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.

Cumming’s art produced in Seattle during the dark years of the Depression, World War II, and the McCarthy era are featured next in Greathouse Galleries I and II, with major loans from collectors and regional art museums. The artist’s commitment to serious yet accessible themes—the female nude, the working man, the urban scene—is demonstrated in pictures of brooding color and somber gravity and beauty.

“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).

It is particularly gratifying to the staff and trustees of the Frye Art Museum that this exhibition exemplifies both a long championing of Northwest artists and a commitment to conveying the complexities of representational art. Cumming’s works were shown at the Frye every year from 1959 to 1963. In 1960, he was awarded First Prize at the Museum’s First Invitational Puget Sound Area Exhibition.

With curator-guided tours, a symposium on American radical culture in the 1930s through the 1960s, and a lavishly illustrated comprehensive publication, all the elements are in place to help visitors fully appreciate the extraordinary accomplishments of one of our region’s most significant cultural and artistic figures.