Artists in various fields and media have often drawn inspiration from their fellow artists who work in different formats. For example, writers have often been influenced by music; and movies have often been based on novels or plays. In the 20th century, however, there was a very close alliance between writers and visual artists, both in American and in Europe. Modernist painters often developed friendships with modernist writers and poets, and modernist poets often used modern paintings as an inspiration for their poems. This trend continued in the second half of the twentieth century, as the post-modern or Beat Generation writers like Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, William Burroughs, and Charles Bukowski wrote about how visual artists and painters either directly influenced their creative process, or how their paintings served as object that the writer used to create a poem or a section of a novel. However, there is one thing that all these writers have in common, besides their love of the visual arts; they were all either students of, or were influenced by the American Modernist poet William Carlos Williams. Perhaps more than any other writer, William Carlos Williams was deeply involved in the Modern American Art scene in the first half of the Twentieth Century. Williams was friends with such major American painters and visual as Charles Sheeler, Joseph Stella and Charles Demuth.
Indeed, Williams wrote poems and reviews about their work, attempting to help them gain attention, and they in turn either took photographs of him, or dedicated painting to him, while some artists even used his poems as the subject matter for their paintings. Perhaps the most famous, and beautiful, connection is between William Carlos Williams’ poem “The Great Figure” and American Modernist painter Charles Demuth’s I Saw the Figure Five in Gold. The poem appeared in Williams’ 1921 collection of poems called Sour Grapes. The painting I Saw the Figure Five in Gold was painted by Demuth in 1928, and was composed of oil, ink, and gold leaf on paperboard, and is currently held and on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. I was able to see the painting during a visit to the Met as part of a larger trip into New York City.
Williams is sometimes associated with the Imagist movement, and other times with the Symbolist movement, but in reality Williams considered himself simply a modern American poet, as he rejected the way these various movements focused on ideas and symbols rather than the object—the real world—that was the proper subject of any true artist. By this, I do not mean that he wanted to connect himself with the “Modernist” movement, but rather that Williams’ desire was to be seen as a poet who was aware of, experienced, and expressed the real world that was around him. He believed that the artists should be current, and engaged with the real world in the present, not some idealized past. An important part of this awareness of and consciousness of the present was to be involved with other contemporary artists, and especially modern contemporary artists who felt the same way about representing the real, current world that they lived in. Contemporary painters “convinced Williams that there was an alternative to symbolism that was applicable to Williams own art of writing” (Diggory 6). This was one of the reasons that Williams became associated with, and eventually friendly with the painters and photographers of the Precisionist movement, including Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth.
One of the beliefs of the Precisionist movement was a focus on the objects, buildings, and architecture of the modern, industrial world. Instead of focusing on natural landscapes and pastorals, the Precisionists depicted cityscapes, urban settings, and landscapes filled with factories and industrial parks (Rawlinson 1-3). In other words, they wanted to depict the America scene as it really existed in their day, a goal that Williams shared for his poetry. While Williams found solidarity in these visual artists who took up his ideas for representing the modern world in poetry and applied them to painting, the painters found in Williams an important, established artist who took their work seriously and helped them establish a theoretical framework for their ideas (Rawlinson 11).
Charles Demuth felt that to truly represent modern America, he needed to include the work of other modern artists in his creations. From 1924 to 1929, Demuth completed 8 abstract portraits of modern American artists in all fiends: poets, musicians, dancers, and stage performers (Stella 64). For his friend William Carlos Williams, he decided against crating an abstract image of the poet, and instead selected one of his favorite poems, “The Great Figure” as the subject matter for his painting of Williams (Stella 62-65). When one examines the painting alongside the text of the poem, one finds many biographical references to the poet as well as to the poem. For example, “cues and names incorporated in the painting allude to the poet’s character, style, personality and background. Demuth’s choice of this particular poem, too, represents his interpretation of the poet as a man” (Stella 63). For example, one can find the worlds “Bill” and the initials “WCW” imbedded at several points in the painting, while Demuth also attempted to represent William’s beliefs about the relationship between art and the modern world.
The poem “The Great Figure” depicts a scene in which Williams is walking down a New York City street at night when he is startled by the loud alarm of a fire truck, which he hears before the fire truck appears, and continues to hear after the truck had passed him by. The poem captures both this modern city experience, but also attempts to depict this motion, of both the object and the sound, which was one of the things he was exploring in his poetry of the 1920’s, when the poems of Sour Grapes were written. The first comparison we will construct will be the similarity of reading and seeing the poem for the first time, before examining more critical approaches.
