William Cumming

by William Cumming

"William Cumming (b. 1917) is one of the most complex and contradictory American artists of the past century. Painter, correspondent, art and music critic, educator, memoirist, and loquacious interview subject, Cumming is heard here in his own words and through art critic Matthew Kangas, who brings together 140 crucial works and situates Cumming in the cultural context of his times - artistic, social, and political, including his years in the Communist Party USA." "Unaffected by decades of rapid stylistic changes in the art world, Cumming remained committed to the image of consequence - socially relevant subject matter - through the Great Depression, the "lost years" of World War II, and the Cold War. He then embraced a renewed sense of life, hope, and a second "conversion" to modernist painting's precepts of color, shadow, line, shape, and contour. With its solid cohesion of shapes, subject, and color, Cumming's art now bears comparison to Bonnard and Vuillard rather than Tobey or Cal