In early 2026, Connie Burg told me in an email that Mars’ “Helen Fordsdale” was the opening song in the soundtrack of a new film, Late Fame, directed by Kent Jones and starring Willem Dafoe. She’d seen it at a private screening and liked it very much.

I had to spend the better part of a year waiting for the film to open to the public in NYC. A few weeks ago, it finally did, and I was there with the proverbial bells on.

Samy Burch’s screenplay is based on a novella by 19^th century Viennese author Arthur Schnitzler, updated from Schnitzler’s Vienna to New York City in the present. Dafoe plays Ed Saxberger (the name is preserved from Schnitzler’s original), a postal worker in his late sixties. In his youth, nearly fifty years earlier, Saxberger had been part of a downtown literary scene and published a book of poetry. He has long forgotten that part of his life, until a young man named Myers shows up outside his door and declares himself a big fan.

Myers introduces Saxberger to his clique of wannabe poets and writers, as well as a stage performer (and the only woman in the group) named Gloria, played by Greta Lee. They welcome Saxberger and praise him as a role model. Over time, as Saxberger hangs out with them, his initial amazement and unease turn to grateful acceptance, but then to inflation of his ego, unsettling his relationships with his friends from his previous blue-collar life, whom he starts to see as illiterate philistines.

The literary group plans a reading to unveil their art to the world, and convinces Saxberger to write something new for it. The plan ends in disappointment for all: the young writers, because the event fails to make the splash they had hoped; Saxberger, because he realizes that his companions are posers, their admiration for him part of the pose.

I went in looking for resonances with my project here on Sumner. I found a diverse spectrum of them. Some are obvious, some that I might have looked for aren’t there, and still others are subtle or indirect.

The first obvious one is the whole theme of the film, displayed in its title. Late fame is a decent description of what I’m trying to bring to my late uncle. And this being the first use of Mars’ music in a true Hollywood movie, the film itself is giving some of it to the band.

Second, Saxberger’s moment as a young poet occurred in lower Manhattan in the late 1970s, the time and place of no wave. If he had been a real person, Sumner might have known him.

On the other hand, Saxberger isn’t much like Sumner. Sumner didn’t live to be Saxberger’s age. Nor did he ever hold down a civil service job, or anything like it; he painted houses for money all his life, but never, to my knowledge, clocked in as a regular employee anywhere. Sumner was voluble and funny; Saxberger is quiet and reserved. Most of all, whereas Saxberger in the film has long ago given up his identity as an artist, Sumner never did. Even when he stopped painting for a while in the 1990s, it was because he was working on a book project about the painter Edward Simmons. To whatever extent I expected, consciously or subconsciously, to see a little of Sumner in Saxberger, it didn’t happen.

But Saxberger’s interactions with his newfound young friends, the core of the story, did make me think about Sumner, and also about myself, in more complex ways, even though Saxberger is unlike either of us.

To dispense first with the film’s least successful element: I found the clique itself, Myers and Gloria and the rest, a little unbelievable, an anachronism transported awkwardly from the coffeehouses of Schnitzler’s Vienna.

That awkwardness didn’t spoil the film for me, though. The youngsters are real enough to Saxberger, and the diverse emotions that pass across Dafoe’s face in response to them were convincing enough to suspend my disbelief in the way that mattered most.

Saxberger’s arc captures something universal about the conflict between the desire to do true creative work and the need to survive in the material world. No wave in general, and Sumner in his particular (throughout his whole life, not just the 70s) had an especially strong stance on this. But almost anyone who wants to be an artist or an intellectual of any kind — academics very much included — has to reckon with it, and Saxberger’s story, as it plays out on the screen here (and on the page in Schnitzler’s novel, to which the film is quite true apart from the change in time and place), gives it a sharp tragic form.

On the other hand, when it comes to 70s lower Manhattan in particular, or the art that came out of it: the film has little to say about it that anyone who doesn’t have prior knowledge would perceive. The story takes place entirely in the present, without flashbacks. We learn little about Saxberger’s past, other than that he once published a book of poems.

But while the film doesn’t wear them on its sleeve, the references to 70s downtown are there. They’re just easter eggs, for those in the know.

The first is Dafoe himself: he really was there, back then, downtown, right along with the no wave originals. Mark Cunningham had wanted to do experimental theater when he first came to New York, before he and Connie met Sumner and Nancy and decided to form a band. Mark writes:

Dafoe was in the Performance group at first, and later co-founded the Wooster group after a split in the first. Since my first idea was theater I was going to most of their productions, so I saw him a lot, but we never met. Actually I’m surprised to see now that he’s 3 years younger than me, as I always was a bit in awe to approach him.... Him, Spalding Gray and Sam Shepherd were the local stage actors I loved in that moment, along with more experimental performers like Meredith Monk.

Connie too pursued theater, as well as dance and other modes of performance. She studied with Spalding Gray at NYU, and also remembers seeing Dafoe perform.

And then, most of all for this particular viewer, there’s the song at the beginning. I don’t know that it would evoke 70s downtown for you if you didn’t know it, as presumably most viewers won’t. There’s nothing in either the film or the song to tell you that this music came out of the same time and place that both Saxberger and Dafoe did, in fiction and reality respectively.

(Much of the film, in fact, is accompanied by an original score by Don Fleming. Mark Cunningham tells me that Fleming was “part of the 80s no wave scene and a good friend of Thurston and Lydia” (i.e., Moore and Lunch respectively) adding “I suspect that it was him that suggested Helen Fordsdale.”)

But if you do know, it’s absolutely perfect. And not just because it’s Mars, but this particular song. It happens to be my favorite one of theirs. I have so much to say about it that it needs a post of its own, so that’s for next time.

For now, this totally unbiased reviewer1 gives Late Fame five stars. With a sixth for either Fleming, or Music Supervisor Taylor Crowley, whoever chose the opening song. As I write it’s still playing in NYC, at Film Forum and Lincoln Center, and presumably elsewhere. It’s soon to be streaming soon, I’m sure, and it will work as well on small screens as anything does. But for me in particular, it was profoundly moving to hear the song in the theatre, nearly half a century after it was performed down in CBGBs and Max’s.

Thanks to Mark Cunningham and Connie Burg, as always, for their insights, encouragement, and contributions to this article, and the next.

The term “km-scale” refers to model resolution, or more precisely, grid spacing. Think of it as the pixel size in a digital camera image. Anything smaller than a pixel can’t be explicitly represented in the model. The smaller the pixels, the more of them there are on the model’s digital representation of the Earth, the greater the detail that can be represented, and the more computation it takes to do it.

These days, 100 km is a typical grid spacing for the more routine uses of climate models; 25-50 km has become commonplace for many purposes, but still considered “high-resolution”, while models at “km-scale”, meaning with grid spacings counted in single-digit numbers of km, are the highest-resolution models in any regular use. They’re usable only for small ensembles of relatively short simulations, on the largest computers available.

Climate models are, in my view, amazingly successful in many respects. They’re good at capturing the basic features of the Earth’s climate, they can predict seasonal variations, and they’ve been remarkably accurate at predicting human-induced warming at the planetary scale. But they do have well known deficiencies, some of them persisting over decades of model development. They’re not so good at predicting detailed regional structure, either of the historical climate or the ways it’s changing. They don’t give consistently reliable answers about which parts of the planet will get wetter or drier, or where hurricanes will increase or decrease in frequency, for example. It’s reasonable to think that higher resolution will eventually solve these problems, thus the scientific motivation for going to km-scale

Any grid at all is an artifice, necessary to represent the Earth in an approximate form on the computer. The finer the grid, the more accurate the approximations, and, in principle, the more realistic the simulated climate as a whole should be. Clouds in the atmosphere and eddies in the ocean, for example, generally become more realistic as resolution increases. Many of the talks at the meeting contained beautiful images and animations (like the example below, taken from this web page about the predecessor meeting in Berlin, 2023) showing virtual clouds, eddies, and other small-scale features, simulated with a sharpness and clarity that traditional, lower-resolution models have no hope of achieving.

Increases in the realism of small-scale elements like clouds and ocean eddies should, in principle, increase the realism of the entire simulated climate. Regional patterns, like where is getting wetter or drier, should start to lock in and look right, compared to observations. But we don’t see this happening as fully as we’d hope, yet. The km-scale models still have substantial biases — systematic errors, where some feature of the climate looks persistently different than its real-world counterpart — and sometimes worse ones than their lower-resolution counterparts.

That increased realism or detail in the underlying mathematical representation doesn’t immediately lead to increased realism in the large-scale properties of the solution shouldn’t shock anyone who knows the history of the field. Most increases in model complexity or sophistication, in fact, cause things to look worse for a while before they get better. Long periods of “tuning” — evaluation of a model’s performance coupled to tweaking of its underlying formulation — are typically needed before the advances pay off. Old models have been through this, while new ones, as all the km-scale ones are, haven’t yet. And progress can only go so fast; these models are very expensive to run, and that even analyzing their output is challenging due to the large data volumes involved.

So while there’s no doubt that km-scale models will be important to the future of the field, they’re not yet the primary vehicles for simulating the climate system across the spectrum of applications for which scientists do that. Thus km-scale is an exciting research frontier, but it’s still a research frontier, rather than something that is fully operational or that has yet transformed our understanding of the Earth’s climate.

The text above is about the physics-based models. These are the models used traditionally, both in climate science and weather forecasting, if with grids larger than km-scale. They represent the system using the mathematical laws of physics (and sometimes chemistry and biology), as well as those can be approximated on the computer. In the last few years, these have seen new competition from models that contain no physics, but instead train machine learning/artificial intelligence algorithms on historical data and use those to predict the future. Let’s call these “AI models” for short.

The AI models have quickly became at least competitive with the physics models, if not even better by some metrics, for weather forecasting. The AI models can’t yet represent climate change well on their own, on the other hand, because that’s an “out-of-sample” problem. The training data — made from historical weather observations — don’t contain enough of what the model needs to know to predict the future. We don’t have enough historical observations of climates with different greenhouse gas concentrations. But people are trying to find ways around that, and there are already many problems in climate science where AI methods can contribute a lot when used in combination with the physics models. The progress is astonishingly rapid, and some beautiful results were shown on a day of the conference that featured AI approaches.

The physics-AI dichotomy in the underlying modeling methodology mapped onto the dichotomy in which side of the Atlantic the researchers came from. The most exciting new AI results came mostly from the U.S., presented either by researchers from actual tech companies or from U.S. university researchers doing work funded at least in part by philanthropies built on tech fortunes.

Whereas when it comes to physics-based km-scale modeling, as noted by my colleague Ryan Abernathey, Europe is now clearly leading. This is rapidly becoming true for all climate science, and many other fields as well, as the Trump administration does everything it can to pull the legs out from under American scientific institutions.

There were some nice results with km-scale models from American labs, but it was clear that these projects are running on fumes, at risk of termination any time. The European labs, on the other hand, continue to move forward as before, with the support of their governments. This yawning transatlantic gap was evident not just in the content of the talks, but also in informal conversations outside the sessions.

Many European colleagues asked me, “How is it over there?” The most positive thing I could say is that not all the worst outcomes have fully materialized yet. Our institutions are mostly still there and still functioning; but this just means we haven’t quite hit the iceberg that is plainly in front of us, with the distance in between closing rapidly.