Williams begins, “Among the rain/and lights/ I saw the figure 5/in gold” (Williams 230). The poem captures how the first thing the poet sees distinguishing itself from the dark around it was a large golden number five. This is very much like the experience of the museum visitor as they approach the painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The painting is set off by itself in a corner which connects to other gallery rooms, so that when one approached the painting from either room, one only sees the painting on the wall, and the very first thing one sees is a large golden number five. The golden five is on “red firetruck” but as soon as the firetruck is brought into the mind of the reader it quickly moves out as the truck is “moving/tense/unheeded/ to gong clangs/siren’s howls/ and wheels rumbling/through the dark city” (Williams 230). The truck itself, which was never described as anything more than a gold five and a moving red object, disappears back into the darkness of the city, as fast as it appears, with only the sound of the truck’s siren remaining to remind the poet that the truck had even passed by. The painting conveys this same visual sense, as after seeing the large golden five centered in the frame, the viewer notices that the five is on a red block, which is made to appear like a fire truck by two white circles (headlights) placed on top of the red block. The rest of the red block is encircled by dark colors, which grow darker as one moves away from the five and toward the frame of the painting. Thus, both the painting and the poem capture the momentary, and fragmentary, nature of this encounter in the middle of the night on a city street.
The fragmentary and momentary nature of the encounter was important to both artists, as they felt this captured the speed and complexity of the modern world, which is filled with multiple objects and multiple perceptions of each of those objects. As the Metropolitan’s sourcebook notes, both works are a “dynamic study of the number 5 in motion” while at the same time the painting attempts to act as a portrait of a specific person by accurately visualizing what Williams wanted to achieve in the poem (Stella 63).
Both poem and painting use repetition and overlapping planes of perspective to convey speed and urgency. Peter Halter’s reading of the painting focuses on the speed with both artists attempted to capture in the two different mediums. Williams writes the poem in a way that the reader feels the rapid motion of the fire truck speeding by the poet as he stands on the street. Halter argues that while the poet can describe the “depth of space into which the firetruck and 5 disappear” the painter needed to actually depict and visualize the speed (Halter 101). Halter continues that in order to “enhance the striking effects of the golden 5, Demuth laid the second of the three numbers in gold leaf, turning it literally into a figure five in gold” (Halter 101). Halter felt that the addition of this literal level created a collage structure which made the viewer “experience depth and motion, since the transition from the largest to the smallest 5 (and back to the largest) is partly blocked by the five. It acts as a veritable eye catcher” (Halter 102). Just as the poet was caught by the shock of the fire truck rushing by, and the reader is caught forced to construct the narrative of the passing image and sound, the viewer of the painting is forced to move to take in the painting in its entirety.
Williams use of short, one or two word lines helps to create a sense of the fast motion of the firetruck, as it passes by too quickly for the poet’s senses to record anything besides one word or impression. In addition, the short or one word line create a sense of fragmentation, which represents how the many different people in the city would have perceived the passing of the fire truck in a different way. Demuth captures this fragmentary sense of the poem by breaking the firetruck up into several different parts, which are not connected by the artists, but must be put back together by the viewer of the painting, the same way the reader of the poem must put the fragmented images together into a narrative to understand the subject matter of the poem.
Just as William Carlos Williams broke the event and object up by breaking the poem up into many small line, Demuth contrasts several different geometric shapes. The result of Demuth’s technique on the firetruck was to break it up, creating a montage of lines and elements which depict “the extremely stylized firetruck, the golden numbers floating in and through the pictorial space” (Halter 102). Demuth breaks from Williams, however, by allowing some of the darker shapes to take the form of parts of skyscrapers and other city buildings, actually representing the city space where the scene occurred, while Williams describes only the sense impressions of the firetruck, and the city is only mentioned because it is what the firetruck moves through. In the poem the truck and the location are kept as separate sense objects; in the painting, Demuth blends the elements of the firetruck with the city background, as the headlights of the truck could just as easily be street lights, and the poems darkness might be the dark colored pavement of the streets rather than a sensory darkness that Williams sees the five appear from and disappear back into.
When Demuth showed the painting to Williams, Williams told Demuth it was the most unique painting produced in America in years, however, he also had advice for the painter, telling Demuth that (in the draft of the painting he saw) “the red in the center” was too static, and Demuth should instead allow the motion of the painting to flow freely (Halter 102). Both “The Great Figure” and I Saw the Figure Five in Gold are American masterpieces, and the collaboration of the two artists allows the current generation to gain a glimpse of how artists thought about the world almost a hundred years ago.
Works Cited
Diggory, Terence. William Carlos Williams and the Ethics of Painting. Princeton: Princeton
Halter, Peter. The Revolution in the Visual Arts and the Poetry of William Carlos Williams. New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Paul, Stella. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Resource for Educators. New York: The Met
Press, 1998
Rawlinson, Mark. Charles Sheeler: Modernism, Precisionism, and the Borders of Abstraction.
New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2008.
Williams, William Carlos. The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Vol 1. Edited by
Christopher MacGowan. New York: New Directions, 1988.
