"For more than half a hundred years," wrote E. E. Cummings in 1954, "the oversigned's twin obsessions have been painting and writing." (p. 342)

[Recent exhibitions of Cummings' art], along with an increasing number of scholarly and journalistic pieces on his art, have made several things clear. First, Cummings was entirely self-taught…. Second, he treated his art as profession rather than avocation: he set himself, especially in his early years, to solve problems of composition and color in his canvases, he regularly sought opportunities to exhibit, and he earned some much-needed funds by selling work to The Dial. Third, he was drawn to theorize extensively, in his private and largely unpublished notes, on the practice and the aesthetics of the visual arts, ranging in his studies from detailed self-instruction in human anatomy to esoteric investigations into color relationships. Fourth, he constantly probed into the parallels among painting, literature, and music...