.
Painting and Poem: Some
Comparative Approaches
In a catalogue statement for one
of his one-artist shows, Cummings
posed and answered a persistent
question about how his two arts
cohered in practice:
Tell me, doesn't your painting interfere with your writing?
Quite the contrary: they love each
other dearly.24
Indeed, that "mutual love" marked
the modernist movement as a
whole. Interminglings of the arts
were visible everywhere: in
RichardWagner's (1813-1883)
Gesamtkunstwerk;in the Symbolists' colloquies and shared subjects; in Ezra Pound's (1885-1972)
forays into other arts to expand
his concept of the image; in
Gertrude Stein's (1874-1946)
Cubist-inspired portraits;in Arnold
Schonberg's (1874-1951) painting
67
Smithsonian Studies in American Art
and composing with the Munich
expressionist group Blaue Reiter;
and in the influence that Marcel
Duchamp (1887-1968), Charles
Sheeler (1883-1965), and Charles
Demuth (1883-1939) exerted on
William Carlos Williams's (18831963) poetry, to cite but a few instances. But perhaps for no one
more than Cummings were two
arts so closely connected and mutually interactive, since he not only
devoted equal time to each but
also guided them both by a
common set of aesthetic
principles.
Early on, critics recognized the
importance of considering together Cummings's "twin obsessions," as he called them, but this
awareness soon faded with his
public persona as a painter and
did not reemerge until the late
1970s. Comparativestudies since
then have noted parallels in subject matter, genre, technique, and,
more recently, aesthetics.25All
these approaches deserve mention
to emphasize how profoundly
Cummings's visual imagination informed his poetry-but not equal
mention, since they do not equally
delineate the relations between
his arts. Similarly, any comparative
method must be sensitive to differences in Cummings's practice
and skill in the two arts and to
their apparent stylistic divergences.
Given Cummings's strong response to the subject and his unabashed romanticism, it is hardly
surprising that the things he cared
about-mountains and flowers,
friends and lovers-should inhabit
his poems and later canvases
equally. Even the most casual
reader of his poems, for example,
quickly discerns how profoundly
Cummings loved nature, a love
that, in fusing childlike joy and religious reverence, could reach a
pitch of lyrical ecstasy, or just as
easily fall into saccharine
sentimentality:
when faces called flowers float out of the ground
-it's april(yes,april;mydarling)it's spring!
yes the pretty birds frolic as spry as can fly
yes the little fish gambol as glad as can be
(yes the mountains are dancing together)26
The same two-edged potential
holds for the views of Mount Chocorua that Cummings painted tirelessly from his family's farm in the
White Mountains of New Hampshire, much as his hero, Paul
Cezanne, repeatedly returned to
the distant motif of Mont SainteVictoire. Indeed, Cummings's View
from Joy Farm (see fig. 15) even
borrows the framing motif from
Cezanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire
(1886-88, Courtauld Institute). As
Viewfrom Joy Farm suggests,
these landscapes, while technically
accomplished, sometimes lapse
into prettiness and conventionality.
Occasionally, though, when inspiration overcame his chronic uncertainty in oils, Cummings could
turn out impressive work, particularly in watercolors calling for
light, fast brushwork. His painting
Untitled (fig. 18), in capturing one
moment of a shifting, tumultuous
sky, recalls the nature poems that,
although carefully crafted, evoke a
startling moment-a lightning
bolt, for example, as in the poem
"n(o)w," excerpted below-with
the feeling of spontaneity.2'
Comparisons of subject matter
in the paintings and poems may
reveal shared themes and likewise
suggest parallel strengths (inspired
spontaneity) and weaknesses (sentimentality, triteness) to which
Cummings's work in each medium
is prone. But such comparisons do
not really explain how his painting
relates to his poetry.
Genre brings us a little closer.
