E. E. Cummings: Modernist Painter and Poet

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14 sea, 1944. Oil on canvasboard, 12 x 16 in. State University of 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 com- posed of countless mutually de- pendent stresses, a product-and- quotient 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, water- color). But it proved to be his fare- well to modernist abstraction: late in 1926 he revealed, in a letter to his mother, that he hoped "to re- sume Painting but in a new direction."19 The "new direction" developed in New York, 1927, an ambitious oil that superimposes a larger- than-life nude over a Marinesque melange of tulips, chimneys, and
16 Untitled (Man Worshiping Moon), n.d. Oil on cardboard, 15 x 8 in. State University of New York College at Brockport Foundation skyscrapers (see fig. 9). Clearly Cummings was seeking a style that would reconcile the figurative and abstract without sacrificing either. In this retreat from modernist abstraction, he was certainly not alone. Indeed, by 1926 scarcely any American painter besides Arthur Dove (1880-1946) and Stuart Davis (1894-1964) main- tained the abstract styles 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 reso- lute innovators filled by relaxing into less demanding styles of re- alism or eclecticism."20 But just as with his development of a modernist style, external fashion mat- tered 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 View from 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 objec- tivity of Modernism for an engaged subjectivity and 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, nat- ural and human: his trees twist an- thropomorphically; his clouds swirl apocalyptically. In his Self- Portrait with Sketchpad, for ex- ample, the tree trunk-a curving feminine torso-extends a shel- tering branch over the artist (fig. 17). Is she the artist's muse or the Jungian complement, the anima, to 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 specu- lated 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 ar- tistic identity as his need to reconcile the figural and abstract was 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.22 Expressive freedom, in turn, encouraged sty- listic 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 Indepen- dent 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 po- etry, 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 re- viewed his one-artist shows in the years thereafter-notably in 1934, 1944, and 1949-invariably ex- pressed surprise on learning that the bad boy of American letters also painted; they thus viewed the paintings as "A Parenthesis to the Career of a Poet," as Hilton Kramer entitled a 1968 review. The critics were also surprised- unpleasantly, for the most part-
Page 1 and 2: E. E. Cummings: Modernist Painter a
Page 4 and 5: 1 Sound Number 1, 1919. Oil on canv
Page 6 and 7: Of the Modernists whose tech- nique
Page 8 and 9: 6 Noise Number 1, 1919. Oil on canv
Page 10 and 11: 10 Charles Spencer Chaplin, 1924. I
Page 14 and 15: 17 Self-Portrait with Sketchpad, 19
Page 16 and 17: when faces called flowers float out
Page 18 and 19: 19 Untitled (Scofield Thayer), befo
Page 20 and 21: spontaneity, of "happening" on the
Page 22: The Magic Maker: E. E. Cummings (Ne

E. E. Cummings: Modernist Painter and Poet

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