E. E. Cummings: Modernist Painter and Poet

6 Noise Number 1, 1919. Oil on canvas, 36
x 36 in. State University of New York
College at Brockport Foundation
7 Joseph Stella, Battle of Lights: Coney Island,
1913. Oil on canzas, 76 x 84 in. Yale
University Art Gallery, New Haven,
Connecticut, Gift of Collection Societe
Anonyme
to the human form," he com-
plained in 1918.11 Futurist dyna-
mism nicely compensated Cubist
stasis, but Cummings distrusted
the Futurists' posturing bravado:
early and late, he respected indi-
viduals, not groups. Among Fu-
turist-inspired American 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."12 For all
their indebtedness, however,
Cummings's early abstractions re-
tain their individuality in the way
60 Spring 1990
they transform these influences
into a unique whole. Their poised
tensions of planar solidity and dy-
namism, of an abstract design and
its figurative origins, embody aes-
thetic ideas Cummings had devel-
oped in his notes and applied to
his poetry as well.
The public response to
Cummings's entries at the 1920 In-
dependent exhibition must have
exceeded his most optimistic ex-
pectations. This time reviewers
from four newspapers mentioned
his paintings. One called them
"a striking bit of post-impres-
sionism." Another recommended
that Cummings's paintings be in-
cluded in future exhibitions of ab-
stract art. The most detailed re-
view appeared in the Evening Post:
E. E. Cummings entitles one of
these [abstractions] "Noise Number
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