Talking to early career researchers during the breaks made it clear that many who in the past would have been seeking their next opportunity in the U.S. have now given up on that and are focused on Europe, regardless of their own national origin. There are young American scientists leaving for Europe, as well as Asians and Africans who are going there, and Europeans who are staying there, all of whom in the past would have come here. I can’t blame any of them, but it’s painful for an American scientist like me to watch. And ultimately it’s not great for Europe either, the boost in incoming talent notwithstanding, inasmuch as the reason for it is the collapse of the country that used to be the continent’s strongest scientific partner.

During the week of the conference, the Trump administration’s Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Michael Kratsios (a man with a Bachelor’s degree in political science and a prior career in business, unlike prior OSTP heads who have had Ph.D.s and experience as working scientists) released a report articulating the administration’s new strategy for science. The report names many problems that are real: scientists spend too much time writing proposals; peer review can be conservative and disfavor the kinds of high-risk, high-reward projects that sometimes lead to the greatest fundamental advances; universities are not always effective at “user-driven” projects, or projects that require mobilizing lots of resources quickly; etc. It says things that sound sincere about wanting to solve them. What the strategy means in practice becomes clearer when viewed together with 1) the proposed OMB rule released a couple of months earlier, which aims to give political appointees direct control over every aspect of federal grants, and 2) the actions of federal agencies over the last year.

The essence of the strategy is to cut funding for “legacy” scientific institutions — meaning universities and government labs, i.e., the public sector — in favor of the private sector. NSF and the other science agencies have already this year been giving far fewer grants to universities than in past years, in favor of large industry-driven collaborations called “X-Labs”. AI, quantum computing, and other commercial or commercializable technologies are in, while understanding the natural world is out.

I have nothing against the private sector; I’m more closely connected to it, through a decade and a half of collaborations with the insurance industry, than the great majority of my colleagues are. But this administration’s strategy, if enacted fully, will mean the end of American science as we have known it. Historically, the private sector builds on a strong foundation of basic knowledge that comes from universities and government labs, while the universities also train young scientists by giving them opportunities, as federally-funded Ph.D. students and postdocs, to work at the frontiers of knowledge. That’s the system that has made U.S. science the best in the world since World War II. The Trump administration is ending that overnight, by top-down decree.

It’s theoretically possible that our historical system for doing science could be replaced with something better, if the administration in charge of it ultimately had any real understanding of science or respect for scientists. An administration like that would have enough humility, and respect for what the historical system has achieved, to understand that one shouldn’t try to destroy the existing system overnight, without buy-in from the scientific community. But that is what pulling grant funding en masse from U.S. universities amounts to.

What Derek Lowe wrote recently in Science seems transparently true: the rationales given in the Kratsios report and previous Trump administration documents, the verbiage about “gold standard” science and the like, are all nonsense. It’s pretty clear instead that (bold font in original):

“The Trump administration hates academic science funding, full stop. They hate where that money goes, and they hate who it goes to. They want to keep all that money for themselves, to hand out to favored cronies who can help them get elected and to steer yet more money and more power back into their hands.”

It was a great conference, but one that raised deeply conflicting emotions for me. It was, on the one hand, a relief to be in Europe and to see that at least there, climate science continues as before, and there are opportunities for young scientists to advance. On the other hand, it was a bitter reminder that these opportunities are evaporating back home.

We face a near future where Europe (and Asia) will lead in most basic science, including especially the science of our own planet. The The U.S. may lead in AI and some other commercializable technologies; but that will be possible only because of the supporting scientific workforce, institutions and culture that have been built up over the last 80 years. These assets are now being being cashed out by our government and tech oligarchy, removing the foundation for the industries of the future, as well as for our understanding of the world and universe in which we live.

I recently read Jesse Rifkin’s This Must Be the Place: Music, Community and Vanished Spaces in New York City. It’s a social history of local music scenes that came and went in NYC in the latter half of the 20^th century. Each scene sprang up spontaneously, in a marginal neighborhood with cheap rents. Each eventually went extinct, due to gentrification, changing tastes, victimization by its own success as its stars moved on, or all of the above. No wave, as you might guess, is one of the featured scenes.

The author is clearly deeply invested; apparently his day job is leading walking tours of the neighborhoods he writes about. But he still achieves an admirable scholarly distance. He conscientiously avoids the “everything was better back in the day” romanticization that the material often evokes, beginning the book with a refutation of the perennial claim that “New York is over.” By documenting many different scenes over a sixty-year period, he demonstrates that there wasn’t a single special time when conditions were right for creativity:

“These supposed golden ages were not fruitful because their chronological circumstances were spectacularly conducive to art and music-making. Amazing stuff happened because a quorum of hardworking, ambitious and creative people saw the opportunities that their specific circumstances created, and chose to exploit them.”

Rifkin documents all the elements that come together to make a local live music scene, of which the people making the music are just one. While the artists naturally feature prominently, they are not at the center of the story. The real protagonists here are the venues, their owners and staff, their buildings and neighborhoods, and the audiences they drew.

I finished reading This Must Be the Place a couple of months ago, but it has me still thinking about the intertwined histories of people, places, and art. And about the work of reconstructing those histories from individual and collective memories. And how those stories can be evoked, to the attuned eye, by the places that still stand today, like the footprints of dinosaurs.

I had jury duty a couple of weeks ago, so I was down near City Hall. After being released, I walked west from the courthouse towards my subway ride home. Crossing Broadway, I realized I was right near number 315. This five-story building, across the street from the gargantuan Jacob Javits Federal Building, was home to Sumner for approximately a decade, ending around 1977 or maybe early 1978. He shared a loft there with David Reed, while Nancy Arlen, Sumner’s romantic partner for most of this time, lived upstairs with David’s ex-wife and son in another loft. Nancy, David and Sumner, all visual artists, were all students at the New York Studio School in the early years, and met there. Mars formed towards the end of this period, and rehearsed in David and Sumner’s place; David remembers hearing them through the walls while he was painting.

Although I’d visited Sumner’s subsequent place on East Fourth Street a couple of times since starting this project, I hadn’t been to 315 Broadway. Once I realized I was within a block of it, I walked over and took a couple of pictures.

The building struck me as Soho-ish, atypical of its more southern neighborhood. I wasn’t wrong, per the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission:

“315 Broadway, located in Manhattan, is a palazzo-inspired commercial store and loft building, which was constructed as a speculative investment by the retired linen merchant Thomas Suffern in 1861. Few of these commercial palaces still exist on Broadway south of Franklin Street.”

When we compare the city of the 1970s to that of today, the story usually told is about gentrification. Yet today this particular address doesn’t look very gentrified, the neighborhood around it notwithstanding.

The blinds and air conditioners in some of the windows above ground level suggest that the residential apartments are inhabited. But the residential entrance’s glass doorway, painted over and covered in graffiti, suggests otherwise, and the building’s storefronts, next door, were shuttered at 4pm on a weekday. The narratives that allow us to understand and remember history are lossy, dropping detail like the algorithms that compress audio files for your phone.

Just a couple of weeks ago, a new record was released: Mars Live at the Village Gate, recorded at the now long-gone Bleecker Street club in August 1977. This is the only known live “board recording” of the band, meaning that the sound engineer, Brooke Delarco, recorded it from the actual sound system, with separate inputs from all the instruments — including individual drums in Nancy’s kit, it sounds to me — and voices, using good microphones, properly mixed on the mixing board. (Delarco herself was an interesting character; she was interviewed by Rifkin for This Must Be the Place, and you can find the interview itself on his substack.)

Mars made many live recordings, of both gigs and rehearsals, with their own tape recorders. These are invaluable for documenting the history of the band, and I love listening to them, but they don’t have the audio quality of this professional job. The studio records, on the other hand, are well-recorded, but don’t capture the band live; also, they were all done later than this gig, by when the band’s repertoire and sound had changed. So this record stands alone, an invaluable document.

The story behind the record’s production and release was shared with me by musician, scholar, historian and archivist of no wave Weasel Walter: Delarco contacted Weasel in 2020, telling him of the existence of this recording, then sharing versions of it. Weasel in turn shared these with Mark Cunningham, and recommended HoZac to release it. There was much back-and-forth between Delarco, Weasel, Mark, and the label, over a period of years (though Delarco passed in 2023, so her involvement ended then). Long story short, Weasel re-mastered it, and now, six years after the start of this interaction, and nearly fifty years after the gig, we have a new Mars record. It sounds good!

Most of the songs on Mars Live at the Village Gate won’t be familiar to anyone but the most devoted Mars fans. With the exception of “3E,” which they recorded for the front side of their first single, none of them made it onto any of the band’s studio records. This is still early Mars: the songs are more reminiscent of their antecedents, more straight up, than the later ones would be. From Marc Masters’ liner notes: “A common misconception about Mars is that their music was meant to be dark and nihilistic. That’s not totally wrong… But the quartet’s work was also energetic, joyful and buoyantly melodic. After all, they started by jamming on tunes by the Velvet Underground, pretty much the ur-band when it comes to sounding both dark and bright.”

I’d argue that “dark” and “bright” are somewhat in the ear of the listener; dissonance needn’t be nihilism. But whatever metaphoric shade we use to characterize it, the experimentation that leads many to find later Mars particularly challenging was still some distance from its peak in August 1977.

I asked Mark what happened to these songs after this, and he answered

“…we wore them out playing the same set for 6 months. 3E is the one new song and it’s clearly a step forward to a new phase, so on the first single, which was recorded a month or so later, we didn’t even consider using any old ones, instead we came up quickly with 11000 volts to complement 3E, and we dropped the old songs as soon as we had a full new set.”

Sumner famously described Mars as going “from ten to one,” meaning evolving from normal song structures towards more anarchic (if still thoroughly rehearsed) “noise” —drawing more and more on free jazz (readily accessible in downtown lofts at the time, including Ornette Coleman’s, where Mark was a regular), experimental music (Sumner had been a student of Morton Feldman at the Studio School, and heard lectures by John Cage), and other abstract forms, and drawing less on rock’n’roll — over the course of their two years of performing. On Sumner’s ten-point scale, I’d put Live at the Village Gate around maybe eight, with considerable distance to go til they would reach the abstractions recorded on Mars EP.

As a fan of Sumner’s many voices, I was captured by his falsetto on “Compulsion.” I hear it as different from any of the other voices he did later, even if it shares a register with the one he would use a little later on “Helen Fordsdale”.

Mark: “…yes Sumner sings Compulsion, it was part of a game he and Connie played to confuse listeners, imitating each other, and it worked cause on the live albums it’s quite easy to guess wrong.”

Connie: “Both Sumner and I were into vocal experimentation, with Sumner more fluid.”

One song, a vehicle for Connie’s voice over a rock beat and a descending chord sequence the same, except for starting on a major key, as the verses of Nina Simone’s “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” is titled “81 Warren Street,” for a rehearsal space the band used.

Connie: ”Guitarist Jody Harris and bassist David Hofstra (friends from Kansas) established a rehearsal studio at 81 Warren that many bands used. Lydia then lived in the abandoned building next door.”

Mark: “It was a rehearsal space which first Mars and The Cramps shared, and later Teenage Jesus and The Contortions. In 77. Later Lydia got a place on Delancey Street with a space and we rehearsed there for a few months.”