The other side of Cummings's lyrical affirmationwas his corrosive
satire and biting portraiture.As his
Chaplin (see fig. 10) shows, Cummings had a caricaturist'seye for
telling detail. Even in a drawing
obviously tossed off in a hurry,
such as one of his friend and pa-
n(o)w
the
how
dis(appeared cleverly)world
iS Slapped:with;liGhtninG
at
which(shal)lpounceupcrackw(ill)jumps
of
THuNdeRB
loSSo!M
(Excerpt from E. E. Cummings, "n(o)w")
68
Spring 1990
18 Untitled (Landscape with Stormy Sky), n.d.
Watercolor on paper, 812 x 11 in. Prizate
collection
tron Scofield Thayer, Cummings
wittily captures Thayer's aristocratically arched brow and dandified bow mouth (fig. 19). In
Cummings's poetry, satire figures
even more prominently. It provided the perfect medium to attack values he opposed, for the
Reverend Edward Cummings's son
was, beneath his celebrations of
the senses, a moralist, albeit a
witty one. As both his contemporaries and his recorded Nonlectures confirm, he had a superb ear
and voice for mimicry.28Witness
his evocation of the half-formed
thoughts, half-swallowed syllables,
and half-human savagery of this
South Boston "tough" opining on
what wartime America should do
to the Japanese:
69
Smithsonian Studies in American Art
ygUDuh
ydoan
yunnuhstan
ydoan o
yunnuhstan dem
yguduh ged
yunnuhstan dem doidee
yguduh ged riduh
ydoan o nudn
LISNbud LISN
dem
gud
am
lidl yelluh bas
tuds weer goin
duhSIVILEYEzum29
Both expressions of satire demonstrate Cummings's sensitivity to
visual and aural nuance and his
ability to exaggerate nuance into
caricature and mimicry. Yet poetry
gave him more opportunity for
subtlety, for thematic complexity
and double entendre, such as slipto
ping "EYE"into "SIVILEYEz"
recall one moral code that the
speaker would no doubt affirm:
"an eye for an eye." With brush
and pen, Cummings was no
George Grosz (1893-1959) and
could not achieve a comparable
subtlety.
When we turn to the visual devices in Cummings's poetry and
compare them to analogous devices in his paintings and to the
aesthetic principles generating
both, the connections between the
two arts become tighter. Although
Cummings's famous typographical
innovations in one sense came out
of the free verse movement of the
teens and owe much to Pound
and perhaps to Guillaume
Apollinaire (1880-1918), they owe
even more to his own painterly vision-only now the typewriter
served as his paintbrush. In this
regard, critics have often and
rightly observed how much the
typewriter, with its sharply delineated print, its precision of placement, and its mechanical regu-
19 Untitled (Scofield Thayer), before 1923.
Pencil drawing, 81/2x 11 in. E. E.
Cummings Papers, Houghton Library,
Hanrard University
larity, enhanced and even
stimulated Cummings's visual dislocations. One element in both
media can serve as an example.
As a painter, Cummings knew
how directly line creates or
impedes motion. As he acknowledged in his foreword to is 5, his
1926 book of poems, "I am abnormally fond of that precision which
creates movement." His unpublished notes, moreover, speculate
often and in detail on methods to
achieve motion in both arts and
the types of motion various lines
effect.30Not surprisingly, then,
such abstractions as Noise Number
1 (see fig. 6) emphasize lines that
create dynamism-sweeping arcs
and curves, diagonals-while eschewing more static horizontals
and verticals.
In Cummings's poems, line is
more complex, for it functions in
dimensions of space and time simultaneously.31As the poem unfolds temporally, the narrative line
conveys motion through its pace,
its accelerations and retards. Simultaneously, however, the short
lyric (Cummings's metier) exists
in space, its line lengths and
placements immediately apprehensible to the eye. Cummings exploited both of these linear dimensions to generate the motions
of his well-known "BuffaloBill's":
Buffalo Bill's
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death32
70
Spring 1990
Spatially,the lines lengthen in
the poem's top half as they move
farther to the right. They reach
their extremity with the expletive
"Jesus,"then retreat and shorten
in the lower half, returning finally
to the left margin with "Mister
Death." A diagram of the extremities of this progression and recession produces an arrowhead-an
appropriate shape to associate
with this famous Indian scoutwith its point of maximum force at
'Jesus." Temporally, the poem's
pacing begins slowly with the announcement of Buffalo Bill's death
spaced over two lines, gradually
accelerates as his dynamic life is
recalled, and reaches its peak of
acceleration and greatest intensity
when Buffalo Bill himself was
most magnificently alive: "and
break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat /Jesus." As the
line shortens and returns to the
left margin-the margin of death
and the present-the pace decelerates, the intensity slackens, and
the poem grounds to an emphatic
halt on "Death."Linear spacing
and pace thus work in perfect synchrony to create motion and intensity by controlling not only the
poem's visual form and thematic
development but also the reader's
perception and experience of it.
