William Cumming:
The Image of
Consequence
Frye Art Museum
Through Dec 31

YOU AND I are doomed to die, and the organs in our bodies, those internal parts that process life, are nothing more than time bombs that will one day explode us into eternity. Some believe that art is a victory over this inevitability, but what a tiny victory it is. And besides, when a work of art is great, it is only so because it reminds us of our fate.

The sense one receives from the paintings of William Cumming—a local octogenarian (nearly a nonagenarian) who has been producing art in the Northwest since 1935—is that of the ephemerality not of things or objects but of human life (the primary subject of his art). Time is eating up everything, and we do not so much exist as spend our days holding apart with all of our might the sharp teeth that want to crush us. And it's not just Cumming's dark paintings that give us this impression, but also his recent bright ones with their vibrant colors. It's not surprising that the painting the guest curator of the massive retrospective at the Frye, art critic and historian Matthew Kangas, designates Belshazzar's Feast as Cumming's "late-period masterpiece." Though it's a spectacle of exotic animals, dancing girls, boozers, and courtiers, the painting is about how all of this, despite its incredible brilliance, is going to vanish and be no more. This is Belshazzar's last feast. After the party, as the Old Testament tells us, he will be slain by his enemies.

These are the basic blocks of Cumming's long life: He was a passionate communist in the '40s and '50s, and, also around this time, close to the members of the Northwest School. During the McCarthy era he was blacklisted for his radical politics, and achieved local recognition in the early '60s, after the second SAM exhibit of his work. He has married seven times, and black Americans and other regional minorities are often represented in his art. A look through the Frye exhibit, which has collected a tremendous number of sculptures, photographs, prints, paintings, and sketches, makes it abundantly clear that Cumming has had an experience that is wholly Northwestern.

But here are a few of the many images in this exhibition that arrest me. One is of a bulky worker lifting a bulky rock (Worker lifting a Rock, 1940); another is of men working in a factory (Structural Steel Shop, 1978); and another is of a group of girls walking through the night (Journey to the End of the Night, 1962).

The first image, which is from Cumming's early period, instantly brings to mind the myth of Sisyphus, and in doing so suggests the eternity of work itself. The individual worker will, of course, die, but someone else will continue the job. Work, and not the worker, is eternal.

The next image, Structural Steel Shop, which is brighter and livelier than the Worker Lifting a Rock, captures a moment in heavy industry. The workers here are manufacturing steel beams that will be used in the production of towers, bridges, and other major structures. What we witness in Structural Steel Shop is the raw transformation of human energy (from the guts and brains of bodies that are impermanent) into the steel beams (which are permanent and will sustain our built environment). A house or city or pyramid is purely the consolidation of human life.

And this is where the final arresting image, Journey to the End of the Night, has its deepest meaning. The moment captured is that of four girls walking home (one presumes) at a very late hour of the night. They are barely visible, they are almost ghosts, and behind them is the dark span of a bridge (a then-recently completed portion of the I-5). Even here, in the heart of the human world, which is defined by its permanence, death is making nothing out of us.

Cumming was not supposed to have lived this long. TB came very close to cutting him down when he was a young man. We can attribute this long and difficult period of illness to the severe sensitivity Cumming has for the passing of time. His paintings are not about the past, or the future, but the present, the moment, the delicate here and now. Life is not only precious; life is self-destruction.