Bill Cumming, Last of the Northwest School

William Lee "Bill" Cumming (1917-2010) was not one of the "mystic" school of Pacific Northwest painting. The best-known of that crew were Mark Tobey, Morris Graves and Guy Anderson. As a young man in the late 1930s, Cumming got to know them and other Northwest artists who were not quite so mystic, such as Kenneth Callahan. He also became considered as part of that larger group.

Cumming was a colorful character, undertaking seven marriages, tuberculosis, Stalinist Communism (until he got sick of it) and teaching, -- while doing his art when not hospitalized or following Party orders regarding this or that.

As for his art, Cumming was a prolific sketchbook artist whose main interest was the movements and postures of the clothed human body. His later tempera and oil painting usually eliminated facial details so the viewers might focus on the rest of his subjects.

His Wikipedia entry is here. Not-so-favorable commentary by a former Seattle Post-Intelligencer art critic is here, and his Seattle Times obituary is here.

Cumming wrote a book titled "Sketchbook" that was published by the University of Washington Press. Here are two excerpts.

Page 60: "My dream of Paris didn't vanish. It simply melted into life in 1937 Seattle. I was never again able to summon up one scrap of the kind of restless and unsatisfied dreams on which young provincials have traditionally motivated their treks.... To my small-town sensibilities Seattle was a reasonable facsimile which had fattened my imagination....a soggy seaport town wedged into the furthest northwest corner of our United States...."

Page 238: "For the most part my teaching has been in what is shallowly called commercial art.... The invidious distinction of commercial art and fine art is poppycock. There is only art."

My interest in Cumming is not his art, to which I am indifferent. Rather, I found his book interesting because it was a gossipy account dealing with local artistic personalities whose names I am familiar with and a few of whom I met many years ago when I myself was young.

Gallery

Untitled - 1940
A standard-issue Depression-era depiction of proletarians.

Evening Conversation - 1956
Cumming was still including faces at this point.

Sailboat - 1965

Drawing - 1972

Sketchbook page

Good News and Bad Weather - 1985

Street Corner - 1990
This is part of a Seattle Parks series of paintings. As best I can tell, there is no evidence of a street corner. The inclusion of both baseball and football players is a bit puzzling because these sports tend to be played at different times of the year.

Pike Street Figures - 1996

Summer Afternoon in the Park - 2008
A painting made when Cumming was 90 or 91 years old.

"Sketchbook" book cover - 1984

Nikolaos Gyzis, a Greek in Munich

Since emerging from Ottoman rule ca. 1832, Greece has remained economically peripheral to Europe. Which is probably why Greece-born Nikolaos Gyzis (1842-1901) studied art in Munich, returned home, and then left again for Munich where it was easier for him to pursue a career as an artist. That career is outlined in this Wikipedia entry in English. Wikipedia suggests readers link to his Greek entry and translate to get more information. There are Wikipedia entries for Gyzis in many languages, perhaps because he is considered a major 19th century Greek artist.

Unless an artist is largely or entirely bound to the artistic traditions of his ethnic culture, his personal style when painting representationally will not differ hugely from a number of representational artists from other backgrounds. Which is a long-winded way of stating that Gyzis was essential a Munich School painter, his Greek origin notwithstanding.

Gallery

Eros and the Painter - 1868
This is considered his most famous painting, according to some Internet sites. Maybe it was famous, but I don't think it's his best work.

Girl Washing Her Feet - 1871

Artist's Psyche

Oriental Warrior

Dance of the Nymphs

Historia - allegory

Pan C. Papastathis tobacco products advertising, Munich

The Archangel - study for The Grounding of Faith - 1895

The Spider - 1884
I think this is intriguing, and a lot like Belgian Symbolist painting. It might have influenced Franz Stuck who was still a student when this was painted -- though Gyzis did not become a Munich Academy professor until 1886.

Henryk Siemiradzki, Painter of Large Works

Henryk Hektor Siemiradzki (1843-1902) was Polish, but his family was prominent in Imperial Russia, his father being an army general. As this biography mentions, he first trained in physics and mathematics, but then went on to study art in St. Petersburg.

His best known works are very large, dealing in religious and classical subjects. His style was essentially academic, but usually with lively, not stilted, subjects.

Here are some examples of his work. Click to enlarge.

Gallery

Chopin at the Piano - c.1887
A non-classical subject, but important to Poles.

At the Spring

Roman Idyll (Before the Bath) - 1887
Two examples of smaller paintings.

