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University of Texas at Austin

E. E. (Edward Estlin) Cummings:

An Inventory of His Art Collection at the Harry Ransom Center

Creator: Cummings, E. E. (Edward Estlin),
Title: E. E. (Edward Estlin) Cummings Art Collection
Dates: 1888-1962, undated (bulk 1905-1962)
Extent: 4 boxes, 1 oversize folder, 9 framed paintings, 2 sculptures (137 items)
Abstract: The collection consists of one hundred and thirty-three original works by E. E. Cummings, including oil paintings, watercolor paintings, drawings, and sketchbooks. Among the original works are self-portraits, as well as portraits of Marion Morehouse, Anne Barton, and his sister, Elizabeth Cummings. Also present are original paintings of New Hampshire and Parisian landscapes, and many anatomical studies of humans and animals.
Call Number: Art Collection AR-00054
Language: English
Access: Open for research. Researchers must create an online Research Account and agree to the Materials Use Policy before using archival materials. Please note that a minimum of 24 hours notice is required to pull art materials to the Ransom Center's Reading and Viewing Room. Some materials may be restricted from viewing. To make an appointment or to reserve art materials, please contact the Center's staff at art@hrc.utexas.edu.
Use Policies: Ransom Center collections may contain material with sensitive or confidential information that is protected under federal or state right to privacy laws and regulations. Researchers are advised that the disclosure of certain information pertaining to identifiable living individuals represented in the collections without the consent of those individuals may have legal ramifications (e.g., a cause of action under common law for invasion of privacy may arise if facts concerning an individual's private life are published that would be deemed highly offensive to a reasonable person) for which the Ransom Center and The University of Texas at Austin assume no responsibility.
Restrictions on Use: Authorization for publication is given on behalf of the University of Texas as the owner of the collection and is not intended to include or imply permission of the copyright holder which must be obtained by the researcher. For more information please see the Ransom Centers' Open Access and Use Policies.


Administrative Information


Acquisition: Purchases (R264, R3819, R4114, R4188, R4289, R4488, R4497, R4720, R4731, R4815, R7995, R14887)
Processed by: Alice Egan, 1997, Helen Young, 2001, and Jill Morena, 2017
Repository:

Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin

Biographical Sketch


Edward Estlin Cummings (1894-1962), son of Edward Cummings and Rebecca Haswell Clarke, was brought up in a conservative Cambridge, Massachusetts home. His father, with degrees in both philosophy and divinity, taught at Harvard University until 1900 when he received ordination by the Unitarian Church and became a pastor at the South Congregational Church of Boston.
According to family diaries, Cummings wanted to be a poet from an early age. He was supported in this ambition by his mother who made up word games and other activities to encourage his creativity. Cummings also drew prolifically, and his childhood drawings were often inspired by literature; his drawings included storyboards. Cummings attended public schools, including the Cambridge High and Latin School, prior to entering Harvard in 1911. While there, he concentrated in the classics, including Latin and Greek literature, and he mastered the various forms of poetry, gaining the foundation he needed in order to begin the experimentation with poetic form and shape that became his trademark.
While at Harvard, Cummings published poetry in the Harvard Monthly and the Harvard Advocate. Through these organizations he became acquainted with S. Foster Damon, Stewart Mitchell, John Dos Passos, Scofield Thayer, and J. Sibley Watson. These friends would encourage and support Cummings through much of his artistic career; many of them also shared his interest in the visual arts as well as poetry and literature. Damon, a music student, introduced Cummings to the works of El Greco, William Blake, Paul Cézanne, James McNeill Whistler, the French Impressionists, and the Fauves. Through Thayer, Cummings became acquainted with the works of Pablo Picasso, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Aubrey Beardsley, the Post Impressionists, and the Cubists. While still in school, Thayer gave Cummings a copy of Willard Huntington Wright's Modern Painting, which Cummings annotated extensively. John Dos Passos also painted and drew. Cummings never had formal art lessons, but he learned new oil painting techniques from his Harvard group of friends.
Cummings earned his B.A. from Harvard in 1915, magna cum laude, like his father before him, and was invited to speak at the commencement ceremony. He presented a term paper on "The New Art". This paper demonstrated Cummings' affinity with the modern artistic sensibility, especially his interest in the overlap between the visual arts and literature, a keystone in his distinctive typographical style.
After finishing his Master's degree in 1916, also from Harvard, Cummings moved to New York City in January of 1917. He worked for the publishing house P. F. Collier & Son for a few weeks, but became bored and quit, deciding instead to pursue the freedom of life as a full-time artist and poet. In April, he volunteered for the Norton-Hajes Ambulance Service and shipped out for France. On the trip he met William Slater Brown and their friendship was cemented by an unexpected five weeks of free time in Paris awaiting the rest of their ambulance unit.
Several months later, events took a defining turn for Cummings when he and Brown were detained by the French military on suspicion of espionage and undesirable activities. As a result of censor-provoking letters home by Brown and a preference for the company of French soldiers over their fellow American ambulance drivers, the two young men were held for three months in a concentration camp at La Ferté Mace. They were kept, along with their fellow detainees, in a large room which was represented in the title of Cummings' book about this experience, The Enormous Room (1922). Cummings' father worked through diplomatic channels and finally wrote a letter to President Wilson to obtain Cummings' release in December 1917. Brown was released two months later. Cummings returned to the United States, first to his parents' home in Massachusetts and then to New York, where he was joined by Brown.
For the next several years, Cummings painted and wrote. His paintings were now inspired by what he had seen in Paris, and a futurist influence started to appear. In 1919, he entered two paintings in the spring show of the New York Society of Independent Artists, and Gaston Lachaise (whom Cummings had met through Lachaise's stepson, Edward Pierce Nagle) reported to Cummings that Albert Gleizes had expressed enthusiasm about Cummings' paintings. In 1920, he again entered two large paintings in the society of Independent Artists exhibition, which were mentioned favorably by S. Jay Kaufman in the The New York Globe and Advertiser. In 1921, he entered his painting Noise Number 10 in the Independent exhibition, but this painting was attacked in a New York newspaper review of the show.
In 1924, he married Elaine Orr Thayer, the mother of his daughter Nancy. They divorced after two months and in 1929, Cummings married Anne Minnerly Barton. They spent much of the next two years living and traveling in Europe.
In May 1931, Cummings left Barton and traveled to the Soviet Union. Pre-disposed to enjoy the trip, Cummings found his personal sense of individualism disturbed by the lack of intellectual and artistic freedom that he found. He published his diary from the trip under the Greek title Eimi (1933), which translates to "I am".
In August 1931, Cummings exhibited 162 works at a show arranged by Philip Kaplan at the Kokoon Arts Club in Cleveland, Ohio. His book CIOPW, a collection of works in charcoal, ink, oil, pastel, and watercolors, was published in 1931.
In 1932, while his divorce from Barton was being settled, Cummings met Marion Morehouse, who was to be his companion and common-law wife for the rest of his life. In 1933, Cummings received the Guggenheim Fellowship for the purpose of writing a book of poems. In 1935, unable to find a publisher for his book, he published No Thanks (1935) with the help of his mother. It was dedicated to the fourteen publishing houses that had turned him down.
E. E. Cummings continued to produce a steady stream of poems and publications throughout the forties and fifties. In 1952, Harvard offered him the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship for the 1952-53 school year. Also during the fifties, Cummings began to tour, reading his poetry across AmeriCirca In 1958, he won the Bollingen Prize for Poetry from Yale University and published his final volume of new poems, 95 Poems.
He died at his family farm on September 3, 1962.
Critics have generally divided Cummings' career as a painter into two stylistic phases. The first phase, about 1915-1928, was represented by his experimental large-scale abstracts and his drawings and caricatures published in The Dial. During the 1920s, Cummings started to drop out of the gallery scene, and he came to view the art establishment as anti-intellectual. The second phase of his art was from about 1928 until his death; this phase was characterized by representational works: still lifes, landscapes, nudes, and portraits.

