E. E. Cummings: Modernist Painter and Poet

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17 Self-Portrait with Sketchpad, 1939. Oil on canvas, 43 x 311/2 in. Iconography Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of 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 paint- ings] to be by the author of 'Eimi.' They are thin, uncertain, and sepa- rated by some curious wall of in- hibition from the medium."23 Cummings's stylistic mean- dering in his later work strength- ened 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 Roch- ester, New York, when he did ex- hibit: 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 pub- licly proved their power to cap- ture the eye, just as his early poetry did. His last abstractions, Noise Number 12 and Noise Number 13, moreover, demon- strate 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 Stuart Davis did, for example, even as modernist abstraction faded from the Amer- ican 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 Mod- ernism later in the decade effec- tively 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 in- terfere 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 Richard Wagner's (1813-1883) Gesamtkunstwerk; in the Symbol- ists' colloquies and shared sub- jects; 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 (1883- 1963) poetry, to cite but a few in- stances. But perhaps for no one more than Cummings were two arts so closely connected and mu- tually 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 to- gether Cummings's "twin obses- sions," as he called them, but this awareness soon faded with his public persona as a painter and did not reemerge until the late 1970s. Comparative studies since then have noted parallels in subject matter, genre, technique, and, more recently, aesthetics.25 All these approaches deserve mention to emphasize how profoundly Cummings's visual imagination in- formed 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 dif- ferences 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 un- abashed 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 re- ligious reverence, could reach a pitch of lyrical ecstasy, or just as easily fall into saccharine sentimentality:
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 technique
Page 8 and 9: 6 Noise Number 1, 1919. Oil on canv
Page 10 and 11: 10 Charles Spencer Chaplin, 1924. I
Page 12 and 13: 14 sea, 1944. Oil on canvasboard, 1
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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