Frederick Cuming
‘My tutor was John Minton, who I think was puzzled by me. He could see that I was unsettled, was always encouraging, but was highly critical in a humorous way.’
In an undated letter to Ruth Borchard in 1959, sent from Honor Oak Park, south-east London, Fred Cuming wrote: 'I will be glad to supply a self-portrait for your collection. Unfortunately, I have no really early self-portraits, the earliest being executed while I was still at college. If you think that would be suitable I will send it to you.' He didn't in fact send that early self-portrait – but it seems that he painted a new self-portrait specially for Ruth. This picture was purchased for fifteen guineas. Cuming was one of 120 younger British artists illustrated in Jack Beddington's 1957 book, Young Artists of Promise.
Born in 1930 in south London, Cuming trained at Sidcup College of Art from 1945-49. He has said, 'In those days you could begin art school at the age of 14, and I was just 15 when I applied to Sidcup.' Following National Service, he studied at the Royal College of Art from 1951-55. He was elected a Royal Academician in 1974.
In A Figure in the Landscape (Unicorn Press, London, 2000, with an Introduction by Richard Holmes), Cuming meditates extensively on his time at art school, the benefits of traditional training and teaching, and the status of art today (concluding that alongside 'the nihilists there are still painters in this country who have celebrated our world: Stanley Spencer, John Nash, Paul Nash, Edward Burra, Lucian Freud...'). Among the interviewing panel at the Royal College of Art, he recalls Rodrigo Moynihan, Robert Buhler, Ruskin Spear, John Minton and Carel Weight (q.v.). Taught by him first at Sidcup, then at the Royal College, he found 'Ruskin Spear, then a rising star... demanding, critical but encouraging... [who] had a profound effect on us... He told me to think about balance and tonality, how to limit my palette, how to contrast violent forms with passive ones – the dynamics of composition, in other words. The [Royal College] was bristling with talent; among fellow students were Peter Coker (q.v.), Jack Smith, Joe Tilson, Bruce Lacey, Peter Blake, and many others... After I left the College, Rodrigo Moynihan talked to me about Goya, Velàzquez and Zurburan, and Manet.'
Cuming's 1945 self-portrait (astonishingly sensitive and precocious for a fifteen-year-old) as a nervously alert, beardless, fine-featured adolescent, is illustrated in A Figure in the Landscape. Its attenuated, Old Masterish colourism – burnished flesh tones set against blackness (black eyes, hair, clothes and background) – as well as its psychological perspicacity – are subtly potent.
The later portrait, dated 1959, now in the Borchard Collection, shows the artist at twenty-nine, in the same pose, now bearded and with the even warier, more melancholy mien of an Outsider figure (in the sense of the profoundly creative, searching, alienated individuals discussed in the 1956 book of that title by Colin Wilson (1931-2013).) Both pictures have a rigorously subdued palette – black (admixed with some brown) predominating; however the pinkish flesh tones are ruddier in the latter self-portrait, which also describes the artist's clothing: a crimson sweater, brown/black tie and white (tonally dove grey) shirt. The illumined faces of the fifteen-year-old and the twenty-nine-year-old are each noticeably serious without being grave – each evokes something of the subject's innate qualities of creative sensibility and resolute artistic endeavour.
At Sidcup, Cuming's 'training had been based on the ideas of... painters like Sickert and Gilman... It was not until I entered the RCA that I became aware of the modern movement in painting, or started to benefit from cross-fertilisation of ideas from students... from all over England.' Perhaps Cuming's early self-portraits reflect the sense of insecurity he felt as a young artist: 'My tutor was John Minton, who I think was puzzled by me. He could see that I was unsettled, was always encouraging, but was highly critical in a humorous way.'
In A Figure in the Landscape, Cuming recalls that 'In 1955 I set off on my first trip abroad'. In Rome, 'I was confronted by such beauty and variety... I was a somnambulist in a state of culture shock.' He then travelled to Arezzo to see the Piero della Francesca frescoes and 'to Ravenna for the mosaics'. He concludes, 'Italy was a revelation but also a shock. If anything the visit had added to my confusion... Carel Weight helped me to get my first teaching job [at] Harrow School of Art, and with a little money coming in I managed to work on.' Cuming's predicament was similar to that of many fresh art school graduates. 'I had to learn how to work alone, to be my own critic - which was difficult - and to be disciplined enough to work every day without praise, criticism or attention of any sort.'