The full power of Cummings's
visual imagination-the painterly
vision of his poems-occurs in
poems that must be seen and can
scarcely be read orally, such as
reprinted
"r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r,"
below.33
The transformations of "r-p-o-ph-e-s-s-a-g-r"are almost exclusively
visual, not only in the scrambled
letters of "grasshopper"that gradually unscramble themselves but
also in the tmesis of "rearrangingly become"-a simultaneous
presentation that virtually defies
coherent oral reading-and in the
falling "1/ eA / !p:"with its capital
"A"suggesting the apex of the grasshopper's leap. In exploiting the
visual potential of each black mark
on his white page-its potential as
ideograph, as abstractshape, as
implied line, as something to slow
or speed the pacing, as visual embodiment of semantic meaningCummings made the real subject
of his poems the experience of
reading and seeing them: their
process, their continuous becoming, their inexhaustible transformativeness. Ironically, though,
even as they give the effect of
r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r
who
a)s w(e loo)k
upnowgath
PPEGORHRASS
eringint(oaThe):l
eA
a
S
(r
rivlnG
.gRrEaPsPhOs)
to
rea(be)rran(com)gi(e)ngly
,grasshopper;
(E. E. Cummings, "r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r")
71
Smithsonian Studies in American Art
spontaneity, of "happening" on
the page, they result from the calculated placement of each mark:
Cummings planned his spontaneity.3"In his painting after 1926,
by contrast, Cummings usually
pursued this spontaneity more directly through a kinetic technique,
or, as he put it in one private
note, "chunking ahead with a big
brush held loosely & loaded with
paint."35The painting sea is one of
the more successful examples of
this style (see fig. 14).
In virtually all respects, then,
Cummings's poetry was more
complex and subtle than his
painting. By responding to the
slightest nuance of language and
intensifying such nuances with his
visual imagination, he was able to
manipulate and exploit words in
more ways to effect more kinds
and dimensions of meaningvisual, aural, semantic, and syntactic-than he could achieve
through his painting. The "calculated spontaneity" of his poems,
moreover, permitted a fine balance between thought and feeling,
between the poem's disciplined
construction and its visceral ap-
pearance. His painting, by contrast,
gravitated toward one or the other
of these poles but seldom integrated them successfully. The calculated paintings, such as View
from Joy Farm (see fig. 15), thus
risked stodginess and conventionality, while the "spontaneous"
style could produce a muddle
when it was not inspired.
William Slater Brown was perhaps right to question from the
outset Cummings's dogged persistence in painting when words
were clearly his medium.
Cummings was a born writer, a
self-made painter. Yet one cannot
help but respect his perseverance
as a painter who endured all
manner of disappointments: bad
reviews, indifference and ignorance, misconceptions about his
seriousness, and, potentially most
crippling of all, self-doubts about
his aims.36Cummings weathered
them all and continued painting to
the day he died. Whatever their
stutterings of facility, their lapses
of critical judgment, his paintings
bespeak an artist for whom the
self-created identity of "poet and
painter" was indivisible.
Notes
1 E. E. Cummings to Rebecca H.
Cummings, 24 April 1919, Selected Letters ofEEE. Cummings, ed. F. W.
Dupee and George Stade (New York:
Harcourt Brace & World, 1969), p. 58.
2 Although the term "defamiliarization"
belongs to Russian Formalism,
Cummings's notes show that he pursued the same effect in his poetry
through visual displacements in
spacing and typography. See Milton A.
Cohen, "E. E. Cummings' Sleight-ofHand: Perceptual Ambiguity in His
Early Poetry, Painting,and Career,"
Universit, of Hartford Studies in Literature 15, no. 1 (1983): 33-46.
3 Isabel Lachaise,quoted in Cummings
to Rebecca Cummings, 7 April 1919,
Selected Letters,ed. Dupee and Stade,
72
Spring 1990
p. 58. For other references to Lachaise,
see letters dated 1918-20, pp. 45-63.
4
"Independents Run Gamut in Art
Show," New YorkSun, 30 March 1919,
p. 14, col. 3. On Cummings's gallery
invitations, see Cummings to Rebecca
Cummings, 7 April and 24 April 1919,
Selected Letters,ed. Dupee and Stade,
pp. 57-58. On his nomination to the
board of directors of the Independent,
see Richard S. Kennedy, Dreams in the
Mirror:A Biography of E. E.
