Upstate New York College Restores Major Collection of E.E. Cummings Paintings

BROCKPORT, NY (03/23/2009)(readMedia)-- While most people know that E.E. Cummings (1894-1962) was one of the most significant American poets of the 20th century, the master of the poetic ellipsis and the parenthesis is not well known for his lush use of watercolors and oils. Thanks to an ongoing restoration project at The College at Brockport, State University of New York, more people are discovering that Cummings was both poet and painter.

Cummings saw himself as much a painter as a writer and referred to the two as his "twin obsessions," which he pursued simultaneously.

The College at Brockport is home to 72 Cummings works donated in the late 1970s by his longtime friend and patron James Sibley Watson Jr.

Watson was a classmate of Cummings at Harvard and a publisher of The Dial, a literary and arts magazine that published some of Cummings' earlier works. Watson and his second wife, Nancy, donated the Cummings paintings to the Brockport College Foundation in 1978, with the suggestion that the collection be named for Watson's late wife, Hildegarde. The Hildegarde Lasell Watson Collection of Artworks by E.E. Cummings has been described as biographically and aesthetically important by several Cummings scholars.

When they arrived at The College at Brockport the collection of oils, watercolors, and sketches were in need of various degrees of restoration, a project the College took on in earnest in 2007. Currently, more than half of the works have been restored thanks to a group of patrons who adopted individual paintings and funded their restoration.

The results of their generous efforts will be on display Sunday, April 5 at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, NY, as part of an afternoon gala celebrating Cummings' life as both poet and painter. The display also will include the remainder of the collection still in need of adoption and/or restoration.

In addition, Emmy-award winning actor Anthony Zerbe will perform his one-man show on Cummings entitled It's "All Done with Mirrors." Zerbe's performance will take place in the Memorial Art Gallery's auditorium at 2 pm.

Tickets for the performance- which also includes the first formal display of the restored collection and a reception-are $75 and can be obtained by contacting Kim Ehret at kehret@brockport.edu. For more about the E.E. Cummings collection and restoration project at The College at Brockport, got to www.brockport.edu/cummings.