`Rich and Faithful Strength of Line'

My brother, who knows more about painting than I’ll ever know, told me on Sunday about William Sommer (1867-1949), who lived for much of his life in and near Cleveland, where we were born and where my brother still lives. The name sounded familiar, and now I realize I associated him with Hart Crane, another one-time Clevelander, who wrote a poem in 1922, “Sunday Morning Apples,” dedicated “To William Sommer”:

“The leaves will fall again sometime and fill
The fleece of nature with those purposes
That are your rich and faithful strength of line.

“But now there are challenges to spring
In that ripe nude with head
reared
Into a realm of swords, her purple shadow
Bursting on the winter of the world
From whiteness that cries defiance to the snow.

“A boy runs with a dog before the sun, straddling
Spontaneities that form their independent orbits,
Their own perennials of light
In that valley where you live
(called Brandywine).

"I have seen the apples there that toss you secrets, --
Beloved apples of seasonable madness
That feed your inquiries with aerial wine.
Put them again beside a pitcher with a knife,
And poise them full and ready for explosion --
The apples, Bill, the apples!”

In a letter to a friend, Crane described the poem as “a homely and gay thing” and said he wrote it “out of sheer joy.” Sommer by then was living in Brandywine, a rural area 20 miles south of Cleveland now best known for its ski runs. Crane’s poem is a celebration of his fondness for Sommer and his paintings – his “rich and faithful strength of line.” Of course, Crane’s poetry shared the same strength, so he is simultaneously announcing his own poetic project. The poem celebrates seasonal change, a theme that later supplies Crane with scaffolding for The Bridge. Clive Fisher, Crane’s most recent biographer, rightly describes the poem as “twenty complex but jubilant lines in honour of his friendship with William Sommer.”

Sommer was born in Detroit, the son of German immigrants, and was largely self-taught as an artist. He earned his living as a commercial lithographer and moved to Cleveland in 1907. Through friends who trained in Europe, and a visit to the Armory Show in 1913, Sommer absorbed the lessons of the Impressionists, Post-Impressionists and Matisse. In 1919, he met Crane, then just 20 years old. I love reading about these supposed provincials and their collisions with Modernism. Crane thought of The Bridge as his covert response to The Waste Land, his affirmation to Eliot’s negation.

From the library of the university where I work I checked out the catalogue of the Sommer memorial exhibition held at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1950, a year after the painter’s death. The book is crudely designed, the reproductions are black and white, and it most resembles a high-school literary magazine. I still don’t have a good idea how Sommer’s work looks, though now I realize I have seen it before. During the Great Depression, Sommer worked painting murals for the W.P.A., including a 20-by-24-foot work in the periodical reading room of the Cleveland Public Library. It depicts Cleveland a century earlier, in1833. Judging from the photograph of it in the catalogue, it’s a conventional, idealized rendering – church, courthouse, livestock, married couple with child, all bathed in glorious sunlight. No wonder I don’t remember it, though I spent a lot of time in the library on Superior Avenue.

At some point, reading again about Crane becomes depressing. His poetry, at its best, is exalted, yet by the time Sommer was painting the library mural, his friend had been dead a year, a suicide. Crane had tried to act as an agent for Sommer’s work in New York City, but Sommer was a regionalist in the literal sense. He preferred to remain in Brandywine. Crane wrote in a letter to Waldo Frank:

“He hates to let his pictures leave him. Against that impasse, I guess, nobody’s efforts will be of much avail. It’s just as well, of course, if he has triumphed over certain kinds of hope. I admit that I haven’t, at least not entirely. I still feel the need of some kind of audience.”