Cummings (New York:Liveright,
1980), p. 204.
5 Cummings's 1915 undergraduate commencement address, "The New Art,"
reflects his familiaritywith an impressive range of avant-gardeartists, including Igor Stravinsky(1882-1971)
and Arnold Schonberg, Paul Cezanne,
Pablo Picasso, Ezra Pound, and
Gertrude Stein. Reprinted in E. E.
Cummings:A Miscellany Revised, ed.
George J. Firmage (New York:October House, 1965), pp. 5-11. See also
Kennedy, Dreams in the Mirror, pp.
78-82; John Dos Passos, The Best
Times (New York:New American Library, 1966), p. 35.
6 E. E. Cummings, "GastonLachaise,"
Dial, February 1920, reprinted in Miscellany Revised, ed. Firmage, pp.
16-17.
7 Willard H. Wright,Moder Painting:
Its Tendency and Meaning (New York:
John Lane, 1915); Emile Bernard, Souvenirs sur Paul Cezanne (Paris: Societe des Trente, 1912); Cummings to
Rebecca Cummings, 2 March 1922, E.
E. Cummings Papers, Houghton Library, HarvardUniversity, Cambridge,
Mass.
8 Cummings to Rebecca Cummings, 19
February 1917 and 2 March 1922,
Cummings Papers.
9 Cummings, quoted in Kennedy,
Dreams in the Mirror, p. 166.
10 Cummings to Rebecca Cummings, 2
March 1922 and 18June 1918,
Cummings Papers. So devoted was
Cummings to Wright's criticism (which
included brilliant exegeses of
Cezanne's techniques) that to praise
his college friend Scofield Thayer,
Cummings dubbed him "W.H.
W[right],Jr."
11 Cummings, "Notes,"ca. early 1920s,
Cummings Papers;E. E. Cummings,
"Picasso,"iii, Portraits,XLIPoems
(1925), reprinted in E. E. Cummings:
Complete Poems 1913-1962 (New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1980), p. 195; Cummings, "Notes,"ca.
1918, Cummings Papers.
12 Cummings to Rebecca Cummings, 18
June 1918 and 2 March 1919,
Cummings Papers;E. E. Cummings,
"at the ferocious phenomenon of
5 o'clock i find myself," rx, Portraits,
XLIPoems, reprinted in Complete
Poems, p. 201. In 1925 Cummings
called Marin "America'sgreatest living
painter" in an article that also refers to
their common motif, the Woolworth
Building. "The Adult, the Artist,and
the Circus,"Vanity Fair, October 1925,
reprinted in Miscellany Revised, ed.
Firmage, pp. 112-13.
13 "L'ArtPour L'ArtRevels in Splash of
Naked Truth,"New York World, 12
73
Smithsonian Studies in American Art
March 1920, p. 8, col. 3; S. Jay
Kaufman,review of the 1920 Independent exhibition, New YorkGlobe and
Advertiser,quoted in Kennedy, Dreams
in the Mirror, p. 211; review in New
YorkEvening Post, 12 March 1920, p.
11, cols. 4-5.
14 Gorham Munson, "Syrinx,"Secession 5
(July 1923): 2-11, reprinted in E. E.
Cummings and the Critics,ed. Stanley
V. Baum (East Lansing,Mich.:Michigan
State University Press, 1962), pp. 9-18.
15 Cummings's Parisiandrawings, in the
Cummings Papers, Houghton Library,
are easily datable by their French watermark-the same paper he used in
dated letters home.
16 Cummings to Edward Cummings, 22
May 1920, Selected Letters,ed. Dupee
and Stade, p. 71; Cummings to Edward
Cummings, 5 December 1923,
Cummings Papers;review in New York
Sun and Globe, 6 March 1924, p. 16,
cols. 2-3.
17 Compare Cummings's poem "ta,"
which depicts a toe tapping to syncopated jazz. III, Portraits,& [AND]
(1925), reprinted in Complete Poems,
p. 107.
18 New YorkSun and Globe, 6 March
1924, p. 16.
19 E. E. Cummings, Him (New York:Boni
& Liveright,1927), act 1, sc. 4;
Cummings to Rebecca Cummings, 4
October 1926, Cummings Papers.
