E. E. Cummings: Modernist Painter and Poet

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
1923, the critic Gorham Munson
concluded that "a complete study
of Cummings should take pene-
trating 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," how-
ever, is open to question. Despite
his steady output of large abstrac-
tions (at least fifteen by 1921), his
early successes, and his declara-
tions to his parents, peculiar
lapses in his emerging career as a
painter hint at professional uncer-
tainty. For one thing, Cummings
was not aggressive in seeking ex-
hibitions 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 in-
fluential readership, but reproduc-
tions in a magazine are no substi-
tute 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 criti-
cize 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. Certainly he knew of the
circle of Alfred Stieglitz (1864-
1946) and probably visited
Stieglitz's gallery "291," but he
made no contacts with this impre-
sario 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 Harvard chums, and
he was aloof to gallery politics, a
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.15
In 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 "primarily a
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 Parisian hiatus.