The lore around the No New York bands tends to focus on the East Village. But 81 Warren Street — today home to an upscale taqueria — is actually in Tribeca, per today’s real estate conventions (though it’s technically south of the “triangle below Canal” for which the neighborhood is named). In fact, it’s just a few blocks from 315 Broadway, so quite a bit of no wave history passes through this less-hip neighborhood.

Connie, speaking of the 70s: “Lower Manhattan was not residential or even mercantile at that point, and many artists created studios and living spaces there. Actually it was a wonderfully abandoned neighborhood only busy during the work week with civil employees and Wall Streeters.”

Based on what I can gather from everyone’s memories (Mark’s, Connie’s, David Reed’s), Sumner was likely still living at 315 Broadway when Mars began rehearsing at the Warren Street space. He would only have had to carry his guitar a few blocks to get to rehearsal. In any case, Mars’ first rehearsal space was the 315 Broadway loft itself; so between these two addresses, much of the band’s development happened not much more than a stone’s throw from City Hall.

Someday, when I follow Jesse Rifkin’s lead and put together a proper walking tour of Sumner’s New York, the Manhattan portion of it will start here.

Like the first one a year ago, this event was organized and executed by a group of brilliant early-career scientists who volunteered their time, effort and talent. I was profoundly honored that they asked me to give the opening keynote.

I structured the talk around my own career, as a way into the broader messages of the livestream as a whole. I used my story as a lens through which to tell some of the larger story of weather and climate science, and post-WWII U.S. science in general. I highlighted the many people, institutions, and intellectual traditions that have enabled me to have the fortunate career that I’ve had, to explain what has made the U.S. such a great place to be a scientist during my lifetime. I tried to show how the system that produced me also produced Nobel Prizewinners (Mario Molina, Syukuro Manabe); the Montreal Protocol; and the invention of modern weather forecasting.

Also, I compared science to art, both at the beginning and the end of the talk. I even managed to fit in a slide about my uncle Sumner Crane.

As I’ve started to write here, I am starting to think about how to combine Sumner’s story and mine into something, and this was another small step. Here my point was that science and art are both creative, but only in science have there been many good jobs supported by relatively stable funding, because the government has made it a priority in a way it has never done for art — and that’s why I chose science over art as a career. Sumner, as someone who basically did his art for no money for his entire life, was not particularly unusual. The alternatives for artists are: be lucky enough to become a superstar, have a wealthy patron, or support yourself by doing something else while doing art in your spare time. We don’t want science to become like that.

If you’re interested, you can see the talk here, starting around 21 minutes in.

As the event went on, a rotating cast of hosts introduced the talks, managed Q&A and expounded in between on the purpose of the livestream, working from a script that emphasized the importance of federally-funded weather and climate science. This year, there was a specific focus on the Administration’s threat to dismantle NCAR, and many of the talks also addressed that institution. Speakers explained how their work depended on use of NCAR’s models, data, computers, and field programs, and on collaboration with NCAR scientists and participation in its education and training programs. Prof. Jen Kay, speaking right after me, gave a comprehensive overview of all this, explaining what NCAR is and what it does (you can find it starting at 1:02 in the same video as above).

The focus on NCAR was diluted, however, by new bad news. Just a few days before the livestream, OMB dropped a proposed new rule that, in its broad sweep and deeply authoritarian intent, is potentially even more catastrophic.

I won’t try to give a comprehensive account of all the ways this rule would do harm to American science. (In fact, the scope of the rule, and its potential for harm, is much broader than science, affecting nearly all federal funding of anything.) You can read about it in articles by Elisa Nilsen and Andrew Freedman for CNN, Eric Roston for Bloomberg, Tony Romm in the New York Times.

Or you can see the open, non-paywalled post from AGU President Brandon Jones. To quote him: “If finalized as written, this rule would give political appointees veto power over peer review, allow the government to cancel active grants mid-project with minimal justification, ban entire categories of science from federal funding, and restrict researchers’ ability to publish their work and attend scientific conferences.”

And again from Dr. Jones: “…what it actually does is restructure the foundational rules of U.S. science funding—with cascading impact for global collaborators—to serve political priorities rather than the public good. We have seen executive orders, budget cuts, and terminations take aim at the scientific enterprise one by one. This proposed rule would codify that agenda into federal regulation, making it far harder to reverse.”

American science has been great, from well before I was born until now, not only because it has been well-funded — though of course that has been essential — but also because it has been well-managed. Well-managed means managed, for the most part, by the scientists themselves. Peer review has been the essential mechanism behind decisions big and small, with relatively little intrusion from politicians below the high-level funding of agency budgets.

It has certainly never been a perfect scientific meritocracy, but it’s about as close as any country has ever got to one. When combined with the generous funding, and a steady stream of foreign talent to complement, collaborate and compete with us locals, it has been a historically and uniquely successful achievement. To whatever extent America has been great, science has been no small part of it, and this has been the recipe.

This Administration wants to destroy all that. This OMB rule in particularly would end the tradition of scientific self-rule, replacing decisions made by peer review with those of political appointees, no justification required beyond “Administration priorities”. The potential it has to harm American scientific institutions, achievement, and work force is difficult to overstate.

It’s not a done deal, though. The rule is in a public comment period that ends July 13. Please write a comment telling the Administration what a bad idea this rule is. You can do it here, through AGU, or directly on the Federal Register, or probably elsewhere. You don’t have to be a scientist; anyone can post a comment. Plenty of bad Administration initiatives have been rolled back after public pushback. Let’s make this one of them.

Thanks to the organizers of the Weather and Climate Livestream: Marc Alessi, Jonah Bloch-Johnson, Haley Crim, Paulina Czarnecki, Syl Foisy, Stella Heflin, Miriam Nielsen, Virginia Schutte, Clare Singer, and Andrew Williams.

One further note: I don’t actually provide an explicit definition of scientific creativity here. I’ll attempt that later. I hope this first installment makes enough sense without one.

Why talk about creativity in science?

Because it’s important, and interesting, and beautiful.

Science is a creative activity. At least, it is when it’s any good. Major scientific discoveries are creative achievements, and creativity is what distinguishes great scientists from not-so-great ones.

And yet we scientists talk about scientific creativity very little, and teach it even less, even though it’s at the core of what science is.

The teaching of science tends to emphasize settled knowledge. To the extent that students are taught anything at all about the origins of that knowledge, accounts of the “scientific method” emphasize the testing of hypotheses (how we determine whether ideas are right) over their generation (where ideas come from; i.e., the most creative part of the process).

Even at fairly advanced levels, like upper-level undergraduate courses in the physical sciences, mastery is measured mainly by one’s ability to solve pre-determined problems using pre-determined methods1. This teaches important and necessary skills, but sheds little light on how anyone first came up with either those problems or those solutions.

Then, once students graduate and become working scientists, our jobs can sometimes seem designed to suppress creativity.

The peer review system, for example, can be deeply conservative. Grant proposals should be among our most creative forms of scientific expression, since they’re where we are supposed to put our best new ideas. They are typically sent to several reviewers, either working independently (“mail reviews”) or collectively (panels) for comments, before a program manager makes a decision about whether to fund the work. When resources are scarce, as they usually are, even one negative review can sink one’s chances; so it’s less important to get great reviews than it is to avoid bad reviews. One learns to make reviewers feel good by saying things they already know, extending established lines of inquiry in incremental steps, presenting work that’s already half done (in order to assuage doubts about whether it’ll work), and altogether introducing novelty only in small, unthreatening doses.

Then, if we’re lucky and our proposal is funded, most of the work (at least in universities) is done by graduate students and postdocs. Their own creativity is suppressed, to the extent that they are told to work on the pre-defined problems that their mentors just got through peer review.

This direction of trainees makes some degree of sense: how else would a typical graduate student, new to the field, know what to work on, or how to work on it? Formulating a good research question, and then a strategy to answer it, require taste2, knowledge of the literature, and intuition. All of these are generally acquired through the hard-won experience that early career researchers don’t yet have. It’s only practical and logical that their mentors, who do have that experience, would set the agenda, at least at the beginning.

But when and how do junior researchers learn to set the agenda themselves, as they’ll eventually need to if they’re to succeed and become senior researchers? The ability to formulate good questions is not something that we teach in the classroom, or in any other explicit way. It’s a muscle that one needs to train, and there isn’t much in the way of systematic or formal mechanisms built into the system for students and postdocs to exercise it. The expectation seems to be that it will happen in the course of the apprenticeship process, but that’s far from guaranteed. Ingredients that promote it include: funding that is reasonably stable and not too tightly tied to specific timelines or deliverables; supportive mentors; and most of all (but most out of the control of the mentor), self-motivation on the part of the junior researcher themselves.

Good mentors give their mentees space to experiment. I was given that space when I was a graduate student and a postdoc, long ago. After spending some months or years working on whatever my advisors had initially suggested, I came up with my own ideas and told them I wanted to work on them. To my immense gratitude, they let me do it. Some of those ideas worked out extremely well; others didn’t go anywhere. In either case I learned.

I have tried to pay it forward by doing the same for those in my care. I try to communicate that I’m open to hearing their ideas and will be supportive of their spending some fraction of their time investigating them, as long as the ideas pass some minimal standard of reasonableness. This approach has worked well for those of my Ph.D. students and postdocs who have had the internal resources to make the most of it. To put it another way, what look like my best successes as a mentor have resulted from little more than cheerleading and getting out of the way.

Not everyone has the internal resources to make the most of it, though. The ideas, the drive and discipline to execute on them, and the risk tolerance needed to spend time out on a limb: all these have to come from inside the aspiring researcher. Sometimes they don’t; perhaps because, up to this point, their educations haven’t truly asked it of them.

Letting someone flail at that point can occasionally lead to a breakthrough, but our institutions don’t make it easy to do that for long. There’s too much pressure on everyone involved to produce measurable outputs, particularly publications and degrees, on time and on budget. So we often default to the lowest common denominator: an assignment to take a set of well-defined, incremental steps, laid out by the mentor, in an established direction.

Creativity can still emerge in the execution. Even if the initial direction is set by the mentor, the junior researcher will face many small choices as they move forward. Those who are most effective will be able to make those choices (at least on a trial basis), and work some distance through the consequences, on their own. They will recognize when something is not working, and adjust, without needing feedback or instruction at every step, allowing them to make substantial progress in between meetings with their mentors.

Both great and not-so-great students will make mistakes in their calculations. The great ones develop the context, intuition and critical sense to look critically at a plot3 they’ve made to visualize their results, realize it’s wrong, think about where the error might be, and try to correct it. The not-so-great ones just make the plot and wait to get their advisor’s take on it. The same applies to results that are not wrong per se, but that, on reflection, show that the calculation didn’t make sense, or didn’t address the scientific question that motivated it in the way that one had thought beforehand that it would. Some will realize this and try something slightly different, on their own, without being told anything.

Being able to take an increasing number of such steps unaided amounts to what we call “independence,” but another term might be “creativity in the small things”. It can lead to creativity in larger things, if and when the process of experimentation and assessment of interim results leads to re-thinking of the larger question that underlies the entire project, or of the methodology laid out to answer it.

Not everything has to be learned through one’s own experience as a researcher. As in other aspects of life, one can learn from the communicated experiences of others. Reading the literature, going to talks and conferences, and conversing informally with other scientists, whether one’s peers or those at later career stages all can support the development of the scientific creativity muscle. Role models can inspire us, by showing what success looks like and providing clues to the perceptive about how to achieve it. Conversely, others’ failures can also be nearly as informative as one’s own, if one has the empathy to understand them — and if they let us see their failures in the first place.

