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William “Bill” Cumming was a painter, member of the Northwest School art movement, and art instructor.

Cumming was born in Montana on March 24, 1917. His family moved to Portland, Oregon when Cumming was a toddler and then to Tukwila, Washington in 1924. Deciding at an early age that he was an artist, Cumming was initially self-taught and studied art history at the Seattle Public Library in the late 1920s and early 1930s. He learned academic drawing through the International Correspondence Schools but disliked the process of academic drawing. After graduating from high school in 1934, he found himself without a job or money for college with the Great Depression in full swing. He spent his time at home drawing before winning a scholarship to the short-lived Northwest Academy of Art. However, this school was also a disappointment since he felt he was more accomplished than his teacher Ernest Norling. Despite this, his enthusiasm and impressive drawing skills led him to meet many artists in Seattle’s small art community and led to an unpaid position writing for a local arts journal, Town Crier.

From 1938 to 1940, he worked for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Art Project in Seattle. He photographed artists employed by the WPA who taught free art classes and created murals for post offices and other federal buildings. Here he met Morris Graves and his circle of friends including Guy Anderson, Kenneth and Margaret Callahan, and Mark Tobey. Graves, Anderson, Tobey, and Kenneth Callahan would later become known as “the big four” of the Northwest School art movement. Cumming became close to Margaret Callahan who urged him to focus on his gift for transcribing bodies in motion. This led to Cumming developing his own distinct style of drawing with contrasts of color, line, and pattern, and his talent at capturing the movement of ordinary people engaged in daily life. Cumming’s first solo show was in 1941 at the Seattle Art Museum.

Cumming spent most of WWII in Firland Sanatorium with tuberculosis and remained quite weak until 1957. He became active in the Communist Party in 1945 after reading Marx, Engels, and Lenin while hospitalized. He was blacklisted during the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunts and had stopped painting. In 1957, on his 40th birthday, he renounced his involvement with communism and began to focus instead on his health and art.

His art met with success in the 1950s, winning numerous prizes and entering private and institutional collections. He had a second solo show in 1961 at the Seattle Art Museum. He returned to teach at the Burnley School of Professional Art in 1963 and continued after it became the Art Institute of Seattle in the 1980s. He also taught at Cornish College of the Arts. He continued to teach and hold painting workshops at his home up until his death. Cumming died of congestive heart failure on November 22, 2010.

Sources: HistoryLink, Seattle Times Obituary, Woodside/Braseth Gallery