William Cumming (artist)

William Lee "Bill" Cumming (March 24, 1917 – November 22, 2010) is a noted 20th-century American artist, often associated with the Northwest School. A controversial figure - he was a hardcore Stalinist for a long period, was married seven times, and was generally outspoken and opinionated - he eventually came to be respected as an important innovator and highly distinctive stylist in modern art, particularly in the Pacific Northwest.

Cumming was born March 24, 1917 in Kalispell, Montana, to James Rutherford and Helen Dorcas (Edmiston) Cumming. His father was a salesman. The family moved to Portland, Oregon, and then, when Cumming was seven, to Tukwila, Washington, a farming community south of Seattle.

Fascinated with art, young Bill took drawing courses by correspondence and travelled on weekends to the Seattle Public Library, where he taught himself art history. From an early age he was aware of the work of the local artists - such as Morris Graves, Mark Tobey, and Kenneth Callahan - who would later become known as the 'Northwest School'. After graduating from Foster High School in 1934, he briefly attended a small, short-lived private art school in Seattle. With the Great Depression in full swing, he lived at the family home in Tukwila while taking occasional art lessons and attempting to show his work to prospective employers. He failed to find work, but his enthusiasm and impressive drawing skill led to meeting many of the members of Seattle's small art community, and a job (unpaid) writing for local arts journal The Town Crier. He was eventually hired by Robert Bruce Inverarity, sketching, photographing, and doing odd jobs with the WPA's Federal Art Project, through which he met Morris Graves and his circle of friends. He became particularly close to artist/writer Margaret Callahan, who encouraged him greatly in developing an original painting style. The Seattle Art Museum bought three of his paintings, and in 1940 he won top prize for watercolor in SAM's 26th Northwest Annual Exhibition. In 1941 the museum gave him his first solo exhibition.

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