In the mid-1990s, when I was a new-ish graduate student at MIT, Isaac Held came to give a seminar. I can’t remember any of the specifics of the talk beyond its topic, one he’d been working on for years. He had set himself a deep theoretical question, the kind where the real challenge is often how to formulate the problem right more than what one then does to solve it4. I do remember that at the end, he didn’t wrap things up into a set of conclusions — as convention dictates, and as almost any other speaker, then or now, would feel compelled to do. Instead, he just trailed off, saying “Well, I still don’t really understand it, but that’s as far as I’ve gotten5.”

Years later, Isaac would become an important mentor to me, as he has been to a great many others in our field. In this moment, the first time I had seen him in person, he won me over completely. He also modeled several traits that I now think of as contributing to his own prodigious scientific creativity, and which I have tried, with whatever limited success, to mimic.

First, confidence and security: only someone who didn’t feel they had anything to prove could end a talk like that. Second, honesty, self-criticism, and vulnerability: he was willing to let us see not just the polished end of his thought process, but the rough middle, and to admit that he hadn’t yet achieved what he wanted. (You can’t succeed if you can’t recognize failure, and live with it.) Third, vision and determination: he was showing us that he was in the middle of a long arc, with a goal that he kept in view even though he hadn’t found the way there yet, and that he was willing to bang his head against obstacles for years if that’s what it took to find his way past them.

But for a developing scientist to benefit from the available stimuli — talks, papers, conversations, now maybe even social media and AI — they have to be active consumers. They have to learn that creativity and taste in problem selection are at the core of being a good scientist. Then they have to be on the lookout for those who exhibit these traits, learn to recognize them, and take the right lessons from them. One can’t find what one isn’t looking for, and much of what it takes to get to the point of doing a Ph.D. — doing well in classes, maybe an undergrad research internship (often mentored by someone who either has low expectations, guides the work closely, or both) — doesn’t require one to look for it.

Just telling someone what I’m saying here doesn’t work either, in my experience. Altogether, formal education can be critically important in supporting the development of scientific creativity, but I doubt it can make it from scratch. After many years of mentoring, I do feel that I’ve helped some students and postdocs develop into more creative scientists; but to the extent that’s true, it has been by nurturing something that they brought with them into the process. Not everyone brings it. If I knew how to give it to them, I would, but I don’t.

The origin of the spark that leads to true creativity is just as mysterious, just as resistant to explanation, in science as it is in art.

Thanks to Jed for comments on a prior draft.

At some point in the evening’s conversation, he told the small group of us present how their home had been damaged by a fire years earlier. He recounted that he had been impressed by the bravery and effectiveness of the firefighters who had come and put it out. He then remarked that it was the only time he could remember when he had felt that he got something for all the taxes he paid.

Later, it occurred to me that I could have said that his taxes had paid for a great deal that he took for granted. Roads and bridges; the internet; the educations of most of his former employees; the police and military who kept him safe; and so on. That his wealth, whatever credit he might deserve for it, was made possible by the stable and functioning society in which he had acquired it, which in turn depended on many public services provided by the government. In fact, though I didn’t realize it at the time, his former company itself had held many large government contracts, so taxpayer funds had contributed to its profits directly and substantially.

In the moment, I was stunned, and silent. And I struggle to this day to understand how this intelligent, educated and knowledgeable man could have expressed the view he did, though I am acutely aware that he’s not alone in holding it.

I suppose it’s easy to take things for granted when they are constants in the backgrounds of our lives. The quiet work our institutions do well day after day, year after year, are less visible to us than their flaws are.

Of course the flaws are there. There are plenty of ways and instances in which the public sector fails us. But it’s one thing to complain that some arm of the government is inefficient, ineffective, or in need of reform. It’s another entirely to say that it does nothing of value at all.

Perhaps it becomes easier to think this way the wealthier we are, as then more of our needs and desires are met by private suppliers who cater to us more directly. Perhaps that makes us bristle more when government agencies treat us as just one of the masses. A firefighter saving our home, as a public servant who helps us in a big, visible and personal way, may be the exception. It’s harder to feel gratitude for the Post Office, the DMV, or the IRS. And those are the most visible ones; we don’t see most government agencies at all, most of the time.

We don’t see the foundations of the buildings in which we live and work, either. But we would be in trouble if they weren’t there.

Once you tell yourself that public institutions accomplish nothing at all, though, it’s apparently not such a big leap to become convinced that they should be dismantled. If we can’t or won’t see what they do, we won’t anticipate the disruption and harm that will result when they stop doing it. Experts may warn us, but if we see those experts as part of the same system that we already don’t value, we’re going to ignore them too.

An example: President Trump and his inner circle had heard reasons why attacking Iran would be a bad idea and thus why past administrations hadn’t done it. The regime would be unlikely to be dislodged, and could then kneecap the world economy by closing the strait of Hormuz to ship traffic. They figured, it seems, that the experts who had made that determination were products of dysfunctional institutions, wastes of taxpayer money. The President had fired them, excluded them from the decision-making process, or intimidated them into silence, such that he was surrounded only by those who told him what he wanted to hear.

On April 24, abruptly and with no warning, the White House fired all 22 members of the National Science Board, the independent body that oversees and advises the National Science Foundation.

The NSF was designed to be independent of short-term political currents, on the understanding that science will work best if scientists are, to a substantial degree, in charge of it. The NSB was the buffer designed to maintain that independence.

The elimination of the NSB was just one act of destruction against American science among many in the last year and a half, beginning with Musk and DOGE in the early months and continuing to the present. Grants have been canceled for political reasons; large numbers of civil servants fired; advisory boards and research arms dismantled (at other agencies as well as NSF, e.g., EPA); legal requirements to consider science in policy ignored; and moves made towards closing entire national laboratories, including the National Center for Atmospheric Research in my own field.

The actions have been rapid, indiscriminate, and vindictive (and often, illegal). They give the clear impression that this Administration simply hates science, or at least hates scientists. The Administration, of course, doesn’t say exactly that. Their position seems to be, more or less, that scientists who are supported by the taxpayer should serve the priorities of the Administration.

Many of those priorities, though — on climate, on vaccines, on most environmental and public health issues — are at odds with the views of most scientists who work in the relevant fields, as expressed through the institutional processes of synthesis reports, advisory boards, and so on. When the consensus views of the scientific community don’t seem to support the Administration’s position, the Administration sometimes makes weak efforts to argue their cases on the evidence, or weak legal procedural arguments (as in the case of the NSB, where it has argued that the board was unconstitutional because its members weren’t confirmed by the Senate). But mostly they just fire the scientists. There’s currently no head of either the Food and Drug Administration or Center for Disease Control and Prevention, nor a surgeon general, for example.

And they choke off the funding. So far this year, despite the NSF having been funded by Congress at a level similar to previous years (in spite of a President’s budget request that had proposed catastrophically drastic cuts; Republican Congresses, including even the present one, recognize the value of federal science funding) the number of grant awards that have been made is dramatically below that in previous years.

It’s not entirely clear why; one reason is likely just that many program managers have been fired, so those that are left are having trouble doing the work it takes to get awards out the door. But this was an easily foreseeable outcome of DOGE’s actions, so one has to conclude that the Administration wasn’t bothered by the prospect that the NSF’s support of scientific research across the country would be throttled.

And the attacks are not just on NSF. At all the federal agencies that support science, the Administration’s hostile takeover has overturned the processes of research funding, creating uncertainty and confusion at best and shutting down laboratories at worst. Research universities are in crisis, to varying degrees but with few total exceptions; even the strongest ones, like MIT, are struggling.

Besides funding, the other essential ingredient in American scientific success is talent, much of which comes from outside the U.S. Aspiring young scientists come here from around the world as graduate students and postdocs. They are drawn here by the research funding, the institutions and talent already here, and the relatively open and meritocratic ecosystem. Many stay here, start companies, and contribute in innumerable other ways. Now, the Administration’s many anti-immigration actions and policies have reduced the scientific talent pool coming from overseas, and demoralized, if not driven out, foreign scientists already here. Some U.S.-born scientists are leaving the country too — I don’t have numbers, but I know quite a few myself, either personally or at one degree of separation, who are taking jobs outside the country.

It’s normal that an elected government should want to set policy, and that this should include some degree of oversight of federal agencies. But one would also hope that any Administration who inherits a world-leading scientific enterprise would recognize the value of it enough to see that they shouldn’t take actions that risk destroying it.

And scientists can’t do their best work without a reasonable degree of independence and stability. To put scientific institutions under the degree of political control this Administration seeks is, if not to destroy them, at least to render them shadows of their former selves.

The system has had no shortage of flaws, of course. Plenty of research is more routine than truly innovative. (It’s just not all that easy to identify ahead of time what research will turn out to be groundbreaking and important, so no one has found a way to fund only that.) The processes and institutions have their shares of biases and dysfunctions. Intellectually serious critics can recognize the successes of the system, while arguing for reforms to remedy its failures.

But the Trump administration is not an intellectually serious critic. These draconian budget cuts, firings, and overturnings of process and precedent, made at this speed, with no apparent deliberation and little or no input from scientists (other than, sometimes, scientists handpicked to say what the Administration wants): these show a willingness to destroy the existing system, or at least a tolerance for damage to it, that no one who recognized and understood what that system has achieved could possibly hold.

The United States’ economic prosperity has been built in no small part on its world-leading success in science and technology. (See, for example, here, here, or here.) The ingredients of that success are generous federal research funding, intellectual freedom, and openness to foreign talent. Remove these ingredients at the nation’s peril.

But while the contributions of federally-supported science contribute to national well-being in many ways, most of those ways are collective, gradual, and indirect. Research at universities and government labs generally leads to prosperity only after multiple downstream steps of translation. It doesn’t usually produce products, services, or improved public policies directly, but informs and enables those things. We’re more like the foundations of the house than we’re like the firefighter who drives up and saves it.

To the average nonscientist, then, the consequences of the Trumpist assault on science may not be seen or felt as immediately as those of closing the Strait of Hormuz. But if the Administration gets everything it seems to want, they may ultimately be even worse, and longer-lasting. Institutions, and the intellectual cultures that live in them, are much easier to destroy than to build. Damage the Foundation, and it’s hard to make the building stand strong again.

Here’s Sumner in January 1948, when he would have been less than two, with his big sister, my mother, Cynthia Sobel (née Schoenwetter), herself six at this time.

This is Sumner in January of 1960, age thirteen, playing the piano.

We actually have a recording from a few months earlier, made by his father, Charles, on his reel-to-reel tape recorder, and later transferred to cassette, probably by Sumner himself. It says “with Tommy Reina, 1959” so the kid by that name (about whom we have no other information) must be the guitarist, with Sumner on piano and vocals, playing songs by Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley. I put their version of Lewis’ “Breathless” on the podcast episode I did with my mother, so you can hear that there. Here is one more, their performance of “Great Balls of Fire”.

Here are Sumner’s parents, Charles and Sylvia Schoenwetter, at their home in Queens in 1963:

Here’s Sumner with his mother in October 1966, when Sumner was 20 and Sylvia was 52. They’re at the family property in Woodbourne, NY; in the background is the building they called “the casino.” Sumner painted many paintings there, and the interior of the building itself is featured in many of them.