Two paintings made by Cuming while at the Royal College were illustrated in black-and-white in Young Artists of Promise: Flood (1954), a brooding study of dark autumnal trees reflected in floodwaters, and a wintry Euston Road School-type painting of a horse and carriage in Lewisham Road (1955). Richard Holmes has written: 'After Sidcup and the Royal College of Art, there was a lost period during which he married and divorced and drifted. Then he moved down on his own to a studio flat in... a crumbling Georgian mansion deep in the countryside just north of Romney Marsh, in the freezing winter of 1962. It is evident... that the first months at Egerton were a key moment of hardship, loneliness and revelation. One suspects that he survived a kind of spiritual ordeal, and then really began to find his way as a painter. The chance effect of a striplight between two westward facing windows, have him his first major subject: artificial against natural light.'
It is useful to make some kind of oblique, intuitive parallel with the predicament felt by the young Colin Wilson as, alone in his room on Christmas Day 1954. he sat down on his bed and wrote this in his journal:
"It struck me that I was in the position of so many of my favourite characters in fiction: Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov, Rilke's Malte Laurids Brigge, the young writer in Hamsun's Hunger: alone in my room, feeling totally cut off from the rest of society. It was not a position I relished...Yet an inner compulsion had forced me into this position of isolation. I began writing about it in my journal, trying to pin it down. And then, quite suddenly, I saw that I had the makings of a book. I turned to the back of my journal and wrote at the head of the page: 'Notes for a book The Outsider in Literature'.'
It was at the time he was living in the crumbling mansion near Romney Marsh that Cuming met and married his wife, Audrey – 'a muse with a practical streak', says Holmes. In 1967, they moved to a house on the edge of Romney Marsh, and in 1987 to Iden, near Rye. Pencil drawings of his baby son Danny (1964) and of Audrey (1968) are finely observed, delicately assured expressions of human vulnerability and resilience.
On long car journeys, he has for many years visited and discovered those liminal, magical, light-fluctuating spots where land meets sky (such as, says Holmes, 'the huge sweep of Camber Sands... the steep sheltered estuary of Fowey in Cornwall... the glimmering backwaters of Venice'), making extensive sketchbook notes, accompanied by written colour notes. Here is an examples: 'From window Folkestone Harbour - soft white - sap (green) - Naples (yellow) - overlaid with palest white - Ultra(marine blue) to mauve slate dots... Sea is eel colour - Horizon mauve grey - hint of blue on horizon - to light mud slug belly colour.'
Following these sketches and notes made in situ, he makes many preliminary studio sketches, before embarking on the final paintings. The figures he portrays on The Beach, Arachon (1985), walking, sun-bathing and in the sea, are featureless beings in the shimmering heat and hazy waters. Though appearing about to dissolve into the elements – each seems as deliquescent as the surrounding paint surface – they nevertheless remain individuals, definite characters. In his painting, Burning Stubble (1991), the small, greyish, indistinct though still determined figure overseeing the burning process – evidently a hard-working countryman – nevertheless seems as fleeting as the gusts of mauve smoke rising over the fields.
Christopher Le Brun, President of The Royal Academy of Arts, has written: 'The love of nature and the lyrical response it inspires, whether in painting or poetry, is inextinguishable in English art. Fred Cuming’s thoughtful and tender depictions of cloud, land and sea, recall times of day where our awareness of transience, or the fragility of appearance is most acute, such as dawn or twilight. How often cloud, that most evanescent of motifs, appears to be his subject. By responding to distance and the changeability of our weather he shows how the artist’s imagination is necessarily engaged in a climate where views lack certainty and objects rarely stand alone and complete.
'The art of Fred Cuming is at home entirely within this profound tradition, one to which he contributes his unique temperament, touch and vision.'
Cuming's 2005 unsentimental, perspicacious portrait of the theoretical physicist and author Stephen Hawking (b.1942) is part of the National Portrait Gallery Collection and was most recently exhibited in 2006. The NPG website rightly singles out its 'tenebrous quality, evok[ing] the sitter in his maturity'.This painting was commissioned by the sitter and is one of three related portraits.
Between 1983 and 2000, Cuming had ten one-man shows at the New Grafton Gallery in Barnes, south London, and between 2006 and 2013, four one-man shows at the Adam Gallery, London. In 2001 he was given the honour of being the 'Featured Artist'' in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, with an entire gallery devoted to his work. His work is in many public collections, including those of Brighton and Hove Museum, Salford Museum and Art Gallery, The National Museum of Wales and the Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne.
