E. E. Cummings: Modernist Painter and Poet

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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."35 The 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- Notes 1 E. E. Cummings to Rebecca H. Cummings, 24 April 1919, Selected Letters ofE EE. 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-of- Hand: Perceptual Ambiguity in His Early Poetry, Painting, and Career," Universit, of Hartford Studies in Liter- ature 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 pearance. His painting, by contrast, gravitated toward one or the other of these poles but seldom inte- grated them successfully. The calculated paintings, such as View from Joy Farm (see fig. 15), thus risked stodginess and convention- ality, while the "spontaneous" style could produce a muddle when it was not inspired. William Slater Brown was per- haps right to question from the outset Cummings's dogged persis- tence 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 igno- rance, misconceptions about his seriousness, and, potentially most crippling of all, self-doubts about his aims.36 Cummings 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. p. 58. For other references to Lachaise, see letters dated 1918-20, pp. 45-63. 4 "Independents Run Gamut in Art Show," New York Sun, 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 com- mencement address, "The New Art," reflects his familiarity with an impres- sive range of avant-garde artists, in- cluding 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, "Gaston Lachaise," Dial, February 1920, reprinted in Mis- cellany Revised, ed. Firmage, pp. 16-17. 7 Willard H. Wright, Moder Painting: Its Tendency and Meaning (New York: John Lane, 1915); Emile Bernard, Sou- venirs sur Paul Cezanne (Paris: So- ciete des Trente, 1912); Cummings to Rebecca Cummings, 2 March 1922, E. E. Cummings Papers, Houghton Li- brary, Harvard University, 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, XLI Poems (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, XLI Poems, reprinted in Complete Poems, p. 201. In 1925 Cummings called Marin "America's greatest 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'Art Pour L'Art Revels 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 Indepen- dent exhibition, New York Globe and Advertiser, quoted in Kennedy, Dreams in the Mirror, p. 211; review in New York Evening 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 Parisian drawings, in the Cummings Papers, Houghton Library, are easily datable by their French wa- termark-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 synco- pated jazz. III, Portraits, & [AND] (1925), reprinted in Complete Poems, p. 107. 18 New York Sun 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, Amer- ican 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-Actual- ities, & [AND], reprinted in Complete Poems, p. 160. 23 Hilton Kramer, "A Parenthesis 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 York Sun, 3 February 1934, p. 9, cols. 1-2. 24 E. E. Cummings, "Foreword to an Ex- hibit: II," from catalogue of one-artist show at the Memorial Gallery, Roch- ester, N.Y., May 1945, reprinted in Mis- cellany Revised, ed. Firmage, pp. 316-17. 25 Munson, "Syrinx." Besides an impres- sionistic chapter on Cummings as artist in Charles Norman's biography
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 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 22: The Magic Maker: E. E. Cummings (Ne

E. E. Cummings: Modernist Painter and Poet

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