Here are two of Sylvia posing next to Sumner’s paintings. We don’t have dates on these but they must be from around this time, the mid- to late-1960s; Sumner painted these works in 1963 or 1964. I showed the second of these paintings in my first post on Sumner’s “Giacometti phase”. (I don’t seem to have a photo of the first one, though there’s a very similar one in that same post, of a male figure, perhaps Sumner, painted in the same way with the scribbly bell-bottom pants above nearly nonexistent ankles, in the same chair.)

Sumner had plenty of conflict with his parents in his youth, as he recorded in his journals decades later. My mother recalls that, well into his adulthood, they held onto delusional hopes that he might go back and finish high school, go to college, and become a teacher. (They were both teachers themselves.) And during the time of Mars and then John Gavanti, I can clearly remember my grandfather, a classical musician, being completely unable to appreciate Sumner’s music. So it brings me joy to see that it wasn’t all disapproval. They did appreciate his art, as evidenced by the fact that they put it on the walls, and took photos of themselves standing next to it.

This next one is particularly appropriate for Sumner’s 80th birthday, because it’s from another 80th birthday party: namely, that of Sumner’s paternal grandmother, Esther Schoenwetter, née Klein. In the center are Sumner and Nancy Arlen, to the left Nancy’s daughter Bridget, and to the right Sumner’s cousin Barry. (Barry is the son of Irving, the second-youngest of the Schoenwetter brothers, and the brother of Linda, Judy, and Francine, all of whom contributed memories that informed this post.) My mother guesses that the woman with the arm visible next to Bridget is Sylvia, but we can’t really tell.

We know what the occasion was because Charles wrote on the back of the photo “Mom’s 80th Birthday Party”. Esther, an immigrant, arrived in the US in 1898, when she was five years old1; this means she would have turned 80 in 1973, so that dates the photo. By this time, Sumner and Nancy would have been together for some years already; they almost certainly met at the New York Studio School, where Sumner started around 1965. (I don’t know when Nancy started there, but it couldn’t have been earlier than 1964 as that was when the Studio School opened. Born in 1942, Nancy was four years older than Sumner.) At the same time, this photo predates the formation of Mars — in which, of course, Nancy would be the drummer — by a couple of years. The long hair and hippie shirts would be gone by then.

Finally, to end on a joyful note: jumping ahead, past Mars and John Gavanti, the Jack Texas collective, the deaths of both of Sumner’s parents, and altogether two decades of life, art, and change, here’s a photo from Sumner and Sue’s wedding day, September 1, 1995.

Back to the art soon.

The subject matter is varied today. The different choices of material in this selection of works broaden our perception of Sumner’s vision during this time. These paintings share some stylistic elements with those we’ve seen before from this period, but have other elements that differ. They also come with family history, both in their content and in the path through which they come to be in this post.

Three of the works here are in the home of Francine Schoenwetter, the youngest of Sumner’s first cousins, who sent me these photos and the paintings’ measurements. Fran is the daughter of Irving Schoenwetter, the second-youngest brother of five, of whom Charles, Sumner’s father, was the eldest. Judy and Linda are her older sisters, Barry their brother. My mother, Cynthia, is their eldest cousin. The first of the works below hung in their home during Fran’s childhood, while the other two were in the home of Judy, who had been given them by Sumner in 1969, perhaps as a wedding gift. Judy, Linda, and Fran have all been reading The Sumner Files, and have shared memories of Sumner and the extended Schoenwetter family, along with these images, with me. I’m so happy to have learned of these paintings, and their history, and to have more of the family involved in this project!

This first is the one Fran grew up with. I think we can call it a still life, although there’s nothing on the table. It’s a “painting in a painting,” though in a much more subtle way than others we’ve seen in this period (such as the last one shown here). Here, it’s a single painting, but there is a black border around it, and a narrow outer border region that is painted in a lighter color, with no other explicit content (save Sumner’s signature at lower left).

Within the still life itself, the brushstrokes and hatching in the background are Giacometti-like, and familiar from Sumner’s other paintings from this phase. What we presume to be a canvas leaning against the wall — rendering this another painting-in-painting — is familiar as well, as is the gold color of the wall. That color identifies the room as the casino, an outbuilding in the family bungalow colony in Woodbourne, NY.

The same room, with a similar coloring, is the setting of this next one, a portrait, one of the two that came from Judy. A single male figure sits on a stool before an oddly-shaped table, apparently reading a book open on a stand. As with other paintings from this period, the figure is hatched on the torso and arms with a relatively small head. But it’s less exaggerated in these respects, and instead more realistic in its proportions, than some of the others.

Who is the subject? Judy doesn’t remember Sumner saying one way or the other. The first guess might be that this is a self-portrait, as we (including my mother) can’t think of who else it would be. On the other hand, Sumner would have been seventeen or eighteen when he painted this, and the figure appears to have a beard, which he apparently didn’t.

To the subject’s right; is it a window? Or is it rather a painting on the wall, making this another painting-in-painting? An empty frame lies propped against the wall. To the left appears to be… a window with some kind of wooden cover that opens on a hinge? Or a box of some kind mounted on the wall?

Let’s interrupt the series sent by Fran with one from Sue’s archive, a portrait of a family member named “uncle Izzy”. There will be more to say about Izzy, but not today. Rather, I’m showing this painting here for how much it shares with the one above. These were obviously done at the same place and close in time.

This next one, the last from Judy and Fran, is a landscape, surely also from Woodbourne:

Behind the meadow are evergreen trees — in my memory, hemlocks were common — and behind them, the hills of Sullivan County, the foothills of the larger Catskill mountains to the north and west. There are no skinny people, no hatchwork lines and not much in the way of intentionally visible abstract brushstrokes. Nonetheless, even if we had no other information, we could date this painting to the Giacometti phase by the seagull-shaped clouds. Compare them to the ones here, shown in the first Giacometti post, and clearly dated 1964:

Sumner didn’t paint all that many rural landscapes in his life, to my knowledge. At least, not many straight-up ones like the meadow above, where there’s no other content, no people, no other thematic material to express his particular interests or obsessions (no obvious Sumnerisms, if you will). But he did paint a few, and I find them all remarkably tranquil. Perhaps partly because they just are, but perhaps also because of this contrast with his other works, and with the way many of us are prone to perceive him.

Since whatever fame Sumner has derives from his time in Mars, most of what has been written about him (at least, most by anyone but me) focuses on the gritty setting of downtown Manhattan in the late 1970s. Because of this, and because he lived in New York City his entire life, it’s easy to think of him as an entirely urban creature. But Sumner spent considerable time in Woodbourne throughout his life, until his mid-forties, when his father Charles passed and the property was sold. His experiences in this rural setting, and his connection to the place, and to his family’s experience there over three generations (eventually four, with my sister and me, though we came after these early works were painted), left a deep and visible imprint on his art, starting from this formative time.

For now, though, let’s simply take in this view of a green meadow through young Sumner’s eyes.

(Ok, also, as an exercise for those inclined to a little more analysis, consider the ways in which this view does or doesn’t resemble the backdrop of The Shopping Centaurs, done around 25 years later.)

This next one is from Sue’s archive. It’s clearly from the same period: the hatchwork look of the buildings in the background and the smudging of the sky, Giacometti-influenced elements, are there. But it’s the only one with this subject matter I’ve seen from this period.

In this choice of material, the viewpoint from a rooftop in the midst of the concrete jungle, it strongly prefigures Sumner’s urban landscapes from the early 1980s, though painted very differently. Compare, for example, this one, a repeat from the earlier post, painted in the 1980s, probably nearly 20 years after the one above:

In these works, and others to be shown, we see both concrete jungles and more literal ones, through eyes whose perception of both of these disparate landscapes changes with Sumner’s age, as he set that evolving vision down in paint.

That’s all for now on this phase. Next, we’ll take a chronological step. We’ll follow Sumner after he turns nineteen, moves out, and goes to the New York Studio School.

Thanks to Francine Schoenwetter for sending the photos of three of the works above, and to her sisters, Judy Moomjian and Linda Wasserman (née Schoenwetter) for their messages, stories, and encouragement. And to my mother, Cynthia Sobel, as always.

Having just shown some paintings from Sumner’s Giacometti phase, I’ll post here a few more of these works. These are all oil on canvas; I don’t have their dimensions. None were signed or dated, but we can be confident they date from around 1963-65.

I wish I knew who the model is here. Is that a towel on her head, some kind of bouffant hairdo, or just an effect with paint, like the similar brushstrokes on the walls behind her?

No idea who this next is either, and no way to tell as there are almost no facial features. It’s very similar to a couple of those shown last time, heavy on the Giacometti vibe, both in the figure’s proportions and in the scribbles of paint along the arms and above the hands:

This next could possibly be a self-portrait. The bright yellow highlights along the limbs and lapels, giving a somewhat skeletal look, appear to be an experiment, in that I’ve not seen this effect in any other paintings by Sumner. The canvases leaning against the wall behind the figure make this something of a “paintings-in-painting”; though we don’t quite see paintings per se, just canvases, in solid colors.

This next one repeats some elements of one of the more surrealist ones I showed a couple of weeks ago. In particular, notice the left figure against the rectangular background with the smaller rectangular cutouts. The triangle at bottom suggests a point of origin at the back within this shape, as though this leaning figure were in a separate, cardboard-cutout universe from the bowing figure at right.

For reference, below the one from the previous post to which I’m comparing the one above:

Sumner did a number of still lifes during this period. (Landscapes too, but those’ll be for another day.) In this one, the bottles are long and skinny, just like his people were during this time. And what is that on the left, leaning against the furniture? A folded cardboard box, maybe? We don’t really know, but notice the shape, and compare to the shapes behind the figures in the two paintings above.

This last is a true paintings-in-painting meta-work. I don’t have the photos to prove it, but I am pretty sure that all the pictures shown in the work below were actually ones Sumner had painted earlier, so he was reproducing his own works here. There are other early paintings in the archive of robed keyboard players like the one at left (though I haven’t seen precisely this one). To be even more cryptic about the portrait on the right: I have a good guess who the subject is. The evidence is circumstantial, though, and will be presented another day, when I’m able to provide more context. The room is easy to identify: it’s the “casino”, a small outbuilding in Sumner’s grandparents’ small bungalow colony in Woodbourne, NY, where he spent childhood summers and, apparently, produced many paintings.

Lastly, notice the skinny bottles again in the work shown in the center; don’t they look similar to the human figures in the one below it? Something about these long, narrow shapes was so compelling to Sumner that he made inanimate objects and humans fit similar molds.

These were Sumner’s late teenage years, but I think we can already see in these works an intentional, self-aware artist. The paintings reference Giacometti, to be sure; but they also reference themselves, in ways both obvious and not.

The last year has been a nonstop assault by the Trump administration on human decency, democracy, science, and nearly everything else I value. I am terribly upset by all of it, but feel helpless, most of the time. I know that in this, I am similar to many, many others, so I’ll use the pronoun “we” for a moment:

We go to protests, call our representatives, sign petitions, give money to causes we believe in. But we’re not political organizers, though we’re grateful to those who are. We have demanding jobs, families, responsibilities. We’re acutely aware that we’re privileged, in that we have these things and no one (yet) has come to take them from us. But while that’s the case, we have to function. Life has to go on.