20 Sam Hunter and John Jacobus, American Art of the 20th Century (New
York:Abrams, 1973), p. 120.
21 Cummings, "Notes,"ca. 1940s,
Cummings Papers.
22 E. E. Cummings, "let's live suddenly
without thinking," Dx,Sonnets-Actualities, & [AND], reprinted in Complete
Poems, p. 160.
23 Hilton Kramer,"AParenthesis to the
Career of a Poet,"New York Times, 16
March 1968, p. 26, cols. 1-3; Henry
McBride, review of Cummings's 1934
exhibition, New YorkSun, 3 February
1934, p. 9, cols. 1-2.
24 E. E. Cummings, "Foreword to an Exhibit: II," from catalogue of one-artist
show at the Memorial Gallery, Rochester, N.Y.,May 1945, reprinted in Miscellany Revised, ed. Firmage, pp.
316-17.
25 Munson, "Syrinx."Besides an impressionistic chapter on Cummings as
artist in Charles Norman's biography
The Magic Maker:E. E. Cummings
(New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972), pp.
255-76, and chronological references
in Kennedy's biography Dreams in the
Mirror, the chief work on Cummings's
painting is by Rushworth Kidder:
"E. E. Cummings, Painter,"Harvard Library Bulletin 23 (April 1975): 117-38;
"'Author of Pictures':A Study of
Cummings's Line Drawings in The
Dial," Contemporary Literature 17
(1976): 470-505; "'Twin Obsessions':
The Poetry and Paintings of E. E.
Cummings,"Georgia Review 32
(Summer 1978): 342-68; "Cummings
and Cubism,"Journal of Modern Literature 7 (April 1979): 225-91; and by
Milton A. Cohen: PoetandPainter: The
Aestheticsof E. E. Cummings's Early
Work (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1987), pp. 33-64; E. E.
Cummings' Paintings: TheHidden Career (Dallas: University of Texas at
Dallas and Dallas Public Library,1982).
26 E. E. Cummings, "when faces called
flowers float out of the ground," 67,
XAIPE(1950), reprinted in Complete
Poems, p. 665. This and other poems
by Cummings appearing in this article
are reprinted by persmission of Liveright Publishing Corp. ? 1923, 1925,
1931, and renewed 1951, 1953, 1959
by E. E. Cummings; ? 1973, 1976,
1978, 1979 by the Trustees for the
E. E. Cummings Trust;( 1973, 1976,
1978, 1979 by George James Firmage.
27 E. E. Cummings, "n(o)w," xxxviii,
W[ViVa] (1931), reprinted in Complete Poems, p. 347.
28 E. E. Cummings, i: Six Nonlectures,
Charles Eliot Norton Lectures recorded at Sanders Theatre, Harvard
University, 1952-53, phonograph records, Caedmon TX 1186-91, 1965.
74
Spring 1990
29 E. E. Cummings, "ygUDuh,"VII,1 x 1
[One Times One] (1944), reprinted in
Complete Poems, p. 547.
30 E. E. Cummings, foreword to is 5
(1926), reprinted in Complete Poems,
p. 223. See also Cohen, PoetandPainter, p. 151.
31 Of course line in painting can also
convey passing time, as painters from
Tommaso Giovanni di Masaccio
(1401-1428) to Picasso have demonstrated. But Cummings, in striving for
instantaneityin his painting, ignored
this potential.
32 E. E. Cummings, "BuffaloBill's,"vii,
Portraits,TULIPS,Tulips and Chimneys
(1923), reprinted in Complete Poems,
p. 60.
33 E. E. Cummings, "r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r,"
13, No Thanks (1935), reprinted in
Complete Poems, p. 396.
34 In E. E. Cummings: The Poet as Artist
(Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1960), chap. 5, Norman
Friedman traced Cummings's poem
"rosetree,rosetree" through numerous
drafts. Both as dynamic process and
crafted object, his poems confirm
Cummings in the classical role of
maker-poietes,as he himself acknowledged: "If a poet is anybody, he is
somebody ... who is obsessed by
Making."Foreword to is 5, reprinted
in Complete Poems, p. 223.
35 Cummings, "Notes," 1940, Cummings
Papers.
36 As late as 1940, Cummings could declare, "ApparentlyI've found my style
in painting," confirming not the discovery so much as the search. "Notes,"
1940, Cummings Papers.