William Cumming: The Image of Consequence

Monday, 22 August 2005 10:32

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON.- The Frye Art Museum presents William Cumming: The Image of Consequence. William Cumming: The Image of Consequence brings an unprecedented body of work to the Frye as part of the Museum’s ongoing mission to reinterpret and resituate the representational art of our time. Guest Curator Matthew Kangas, distinguished art critic and frequent reviewer for the Seattle Times, assembles more than 130 paintings, prints, sculptures, and photographs from 1935 to the present in an attempt to position the eighty-eight-year-old artist within American and Northwest art history of the mid-twentieth century. Cumming’s first museum show since 1983, The Image of Consequence demonstrates that the artist’s exposure to the deprivations of the Great Depression, followed by his thirteen-year membership in the American Communist Party and his subsequent years as a teacher forged a deep commitment to subjects that ordinary people can relate to and that have social resonance. In the Graphics Gallery, visitors are treated to a mini-retrospective of Cumming’s works on paper—watercolors, ink and pencil sketches, posters, and mixed-media paintings—that introduce his command over the figure in motion and at rest. “Cowboy Alley” is a section dedicated to the best of the artist’s popular Western-scene oils, drawings, and paintings on paper. And finally, Cumming’s vibrant scenes of families at the park or the beach join large public murals such as Triptych (1992), Belshazzar’s Feast (1985–1988) and Structural Steel Shop (1978).

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