Life and Times in Leschi
Frink Park 9: William Cumming, Part 2
I became interested in the artist William Cumming last year, when I attended a “town hall” put on by our three 37th District legislative representatives. I went there to buttonhole them about my opposition to some pro-nuclear power bills making their way through the legislature. I accomplished that with fairly good results, I thought at the time. Unfortunately, during this year’s session, all three of the representatives voted in favor of nuclear power when it came before them.
I sat down before the proceedings began. Next to me was Ted Kadet, a few years older than me but looking none the worse for wear. We fell into an easy conversation, and before long it emerged that he was an optometrist.
In his later years, William Cumming ended up back in Leschi, where he had lived earlier. My newfound friend told me that Cumming regularly took walks in Frink Park and stopped to sketch people who lingered or passed by. He was so poor that he didn’t always have his own paper to draw on, Ted told me; sometimes he sketched on a newspaper that had been left behind. There is corroboration: in the early 1960s he drew on pages of a German medical textbook.
Dr. Kadet himself had a Leschi connection. Many years ago he had been married to a daughter of Herb Schneider, an early president of the Leschi Improvement Council (now the LCC).
In the middle 1970s, Cumming’s eyes needed attention, but he couldn’t afford care (or hardly anything else), so a deal was arranged: he traded some drawings for the eye-doctor Kadet’s services. As for the earlier sketches from Frink Park, Cumming would often bring them to Leschi resident Art Mink, who years later was the editor of this publication (and I was his copy editor for a while). Mink gave a dollar or two for each drawing – enough for Cumming to get something to eat.
Cumming made similar exchanges with other comrades from his former Communist Party days who lived in and around Leschi. Now their offspring have those drawings, and I have been fortunate to track them down among several of the next-generation people I know.
In that period, Cumming described his art, and that of his Northwest compatriots, as manifesting austerity and thoughtfulness, representing “the texture and form of our land.”
Cumming often drew his subjects without facial features, or even without their faces showing at all, as in the example above. He suggested that people can be recognized at a distance by their posture and gait, and thus, to an artist at least, facial recognition is less significant to capturing a person’s identity. He also felt, during the period of McCarthyism and its aftermath, that it was prudent to avoid identifying people directly, lest they become subjects of anti-communist persecution.
In 2005, an exhibition of Cumming’s work was presented at the Frye Art Museum. It was organized and curated by Seattle art critic Matthew Kangas, who also published a book to accompany the show.
Cumming survived his earlier health difficulties by many years, dying in 2010, at the age of 93.
Thanks to Ted Kadet and members of the Mink, Schneider, Castle, and Sussman families for their support and assistance, and for providing a look at several of Cumming’s unpublished works, including those shown here. Thanks also to Matthew Kangas, author of “William Cumming: The Image of Consequence,” University of Washington Press, 2005.
This article concludes the series on Frink Park.
~Roger Lippman
The author writes monthly about Leschi history and his experiences over his 48 years in the neighborhood.
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