Sources:


Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 48: American Poets, 1880-1945, Second Series, edited by Peter Quartermain. Detroit: Gale Research, 1986.
Kennedy, Richard S. Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E. E. Cummings.New York: Liveright Publishers, 1980.
The Paintings of E. E. Cummings, http://www.eecummingsart.com/cummings.html (accessed online 18 April 2002).

Scope and Contents


The E. E. Cummings Art Collection is comprised of one hundred and thirty-seven original works by E. E. Cummings, as well as a few other works and items that belonged to the artist. It is organized into two Series: I. Works by E. E. Cummings, and II. Works by Others. Titles are transcribed from the items; titles of published works are from the publications. Cataloger's titles appear in brackets.
Series I. Works by E. E. Cummings, is subdivided into four subseries: A. Oil Paintings, B. Watercolor Paintings, C. Drawings, and D. Sketchbooks and Miscellaneous. Within each subseries, works are organized by accession number. Subseries C. Drawings, is further divided into Portraits and Self-Portraits, Landscapes, Nature Studies, Drawings of People, Animal Drawings, Anatomical Studies of Humans, and Illustrations. Thirty-six anatomical drawings and studies of male and female models was acquired in 2014. Among the original works are: eleven self-portraits, as well as portraits of Marion Morehouse, Anne Barton, and his sister, Elizabeth Cummings; paintings of New Hampshire landscapes, and numerous anatomical studies of humans and various animals; five of the illustrations for By E. E. Cummings.(1930); three works that were published in Cummings' CIOPW(1931); and designs for illustrations for a children's story (apparently unpublished) by Elizabeth Nagle. There are also three sheets with labeled color swatches in oil and watercolor, as well as two small cement and brick sculptures by Cummings.

Related Material


The Ransom Center's Art Collection also has a portrait drawing of E. E. Cummings by Robert Sheriffs in its Robert Sheriffs Collection. The Ransom Center also has extensive E. E. Cummings manuscripts and letters in the E.E. Cummings Collection (MS-01009), Cummings's personal library, and photographs in the E.E. Cummings Literary File in the Photography Collection. Among Cummings' manuscripts is Edward E. Cummings Grand Zoological Congress and Trained Wild Animal Arena, produced in 1902 when he was seven, which contains some of Cummings' earliest drawings.

Separated Material


Art supplies, carved wood boxes, and other personal items can be found in the E.E. Cummings Personal Effects Collection.

Index Terms


People

Cummings, E. E. (Edward Estlin), 1894-1962.
Morehouse, Marion, 1906-1969.

Document Types

Drawings.
Oil paintings.
Pencil works.
Watercolors.

Item List