Nero's Torches - 1877

Christ with Martha and Mary - 1886

Dance Amongst the Swords - 1881
Version in Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Judgement of Paris - 1892

Phryne at the Poseidonia in Eleusis - 1889

Anna Zinkeisen, Doris' Sister

Anna Katrina Zinkeisen (1901-1976) wasn't quite as glamorous as her older sister Doris (who I wrote about here), but she seems to have been the better artist.

Anna's Wikipedia entry is here, and a link dealing with both sisters is here.

Anna could vary her style when called for. Some murals done in the 1930s are busy (as most murals should be) and painted in a mannered way. Her portrait work, on the other hand, was usually solidly, strikingly done, making use of smoothed, slightly simplified surfaces on her subjects' faces, hands, etc.

Gallery

Doris Zinkeisen

Self-Portrait - c. 1944

Diana Wynyard, actress - 1930s
This is not Anna's usual style, but a credible website states that this is her work.

Consuelo Kennedy in Evening Dress - 1937

The Dark Lady - 1938

Elizabeth Allan, actress

Laying the Foundation Stone of Southampton Docks, 1838 - 1938

Mediaeval Lincoln

Sir Archibald Hector McIndoe - c.1944
Plastic Surgeon.

Sir Alexander Fleming - 1958
Posthumous portrait of the discoverer of Penicillin.

Night Duty - 1955

St. John Ambulance Brigade Officer and Nurse - 1955

Julia Heseltine (her daughter)

Air Chief Marshal Sir Denis Smallwood - c. 1975

Architecture and Design at the 1964 New York World's Fair

World's fairs are usually showcases for architects and designers to strut their stuff. By the 1920s the stuff they wanted to show off was either the latest in modern (or Moderne) thinking or perhaps their prediction of the future. In America, the 1933 Chicago Century of Progress exposition featured plenty of modernistic pavilions to excite Great Depression crowds. And the famous 1939 New York World's Fair was explicitly themed The World of Tomorrow.

The Chicago fair opened after most of the pre-Depression Art Deco and Moderne office towers had come on line and little was being built. To a considerable degree the thrust of the trend towards architectural modernism had been halted. Its evolution had effectively ceased aside from doodles in architects' sketchbooks. The New York fair came later in the architectural drought at a time when the Depression was easing, but few large buildings aside from government structures were being built. At least it created an opportunity to look ahead while entertaining fair attendees.

By the early 1960s when the 1964-1965 fair was being planned, the "future" that the '39 fair attempted to predict had already happened in the form of a modernistic building boom in New York City and elsewhere. Rather than featuring Progress or The Future, this fair's weak theme was "Peace Through Understanding." As best I could tell, it was virtually invisible to fairgoers, there being no pavilions from major nations due to the fair's lack of BIE sanctioning.

Nevertheless, the fair's architects and designers did their best to show off, and a number of pavilions were future-oriented in what was on display. So the fair's architecture ranged from attempts at showing the future to whimsical structures to even traditional or historical recreations.

The fair was not a great success. And it did not excite me when I visited it in June of 1965 during the second and last year of its run. Information regarding it can be found here.

Below are some photos I took.

Gallery

To set the scene, this is the General Motors pavilion at the 1933 Chicago Century of Progress exposition. It seems more Moderne than Deco.

And there is GM's 1939 New York pavilion as seen from the rear. I suppose the style might be called Streamline Moderne.

Now it's 1965 and this is part of the Chrysler Corporation area. That's a whimsical V-8 motor sculpture at the left.

Here is the nondescript, government-issue bureaucratic architecture United States pavilion.

The theme symbol was the Unisphere. A giant cliché that might well have been selected by an unimaginative committee. It still exists.

More whimsy: The Tower of the Four Winds. Some of its elements moved when caught by a breeze or wind, in the spirit of Alexander Calder.

The Rheingold brewery opted for a traditional setting. Its beer had been very popular in New York for decades, but was starting to fade in the mid-1960s.

And there was the Belgian Village that hadn't been finished when the fair opened in 1964. It was best known for its Belgian waffles.

The New York State pavilion. Its best feature was observation towers, two of which can be seen at the left. The nice thing about the towers wasn't their design. Rather, once you were up one, there was a good view of the fairgrounds -- especially in the evening when the major pavilions were illuminated.

New York State observation towers as seen from farther away.

The IBM pavilion.

This is the AT&T Bell Telephone pavilion. It features a "floating" look that reminds me of Star Wars type spacecraft that appeared nearly 15 years after it was designed.

The General Electric pavilion.

The General Electric pavilion at night.

The Unisphere and pool at night.