And one can’t be outraged all the time. It’s painful and exhausting. I follow the news closely enough to know what’s going on, but not nearly as closely as I could, or as I have in the past.

I have also found myself limiting my own public statements. Over the last dozen years or so, until this most recent year, I had been writing a few op-eds a year, including a few political ones. While I mostly tried to resist the temptation to become the kind of public intellectual who opines far outside their expertise, during Trump’s first term I started to feel that I had a historical obligation, as someone with a public platform, however small, to go on record. The compromise I found was to write about political topics if, when, and to the extent that I could make some kind of logical connection to climate, or to science generally; and even then, to distinguish when I’m speaking as a scientist, and when as a citizen with an opinion. I’ve written a few things like that. I’ll probably write more.

But I haven’t written one in over a year (unless you count a relatively spontaneous defense of NCAR, published here on substack). I stopped in part because the outlets I used to write for either don’t exist any more, or the editors with whom I had relationships have left. But also, the last year’s attacks on science and academia have been so intense — with both my own institution, and my own field of science in particular, being singled out for special punishment — that I’ve felt that just continuing to do the work that we do is itself a meaningful political act. I’ve focused much of what discretionary time and effort I have into developing new ways to enable and support that work. (More on that another time.)

As for social media: I won’t tell anyone else not to share their views frequently on their platform of choice, but for me individually, that level of engagement with the algorithms leads to a toxic downward spiral. Also, I’m convinced that social media’s destruction of a shared truth has played a big role in creating this disaster of a timeline, and I don’t want to be part of that dynamic.

Substack is a compromise, somewhere in between social media and real writing. I’m still figuring out how I feel about it. But in any case, I didn’t get on here to write about politics, at least not mainly. My immediate purpose was to write about my uncle Sumner Crane. I needed a forum where I could post his art and get some feedback, as a way of working towards the proper book that he deserves, and that’s mostly what I’ve been doing for the last few months.

I don’t feel any shame about it, most of the time. Art is just as important to me as science is. I wouldn’t want to live in a world without either, no matter what else happens in the world. What I’m trying to do here is a form of art; or, at least, it’s about art, Sumner’s in particular; and before long it’ll be about science too, and the connections between them. So far, this is bringing me great joy, and some wonderful human connections. My therapist says it’s keeping me sane, and he’s probably right.

But it does make me uncomfortable, some weeks. When the headlines are filled with constant outrages inflicted by my country’s government on so many people, within and without its borders, posting only about an obscure artist who died decades ago can feel a bit like closing my eyes, sticking my fingers in my ears, and singing loudly.

I know that people around the world are looking at the U.S. and trying to understand how we can possibly be ok with what’s happening. We here can wonder that about each other also, and future generations will look back at us and do the same. It’s important to make clear, as often and as loudly as we can manage, for all these audiences, and for ourselves, that we, very very many of us, aren’t ok with it.

No Kings Day protests, hopefully, send that message. But I feel an obligation to speak out as an individual also. Not because I have any original insight, nor because any professional expertise I have particularly matters, nor because I expect it to have any material effect. Just to be on the record.

So here is a public statement.

I am against most wars, invasions and unprovoked threats to other nations, especially without the approval of Congress. I am very much against the present war being waged on Iran.

I am against these actions of ICE: detaining and deporting people without due process, terrorizing communities, murdering people (U.S. citizens or otherwise), and blaming the victims.

I am against the withdrawal of the U.S. from international treaties and organizations and the rules-based international order.

I am against corruption: that is, individuals, companies or nations influencing government policy by giving money or favors to individuals holding public office.

I am against government attacks on universities, media, law firms, and other institutions of civil society.

I am against control of or interference in U.S. elections by the federal government, and especially by any political party.

I believe that immigrants, in general, are good for this country, and should be treated as such. Except for indigenous people, we are all descendants of immigrants here, and would do well to remember that.

I believe that we owe both future and present generations our best possible effort to transition away from fossil fuels in favor of cleaner energy sources. I am against government policies and actions that oppose that transition, and for those that favor it.

In short, I’m against most of what the current Presidential administration and its allies, within and without the federal government, are doing.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

He had been drawing earlier in his childhood, inspired by comics. Then, at some point, he started painting regularly with oil on canvas. My best guess is that this happened first in school. Like his sister (my mother), but five years later, Sumner started high school at Music and Art (now LaGuardia; also known as the school on which the film Fame was based) in Manhattan. He didn’t like it there, though, and after some period of time he switched back to his local school in Queens, before eventually dropping out entirely. But at Music and Art there would have been classes in painting, with all the necessary supplies, and presumably he’d have taken them.

If so, this dates the beginning of Sumner’s painting to around 1960, the year Sumner turned fourteen. He left home at nineteen, in 1965, and also started at the New York Studio School around then. The archive contains some studies of nude models, still lifes, and other very competent but student-exercise-looking works that I suspect are from the beginning of his time at the Studio School. Then, before long, he came under Milton Resnick’s influence, and began painting abstractly, certainly by the late 1960s. The paintings that are today’s subject are distinctly different from both of those, and we can date them with certainty to the five-year period 1960-65, when Sumner was aged 14-19.

We can date some of the works more precisely than that, however. Sumner wrote dates on a few of them; and others are similar enough to those, in both content and style, that they must have been done closely in time to one another. From this evidence, we can be confident that most of the works in today’s post, if not all, were painted in 1963 and 1964, when he was between 16 and 18, Sumner’s last years before leaving home and starting at the Studio School.

This phase exhibits, perhaps for the first time, Sumner’s tendency to be strongly influenced by one particular artist or thinker, to the point of appropriating his style, and then building on it.

This would happen later with Resnick, with Bob Powell, with Bukka White, and with Kierkegaard. In some of these cases Sumner would do work that can be characterized as explicitly imitative, as in the reproductions of Powell’s drawings he did with Rudolph Grey as Jack Texas; in other cases, it’s better classified as tribute, as with Sumner’s opera John Gavanti, which is directly inspired by Kierkegaard’s Immediate Erotic Stages as well as Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which was Kierkegaard’s subject in Immediate Erotic Stages.

In each of these cases, Sumner’s work takes the source material in his own directions --- even his explicit reproductions of Powell are still very different things than the original comics, in the same way that Roy Lichtenstein’s or Andy Warhol’s reproductions are --- but makes no attempt to hide it. The boundary between fandom and creation was either unimportant to Sumner, or, in some of these cases, intentionally erased, as Kierkegaard’s essay itself does with Mozart’s opera.

This first instance, in these teenage paintings by Sumner, shows all these tendencies. The influence is clear, and the influencer is Swiss sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966).

Giacometti is known primarily for his small sculptures of inhumanly skinny people, often in walking poses, as on the cover of this book by the Tate Modern, for example. Consider this painting by Sumner, currently hanging on Sue’s wall:

Ok, he’s running more than walking — for that matter, he’s floating above the ground, in a running pose — but you get the idea. Not only the man, but also the trees are tall and skinny. There’s no date on it, but from its slightly more juvenile look and less sophisticated composition I suspect it was done earlier than the others in this post, thus pre-1963. This next one, dated 1964, looks to me like the work of a more mature artist:

Several distinct surrealistic elements here prompt me to wonder about their significance to 18 year-old Sumner. Why are the human figures standing against solid rectangles with cutouts on their corners, as though mounted on oddly shaped boards? Does the factory-looking structure in the distance at right, with its multiple smokestacks, mean something? Why the radiating lines on the ground delineating distance, with the single tree — disproportionately large given how far away it seems to be — and highly stylized clouds? Why is the woman leaning left, while the tree leans right, and the man stands straight?

All these could be just elements in a purely visual composition, without any explicitly intended meaning. But it’s clear that there was a conscious intent of some kind, because Sumner painted multiple pictures with some of the same elements. Like this one, which I think it’s safe to say must also have been done in 1964 or close to it:

Sumner also did portraits during this period, though he hadn’t yet got nearly as good at capturing faces as he would later. There are several of what are almost certainly self-portraits; I say “almost” because they don’t look that much like him, to my eye, so I almost want them to be portraits of someone else. But there’s no evidence of that, and they’ve pretty much got to be him. Here’s one, unfortunately wrapped in plastic, but I include it because it’s dated. The date is 1963, when Sumner would have turned 17:

Here’s another, presumably from around the same time:

And another:

In this last, the wood-framed walls and ladder in the background indicate that the setting was almost certainly a building in the small bungalow colony in Woodbourne, NY, that his grandparents, Harry and Pauline Cross, ran as a business, and where Sumner spent summers as a child and teenager. Most likely it was an outbuilding known as “the casino.” In future I’ll have more to say about this place and its roles in Sumner’s life and art.

In all three of these self-portraits, the Giacometti influence is subtle, but detectable in the length and narrowness of the heads. Sumner took this further in portraits that I take, from the greater degree of stylistic development, to have been done a little later. This one too is most likely a self-portrait:

The objects surrounding the human subject (presumably Sumner) are his own paintings. These recur in several other works from this period, sometimes (though not here) portrayed clearly enough that we can see that they are in fact reproductions of specific paintings he had done earlier. While we can’t tell much else about the room, the jumble suggests to me that the setting here too is the casino, or another building on the Woodbourne property, since I can’t imagine he had this kind of space in the Schoenwetters’ Queens apartment.

The head- and neck-shrinking goes further in this portrait of a woman, sitting in the same chair as Sumner is in the one above, though now closer up. It’s presumably a family member. My first guess was his grandmother, Pauline Cross, but mother guesses their mother, my grandmother, Sylvia Schoenwetter (née Cross), was more likely the subject. I doubt this question can be resolved conclusively, because it doesn’t look enough like either one (or any actual human being) to tell, due to the distorted proportions, tiny head and facial features:

Here’s another that’s clearly of the same woman, signed but unfortunately not dated, legs and arms even more spindly and stick-like:

These works were more than influenced by Giacometti. Here as well I’d argue that Sumner was adopting Giacometti’s style and taking it further.

To place this argument in the broader context that knowledge of Sumner’s later development gives us: I argued a couple of weeks ago that by painting in an abstract style similar to Milton Resnick’s, but doing so on a long and narrow piece of wood instead of a canvas with more typical proportions, Sumner was taking Resnick’s mode of abstraction a step further than Resnick himself had. (I also argued that the odd dimensions of these works could have been influenced by Nancy Arlen’s sculptures; perhaps we can also see length and narrowness as elements carried over from this earlier phase of Sumner’s own art, where both people and some nonhuman elements were unrealistically long and narrow.)

Now let’s consider Giacometti’s own work. His paintings are nowhere near as well-known as his sculptures — I’ve never seen the paintings in a museum, while I’ve seen the sculptures many times — but as far as I can tell from a modest amount of online surveying, he did mostly portraits. At the risk of mild copyright violations, here are a couple, to give a sense:

We can see several distinct elements in these that Sumner adopted in his own work. The seated poses; the hatched lines in the background, gesturing at defining the interior spaces but not fully doing so; the smudgey halos of paint, around the subject’s heads (compare Giacometti’s just above with the last of Sumner’s two further up) and elsewhere, that occupy irregularly shaped portions of the canvas and introduce an element of abstraction.

