E. E. Cummings: Modernist Painter and Poet Author(s): Milton A. Cohen Source: Smithsonian Studies in American Art, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Spring, 1990), pp. 54-74 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Smithsonian American Art Museum Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3108985 . Accessed: 05/04/2011 17:57 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The University of Chicago Press and Smithsonian American Art Museum are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Smithsonian Studies in American Art. http://www.jstor.org E. E. Cummings Modenist Painter and Poet Milton A. Cohen As painters took down their can- 1965), Max Weber (1881-1961), vases after the huge 1919 exhibi- and Edward Bruce (1879-1943).2 tion of the Society of Independent Cummings's letter refers to three Artists in New York, one young art- highly influential artists in postwar ist eagerly wrote to his parents of New York: the Cubist painter his success: Albert Gleizes, the sculptor Gaston Lachaise (1882-1935), and the You may be glad to know that painter and director of the Society Gleizes(the 'first cubist"-probably of Artists,Walter the most individual,though some- Independent Pach Their what abstract in (1883-1958). recogni- cold, painter Gleizes's-of a Picasso-best tion-especially America,and-after first effort known a young painter's public among painters of is and use Lachaise's significant, Cummings type-was(to phrase) seemed to be "TAKENOUT OF HIS FEET" the making important by contacts in the New York art two mine at the things of Indepen- world a few months after his dent. to said only According Nagle,he from the in later on that were the "best discharge army Jan- they 1919. this in in oil" that he had seen uary By time, fact, things Lachaise was his close friend and "in America".Mr. [Walter]Pach, mentor, visiting Cummings's the director,was(as you may studio often and offering him ad- imagine)highly pleased;and said vice and encouragement. Two very pleasant things a propos weeks before Cummings wrote to when Nagle and I came to take his parents about the exhibition, away our things.1 Isabel Lachaise, the sculptor's wife, The painter who penned these ex- had asked him: "How does it feel uberant words was the twenty- to be the sensation of the Inde- four-year-old E. E. Cummings pendent? That's what everyone is (1894-1962), and this was his first telling me."3 public exhibition. Was Cummings the "sensation" One of the paintings that im- of the 1919 Independent? Besides pressed Albert Gleizes (1881- the opinions of Gleizes and Pach 1953) was a large, square oil that Cummings recorded, more Cummings called Sound Number objective facts confirm that his 1 (fig. 1). A casual glance reveals work was noticed. First, of the an abstract formalism analogous to more than six hundred canvases the "defamiliarized"surfaces vying for the attention of the jour- Cummings was then devising in nalists covering the exhibition, his poetry, a style that placed him Cummings's abstractions were in the orbit (though not in the ac- among the few that received spe- of such mention: "The brilliant Self-Portrait,1958. Oil on canvas, 20 x 15 quaintance) contempo- cific sally in. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian raries as Morgan Russell (1886- in color by Mr. Cummings will Institution 1953), AbrahamWalkowitz (1881- greatly impress those who have 55 Smithsonian Studies in American Art 1 Sound Number 1, 1919. Oil on canvas, 35 arrived at an appreciation of the lage. He was even nominated x in. The Museum 35 Metropolitan of Art, abstract in art,"wrote a reporter (though not elected) as one of the Bequest of Scofield Thayer, 1982 for the New YorkSun. Cummings twenty directors for the next Inde- also received invitations to exhibit pendent exhibition.4 elsewhere: at the Penguin Gallery, Whether these facts prove that where he showed Sound Number Cummings's premiere was a "sen- 2 (fig. 2) while the Independent sation," they do suggest that by was still on, and, as a result of his April 1919, on the basis of his Independent entries, at an un- public work, he was more likely named gallery in Greenwich Vil- to have been known (if at all) as a 56 Spring 1990 2 Sound Number 2, 1919. Oil on paper, 19 x 24 in. Memorial Art Gallenr of the Universityof Rochester,Gift of a friend of the gallery in memory of Hildegarde Lasell Watson painter than a poet. Outside of his a pupil's originality is "irrevocably poems in the Harvard Monthly diluted" if not "entirely elimi- and a conventional piece or two nated." He cited both Lachaise and in the Boston Evening Transcript, Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) as Cummings's published poems by proof that "the man who by the 1919 numbered eight, appearing gods has been fated to express in a little-read, privately printed himself will succeed in expressing volume, Eight Harvard Poets himself in spite of all schools."6 (1917). Several years were to pass To nurture this independence before this public perception and self-expression-qualities he would change. For those today cherished throughout his life- who know Cummings only as a Cummings set about teaching him- poet, however, his painterly iden- self the fundamentals of his craft tity in these years is intriguing. from a modernist perspective. A determined autodidact, he de- The Modernist Painter voured every available work on Perhaps the two signal facts about modern painting, even translating Cummings's background as a for himself A. J. Meier-Graefe's painter are that he was entirely Cezanne und sein Kreis (1918). self-taught and entirely serious Cummings eagerly attended mod- about teaching himself. Although ernist exhibitions beginning with he painted and drew from child- the 1913 Armory Show in Boston, hood, he began painting in ear- and, more important, he studied nest only during his last years at intensively on canvas, sketch pad, Harvard, 1915-16, when he be- and notepaper the way basic ele- came avidly interested in Mod- ments of painting interacted. His ernism in all the arts.5Identifying notes on painting in these years, himself with the avant-garde,how- preserved at the Houghton Library ever, he equated academic instruc- at HarvardUniversity, are exten- tion with creative suicide. In art sive and far exceed his notes on schools, Cummings wrote in 1920, poetry. 57 Smithsonian Studies in American Art Of the Modernists whose tech- His constant reports home about niques Cummings studied- his painting suggest that, like so Cezanne, Pablo Picasso (1881- many artists of middle-class fami- 1973), Gleizes, Henri Gaudier- lies, Cummings had to convince Brzeska (1891-1915), and the Fu- his parents (who were still paying turists-Cezanne was clearly the the bills, after all) of his vocational most influential. Quotations from intent and to free himself of their Cezanne's letters and his aesthetic well-intentioned urging that he opinions, as recorded by Emile pursue the more rewarding career Bernard or interpreted by W. H. of writing prose. The letter he Wright and Meier-Graefe, turn up wrote to his mother on 2 March often in Cummings's notes. But as 1922, excerpted below, reveals his with his study of the other mod- exasperation.8 ernist masters, what Cummings But his parents were not the sought was not to imitate but to only ones Cummings had to con- develop his own style. Thus he vince: there was also himself. His wrote to his mother in 1922, "In roommate at the time, William great part I've been using the Slater Brown, asked him (with the world famous Cezanne palette ... frankness permitted a roommate) but employing it not a Cezanne in why he should work so hard at his watercolors-feeling me out painting when he was far more with it, rather; me times water skillful at writing poetry. Cum- times paper times dejaunir [?] so mings replied that because it was to speak."7Shaping his mastery of harder for him to paint, "it was modernist techniques and his own artisticallymore important to aesthetic principles into an orig- achieve something in the more inal style was what mattered most difficult medium."9The argument to Cummings the painter, as it did seems contrived to convince him- to Cummings the poet. self as much as his roommate. Poetry was, of course, always a Similarly, Cummings's frequent full partner in Cummings's self- declarations of painterly intent to concept as an artist.