William Cumming: The Image of Consequence brings an unprecedented body of work to the Frye Art Museum. Part exhibition and part art history scholarship, Image of Consequence is the largest museum retrospective organized for a Northwest artist in many years and the first Cumming survey since 1983. The Image of Consequence is an authoritative survey of the last living artist associated with the Northwest School. Now 88, Cumming, the former instructor at Cornish College and current teacher at Art Institute of Seattle, is an extraordinary eyewitness to the art history of the Pacific Northwest who not only was involved in many of the central cultural and social events of the 20th century but who also wrote the definitive study of an era, Sketchbook: A Memoir of the 1930s and the Northwest School.
Guest Curator Matthew Kangas, distinguished art critic and art historian, assembles more than 130 paintings, prints, sculptures, and photographs, from 1935 to the present, in the Greathouse and Graphics Galleries. Kangas positions Cumming within American and Northwest art history of the mid-twentieth century.
Cumming’s exposure to the deprivations of the Depression, followed by his 13-year membership in the American Communist Party forged a deep commitment to subjects that ordinary people relate to and that have social resonance. The lifelong subject matter of his art became the image of consequence, serious pictures of people that were accessible, dignified, and sympathetic. Eventually, his mastery over color, line and form combined with the image of consequence to lead to an overlooked conversion to modernism through the application of pattern, his characteristic broken-line brushwork, and the triumph of composition over anecdote.
In the Graphics Gallery, visitors are treated to a mini-retrospective of Cumming’s works on paper that introduce his command over the figure in motion and at rest. Cumming’s art produced in Seattle during the dark years of the Depression, World War II, and the McCarthy era are in the Greathouse Galleries and feature major loans from collectors and regional art museums. The artist’s commitment to serious yet accessible themes—the female nude, the working man, the urban scene—is demonstrated in pictures of brooding color and somber gravity and beauty. Kangas presents a radical revision of the artist’s achievements and restores Cumming’s “lost years” (from 1944-61 when ill health, membership in the Communist Party, a blacklisting, and three wives and four children took center stage) with twelve works from this time. The “Cowboy Alley” section is dedicated to Cumming’s popular Western-scene oils, drawings, and paintings on paper.
The retrospective ends on a celebratory, triumphant note with vibrant works in glorious colors. His post-1984 period, revealing a renewed sense of daylight and hope, is a significant and evolving one (Cumming is still actively working in his studio) in which he merges his passion for figure with increased focus on color, shape, and form. It is period that defines Cumming’s unique contribution to Northwest art history—the productive mix of representation and abstraction.
It is particularly gratifying to the Frye Art Museum that this exhibition exemplifies a long championing of Northwest artists. Cumming’s works were shown at the Frye every year from 1959 to 1963. In 1960, he was awarded First Prize at the Museum’s First Invitational Puget Sound Area Exhibition.
Accompanying the exhibition is a fully illustrated comprehensive publication, William Cumming: The Image of Consequence, co-published by the Frye Art Museum and the University of Washington Press. In this catalogue, available in the Museum Store, Kangas charts the evolution of the artists work from socialist realism, a representational art created in service to political ideals, to a socially relevant but less instrumental art that Kangas terms “figurative formalism.”
Also accompanying the exhibition are curator-guided tours and a rich array of cultural programs in film, music, history, and politics (a partial listing follows) that celebrate the extraordinary life and accomplishments of one of our region’s most significant cultural and artistic figures.
IMAGE
William Cumming
Two Girls, 1960
oil on canvas
33 x 21 in.
Museum Purchase, 1960
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