What we don’t see in Giacometti’s portraits is the extreme elongation that his sculpted figures have, and that Sumner’s paintings adopted. The heads are maybe around as small as those in Sumner’s self-portraits above, but neither are they as small as in Sumner’s portraits of the seated woman, nor are the limbs and necks reduced to skinny sticks as Sumner’s woman’s are. In his paintings, in other words, Sumner combines elements of Giacometti’s sculptures and paintings in a way that Giacometti himself didn’t.

What drew Sumner to Giacometti’s work so strongly, such that he would inhabit Giacometti’s artistic persona and make it his own to this degree, for at least a couple of years? I have no idea. This phase was well over by the time I was born, let alone old enough to communicate with Sumner about art. I don’t remember him talking about it later, either, nor have I heard anyone else recall such a memory. Adult Sumner talked about Powell, Bukka White, Kierkegaard, sometimes Thelonious Monk or Ornette Coleman — but not Giacometti. He had, apparently, dropped the Swiss artist from his pantheon by his thirties, if not earlier.

At the same time, the archive shows that Sumner wasn’t embarrassed by this work. He must have considered it an important stage of his development, at least, because he saved so many of these paintings, quite a few more than I’ve shown here, til his death, 40 years after he finished them.

Modern weather forecasts are based on calculations performed by powerful computers. Complex numerical models simulate the atmosphere’s behavior, starting with the weather at the present moment and moving forward in time.

In principle, the laws governing the weather within the computer are deterministic. If the starting point is known precisely, the outcome is preordained.

Like the weather itself, however, the numerical forecasts are subject to the phenomenon of chaos. Any differences in two weather states at the initial time, no matter how tiny, grow rapidly. Two forecasts that begin as almost indistinguishable become more and more different.

And we never know the weather exactly, even in the present. Our observations are incomplete and imperfect. Multiple, slightly different versions of this moment’s weather are consistent with the observations, and we have to consider the possibility that any of them should be the starting point for the forecast. They may be very similar now, but they will soon differ quite a lot. This inevitable growth in uncertainty makes perfect weather forecasts impossible.

The phenomenon of chaos is also, in a less quantitative and more poetic sense, familiar to us as part of human life. Trivially minor actions now can lead to coincidences with major consequences for the future, as in the proverb beginning “For the want of a nail.” If, for the sake of argument, we grant science fiction stories about time travel their central conceit that it is possible, they are not wrong to let time travelers change the future in big ways through small acts in the past. (What is still probably unrealistic, on the other hand, is the notion that the changes will be only the ones they want. There will always be details that can’t be perfectly known, and whose import will also grow with time.)

While chaos prevents us from knowing the future precisely, it can still allow us to place bounds on the range of possibilities. In modern weather forecast practice, each model is run not once, but many times per forecast, each with imperceptibly slight differences from the others in the weather at the start time. The many simulations in the “ensemble” are all considered possible futures. The “spread,” or difference between the most different ensemble members, measures the uncertainty, and increases with time. After something like two weeks, it’s large enough that forecasts by even the world’s best models and most powerful computers are no better than a random guess.

The design of the initial conditions for weather ensembles is a science unto itself. There are many ways for two weather states to differ, and some differences grow more rapidly than others. One wants the ensemble spread to grow as quickly as possible, so that the full range of possible futures can be fully represented. A storm’s impacts may be very different if it zigs one way or zags another. We want to make sure we don’t miss any of the zigs or zags that could happen, though it isn’t obvious from which slight differences at the start they will follow.

Different models, too, represent the atmosphere slightly differently, due to the different compromises they make to represent the laws of physics on a computer. Even with identical initial conditions, they will produce different forecasts. Forecasters use not just ensembles with a single model and different initial weather states, but also multiple different models. They produce different errors, but not consistently enough that one can know in advance which model will be closest to the truth. One needs the whole multi-model ensemble, containing models produced by different teams of scientists in different parts of the world, to understand the full range of possible futures.

In this, too, weather forecasts are like human lives. Our own ensembles include people whom we know well enough, and with whom we share enough, to see their experiences as relevant to ours. Seeing how their lives play out, the consequences of their own choices as well as the slings and arrows that the world sends them, we draw inferences that guide us in our own lives, rightly or wrongly.

Our ensembles can be wide-ranging, including people from history or fiction with whom we identify. Myths, religious stories, novels and movies use the development of character through story to teach us lessons.

Closer in, they can include teachers and mentors. From them, if we are lucky, we may learn by example, just as much as by any lessons they actively teach.

Closest of all are our families. The lessons we draw from them, consciously or not, lay the deepest grooves in our psyches, conditioning our experience of the world most strongly. Our parents first among them: no theme is more central to the stories we tell ourselves than how our mothers and fathers influence us. As the joke goes, told to me by my therapist: “If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother”.

But the ensembles of family influence are, if we are fortunate, wider than that. They can include our siblings, our grandparents, even our children. Close friends can be in there too. What matters is that we identify with them in some way. We need to feel that their circumstances, and their own natures, are sufficiently close to ours, like two runs of similar numerical models with similar initial conditions, for the weather of their lives to inform our own forecasts.

In the constellation of relationships that enumerate for us the different ways of being a person, an aunt or uncle can have a special place. They are so close to our parents, and yet they can be, sometimes, so far. They can dramatically increase our ensemble spread, especially when we are children and our ensembles are small. Their shared origins with our mothers or fathers, the various forms of family resemblance and heredity and circumstance, nature and nurture both, guarantee their relevance. But from such similar initial conditions, they can still take radically different trajectories.

Though their generation places them adjacent to our parents, our aunts or uncles may sometimes not have children of their own. When we are children, this can make them feel closer to us, since we have none either. They can be present enough in our own lives, early enough, to be part of our own internal schema, the psychic structures that exemplify to us what it means to be a person. Yet they can be much more distant than our parents are, so that our relationships with them are much freer from tension and drama. As adolescents, we may rebel against our parents, but usually not our aunts or uncles.

You might have a weird, cool, or interesting aunt or uncle. They might be present in your extended family life, but not caught up in your everyday. They share a lot with you and your parents, but their life looks very different. Like a member of a forecast model ensemble that shows a very different future than the others, they enlarge your perception of the possibilities that life holds.

Such an aunt or uncle can have a disproportionate influence on you. They can make up a big part of your sense of yourself, and you can carry them with you, even when it’s been a long time since you thought of them consciously, or since they were alive. If you have such a person in your life, you are lucky.

Much more fortunate, and much rarer, is to have an uncle who is an artist, a thinker, someone who leaves an imprint, even if a small one, upon the larger world. An imprint that reflects back onto you, that reminds you of who he was, and turns your connection with him into a connection with a larger group of people, those who know him through his art.

And even more fortunate and rare still, is to rediscover your uncle’s art, and his life story, at an advanced point in your own life when you have the capacity to appreciate them in a new way. You begin to see how your own choices, your own process of seeking whatever you have been seeking, have carried something of your uncle’s, although your two lives look very different, on the surface.

And then you discover that there is much more to his art, and his life, than you had known, or than almost anyone had known — but he preserved it, and it’s available to you, and people should see it.

And he has some close friends, weird, brilliant and creative people like he was, people who loved him, who are still around. And when they see you beginning to engage with his legacy, they applaud and encourage you, but also challenge you to do more.

If all that happens, and you are open to it, you are presented with an exceptionally rare opportunity. The opportunity for an intergenerational collaboration, simultaneously scholarly and deeply personal. The opportunity to be part of an investigation, spanning more than one lifetime, into the relationships between different ways of seeing the world. Into how new ways of seeking meaning, and community, can emerge, when the ones we’ve inherited don’t work well enough for us any more. Into the variegated forms of connection and human experience that art, science, and love make possible. All this, it turns out, is embodied in the stuff your uncle left behind when he died, over twenty years ago.

Of course, “you” here is me. This happened to me. Is happening. My project here is to see all this for the singular opportunity it is, to discover what it means, and to make the most of it. Which means, to share it. With Sumner, and with you, dear reader. Thank you for being here.

I found this one particularly hard to photograph, so here are a few detail views to give more of an impression of this work as the three-dimensional object it is:

Sue has maybe a dozen of these remaining in the archive. Here’s another one; forgive the sloppy staging, but I’m leaving it uncropped because you get a better sense of the size this way:

Sumner produced works like this for some period of time, perhaps a year or two or a little more, in the mid- to late 1970s. I believe that by the early 80s he had stopped doing them; these works were not done as part of the Jack Texas collaboration, but pre-date it. I don’t know precisely when he started doing them; it’s possible that it was earlier than 1977, when he was still sharing a loft on lower Broadway with David Reed, downstairs from Nancy Arlen, and when he and Nancy were still together. What we do know for sure is that he was doing them by sometime during the Mars period (which itself began at the end of 1975) and certainly that some of them, if not all, were done in Sumner’s early years in the East Fourth Street basement apartment, into which he moved in about 1978. We know this because multiple people who knew him during this time remember these works clearly. So if I had to guess, I’d date this work to 1978 or 1979, accepting that this estimate could perhaps be wrong by a year or two on either side.

Sumner first began making abstract paintings in the later 1960s, as a student at the New York Studio School with Milton Resnick. I grew up looking at some of these. In the decade-later paintings on wood that are today’s subject, Resnick’s influence is still clearly recognizable in the layers of paint, the colors blended and homogenized to varying degrees. The choice of medium, on the other hand, is pure Sumner, and render these works very different from anything Resnick ever did.

These pieces of wood, or occasionally metal (there are one or two painted on thin metal spars, as if from a scaffold), were found objects. Most likely Sumner got them off the street, or perhaps from some of the rubble-strewn vacant lots that were common in the East Village at the time. He was making artistic lemonade of poverty, and literally incorporating into his work the material conditions that made his neighborhood such an exciting, if sometimes also scary, zone of artistic and intellectual ferment.

The extremely oblong shapes of the painted surfaces take the abstract expressionist aesthetic a step further: not only does the paint not represent anything in the outside world, but the dimensions themselves nearly outrule such representation. That is, while a painting by Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko or Milton Resnick may not be a painting of anything, they typically have aspect ratios that are closer to that of the human field of vision, so that one could have painted a scene from life on the same canvas. Not so here. One perceives these as objects first, before recognizing them as paintings.

This high degree of abstraction in these visual artworks paralleled Sumner’s musical life at the time. Mars was “going from ten to one”, meaning their material was evolving from traditional song structures to much more abstract and dissonant forms, something like the progression that had led jazz to the free ensembles of Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler and Cecil Taylor (all of whose music Sumner loved, and all of which influenced Mars).

Sumner was also doing yet other experimental work with an abstract component at the same time, though it doesn’t survive. Arto Lindsay and Julia Gorton both remember him showing them works he had produced by freezing small objects, like toy soldiers, in ice, or encasing them in gelatin. Arto also remembers Sumner’s semen being an ingredient in some of these.

All this stands in stark contrast to what would come shortly after. By the early 1980s, Sumner’s painting, as Jack Texas, had become completely figurative again. The streetscapes, sports scenes, portraits, and scenes from books that I’ve been showing in recent posts are all examples of this. The centaurs and mermaids that would come after that would be less “realistic” — since these creatures don’t exist — but still figurative, and in fact Sumner would never paint truly abstractly again. His music, too, would shift towards less abstraction; after John Gavanti, he played mostly delta blues. With hindsight, then, Sumner’s time as an abstract artist was about to end; but it was not over yet, not at all, as he painted these two-by-fours.

