According to Judith h. Dobrzynski of the Wall Street Journal, You have to go out of your way to get to Brockport, N.Y., a pretty little Victorian village west of Rochester that had its moment in the sun before the Civil War, when the Erie Canal briefly ended there and canal boats loaded up on products like grain and cod liver oil. Yet a few enterprising Brockporters are hoping that arts-lovers will beat a path to their door this month to help them restore the works of the painter E.E. Cummings, which are torn, dusty, stained and otherwise in pitiful condition.

That's right: The very same enduringly popular, inventive bard of love, sex, rebellion and nature who ranks with the best of 20th-century poets painted with paints as well as with verbal images arranged just-so on a page.

Cummings's paintings are largely forgotten, but he considered himself just as talented a painter as a poet, and worked hard at it, especially on his early abstractions. He made thousands of works. "He painted every day, and devoted more time to it than to his poems," says Milton A. Cohen, a humanities professor at the University of Texas at Dallas and author of "Poet and the Painter: The Aesthetics of E.E. Cummings' Early Work."

How 72 of those paintings ended up in disrepair at the State University of New York at Brockport -- miles away literally and figuratively from Cummings's bohemian life in Greenwich Village, Paris and New England -- is a tale that reveals much about his career, the fame that shaped it, art-world fashions, and, of course, money.

When Cummings left Harvard in 1916, the 21-year-old didn't know what direction his life would take. Soon he was in Paris, where he studied art seriously, more so than writing, according to Cummings scholars. In tune with trends there, he mostly painted abstractions, although "there's a series of watercolors in the '20s of a town in France, Pornic, that are wonderful," says Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno, one of Cummings's biographers. "They are very Cezanne."

Back in the U.S., Cummings regularly showed his work at the annual exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, from 1919 until about 1930. Unjuried, it showcased thousands of works, yet reviewers almost always singled out Cummings's for a positive mention. As late as 1924, Prof. Cohen says, Cummings wrote to his father saying he considered himself primarily a painter. Aside from Cézanne and early Picasso, he was influenced by Joseph Stella, Albert Gleizes, and early John Marin, scholars say.

Literary success, however, soon claimed him. In 1922 came the publication of "The Enormous Room" and in 1923, "Tulips and Chimneys." Soon, "he was in demand as a poet," says Mr. Sawyer-Lauçanno. In 1925, he won the Dial Award, which was created in 1921 by his friend Scofield Thayer, who as the Dial's editor made the publication a must-read for modernist literature.

Cummings kept painting. But around 1927 he began to abandon abstraction. Prof. Cohen says that Cummings liked to paint spontaneously, befitting his philosophy as a poet, and so he was better at watercolors than at the more serious medium of oils. "That's why he gave up abstractions, because he labored at them," Prof. Cohen says. Instead, Cummings tried out many styles and genres: still lifes, nudes, portraits, landscapes, cityscapes, interiors, religious themes.

To see the original article click here...