Besides Resnick, I think it’s appropriate to consider here the influence of the person who was closest to Sumner from the Studio School years until sometime in the Mars period, i.e., approximately his entire abstract phase: Nancy Arlen. Nancy was herself an abstract visual artist, and for that matter one who had more of a career as such than Sumner ever did, low bar though that may be.

One ought to expect that a couple of artists, together for something around a decade and more or less de facto married for at least some of that, would influence each other. And I think it’s fair to see Sumner’s influence on Nancy in her role as drummer in Mars, since she hadn’t been a musician before that, while he had. The works we’re considering today, though, give us a little more concrete material to inform our thinking about Nancy’s influence on Sumner.

These are paintings, as Sumner made them by applying paint to pre-existing substrates. But the nonstandard shapes and three-dimensional media give them an element of sculpture. Nancy, while she painted also, is known as a sculptor first. Her work from the late 1970s and early 1980s, from the few images and descriptions one can find online, featured “poured brightly colored tubular plastic sculptures of simple abstract forms clamped on to the wall”1, with materials she found in plastics shops on Canal Street. She also made life-size reproductions of penises, from plaster casts she applied to men herself (as one can actually see her do in the very strange, mildly pornographic, challenging-to-watch film WR: Mysteries of the Organism). It seems reasonable to guess that his close and long exposure to Nancy and her work might have been part of what gave Sumner the idea to go in the direction of making paintings on long, three-dimensional, arguably phallic structures.

The smallest of these paintings on wood is now in the collection of Julia Gorton. Julia documented the original no wave scene with photos she took for Beat It, the zine she and Rick Brown published in which she also interviewed Sumner, and she and Sumner became friends and collaborators, all during the time Sumner was doing these works. Nearly 40 years later, Julia now does exhibits in galleries in which she shows her late 1970s photos, alongside much newer portraits that she has taken of her audience members at recent shows. So each show is also a portrait session, and the production and display of Julia’s work are merged.

I went to one of these shows in fall of 2024, a couple months after I had interviewed Julia for the podcast — one of the first interviews I did, and one of those that inspired me to expand the scope of this project into the much larger thing it has now become. I texted her beforehand that I was planning to be there, and hoping she’d take some photos of me. She told me to wear a black t-shirt that I didn’t mind being cut up. I did so, and she took a bunch of photos of me that reprise an iconic one she had taken of Sumner 25 years earlier. (I was 20 years older and much less cute than Sumner was when she had taken the original, and for that and other reasons I’ll spare you the ones in which I tried to pose like him. I very much like some of Julia’s other ones from the session, though, and I’m now using one of them frequently when I need a headshot for my real job.)

A couple of weeks later, at the end of a work trip to California, I went to Sue’s place to photograph Sumner’s paintings and study the archive. Among the items I brought back was this small stick painting, a gift from Sue for Julia. A couple weeks after that, I attended Julia’s event for the publication of her Beat It Anthology, and I took the occasion to hand the painting to her. A short time later, Julia sent me the photograph below.

On the left, the original Sumner photo; in the middle, the small painting on wood; on the right, the neck we had cut off my t-shirt. At this size, and in this setting, the painting becomes a totem, a talisman, a physical relic that recalls the artist who made it.

In life, Sumner was very much a team-builder and a collaborator. I told Sue some months ago that among the emotions I’ve felt while working on this project is sadness that I never managed to collaborate with him on anything myself. Sue responded, “Well, you’re collaborating with him now.” Indeed, this photo by Julia, reproduced here in my little newsletter, shows how, more than two decades after his death, Sumner is still building teams to make art.

Thanks especially to Julia Gorton for the photo; and to Mark Cunningham, Connie Burg, Arto Lindsay, and David Reed, on whose shared memories this post draws; and to Mark Rudolph, for a conversation about Nancy Arlen.

This week’s post is again an audio podcast episode, which you can find here, on the podcast site. But this time it’s a tape from the archive, the first of three interviews Sumner, along with his friends and collaborators Rudolph Grey and Duncan Lindsay, conducted with Milton Resnick. The remainder of this post is the text of my introduction to the episode. That is, you’ll hear me say these same words before you hear the interview, but you can also read it here to get an idea of the content and context first. I may publish a transcript of the interview itself later, but the AI version I have needs some cleaning up, and that will have to wait, so for now listening is the only way to consume it. But I recommend that anyway, as the voices convey a sense of the personalities, including Sumner’s as well as Resnick’s and the others, that the words alone don’t.

This episode of The Sumner Files is not an interview I conducted, but rather one Sumner himself did. The subject of the interview was the famous abstract expressionist painter, and his former teacher, Milton Resnick.

For some period of time, beginning sometime around 1965 when he was around 19, Sumner studied at the New York Studio School. The studio school had opened in 1964, at the initiative of a group of students from other art schools who were frustrated with the emphasis on classroom learning over actually practicing their art. Sumner was either in that first group of students, or one shortly after that. Anyway at the studio school, the teacher who influenced him by far the most strongly was Milton Resnick.

Resnick is a truly important 20^th century painter. He’s not quite as well known as Jackson Pollock or Willem DeKooning, for example, but he was in their same circles and on their level. Resnick’s work has been shown in countless museums and galleries, including the Museum of Modern Art for example. It is perpetually shown in the lower Manhattan gallery run by the foundation named for Resnick and his wife, painter Pat Passlof, the Milton Resnick Pat Passlof Foundation, in the converted synagogue where Resnick lived in his later years in downtown Manhattan.

Sumner painted figuratively before studying with Resnick, and then eventually again after, but Resnick influenced him so strongly that for about years he painted abstractly, somewhat like Resnick, large canvases thick with many layers of paint. I grew up looking at these paintings by Sumner, though I didn’t know who Resnick was.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, during and after the Mars years, Sumner conducted interviews with a number of other artists and musicians he knew. I hadn’t known this until I started this project, and it was quite amazing for me to learn it since my project itself grew out of my own practice of interviewing my colleagues for this podcast.

Anyway, he interviewed Resnick three times, in 1980 and 1981. While some of Sumner’s earlier interviews were published in the short-lived No Wave publication Vacation Magazine, I don’t believe these Resnick interviews were ever published or released in any form, as they were done after Vacation magazine stopped publication.

These interviews were in fact conducted not just by Sumner, but by a trio of interviewers including also his friends Rudolph Grey and Duncan Lindsay.

Rudolph was Sumner’s best friend and collaborator in the Jack Texas trio, along with Arto Lindsay. Rudolph is also a musician, having been in the no wave band Red Transistor, and then his own bands, at the boundary of no wave and free jazz, under the name Blue Humans; later, Rudolph would write the book about Ed Wood that would be adapted to the Hollywood movie starring Johnny Depp. Duncan is Arto’s brother, and also a friend and collaborator of Sumner’s, having played, along with Arto, on a track on Sumner’s opera John Gavanti and with Sumner and Ikue Mori on at least one tape of unreleased blues that we still have in the archive.

Sumner, however, was the one who had the pre-existing relationship with Resnick, and who must have set this up. That he invited Rudolph and Duncan to do it with him is typical of Sumner, that he wanted just about everything to be a collaboration with his friends.

In the conversation, it’s Sumner’s voice you hear the most, after Resnick’s of course. But you do hear the others too, and this really does become a four-person conversation at times. To help you identify them, Rudolph’s is the deepest baritone, while Duncan has the slight hint of a southern accent.

I think it’s quite significant that these interviews were conducted more than 15 years after Sumner first studied with Resnick at the Studio School. I have said in the past that, although Sumner was a brilliant and deeply well-read auto-didact, he had little formal education, having dropped out of high school. These interviews, however, show something different. Besides having attended the Studio School — a nontraditional school that didn’t offer degrees — it’s clear from these that Sumner had a long-term relationship with Resnick, one that reminds me more than anything of the kinds of relationships that academics often have with their former Ph.D. advisors. That speaks to the depth of Resnick’s mentorship of Sumner, and that itself is a profound form of education.

One more thing. While Resnick does by far most of the talking (and he tends to interrupt Sumner and the others and talk over them, which I find a little aggravating), I value these interviews greatly because we do hear quite a bit of Sumner’s voice too. In fact we hear more of him here than in any other existing recording I’m aware of, at least from this period.

To me, Sumner’s personality was expressed so much through his speech — his intensity, his sense of humor and slightly crazy-sounding laugh, his Queens accent — that these documents have great value. If you want to understand Sumner, it’s a big help to hear him speak.

Without going into too much detail, here’s a brief, selective, and Sumner-centric summary of the topics you’ll hear about.

The conversation starts with Resnick’s account of his recent experience teaching at the artist residency in Skowhegan, Maine, where he ran out of paint.

This eventually leads to a lively four-way discussion of what it means to be an artist, in history from ancient Greece to now.

Then there’s a story about Arshile Gorky and Willem De Kooning, referred to as “Bill”, having an argument about the relationship of drawing and illustration to “great art”, in which Resnick eventually refers to his falling out with De Kooning and the end of their friendship.

There’s a discussion about the role of critics in art. I found this interesting because Sumner defends critics against Resnick’s more negative view of them.

About an hour in, Sumner changes the subject by asking Resnick about his experiences as a soldier in World War II. Resnick says he doesn’t want to talk about it, but then he does, a little.

There’s a discussion about the painter Max Schnitzler and his influence on Jackson Pollock. Schnitzler, a much lesser known painter, apparently was angry that Pollock had been influenced by him, to the point of feeling that Pollock had stolen from him. Sumner defends Pollock, saying we all influence each other; he asks “what are you supposed to do, cut yourself off” (from the experiences we have of others’ work)? I found this particularly interesting, since Sumner’s own influences were so important to him, and worn so prominently on his sleeve.

This interview was conducted on February 20, 1980, according to the writing on Sumner’s cassette, making it the first of the three that we have. I haven’t edited it at all, so bear with the clicks and starts and stops at the beginning. The first voice you hear is Sumner’s, to get you oriented.

I’ve said enough. Here is Milton Resnick, interviewed by Sumner Crane, Rudolph Grey, and Duncan Lindsay.

This first one is titled The Continental Op, Part 1. The Continental Op is the main character in two Dashiell Hammett novels, The Red Harvest (1929) and The Dain Curse (1931), as well as many short stories. A “hard-boiled detective” working in San Francisco, he is widely cited as the model for all the similar characters in later books and films, including Hammett’s own Sam Spade (famously played by Humphrey Bogart in the film adaptation of Hammett’s novel The Maltese Falcon), and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe (also played by Bogart, in The Big Sleep). Sumner also painted portraits of Bogart, Hammett, and Chandler themselves, showing that he was inspired both by this material’s creators and their creations.

Anyway, I haven’t read all the books or watched all the movies, so I can’t say where this specific scene comes from. But we do know who the models for Sumner’s painting were: Connie Burg, left, and Rudolph Grey, right.

This is one of very few of Sumner’s paintings to have been shown publicly, being one of two that were shown at the Kerry Schuss gallery in New York City in 2008, in the show for the publication of Thurston Moore and Byron Coley’s book No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980. The other painting shown there portrayed Bob Powell’s Cave Girl fighting a couple of apes; this one was also shown at Danceteria in 1983, while the one just above hadn’t yet been painted then.

This next, The Continental Op, Part 2, is another painting of the same scene, only now we are zoomed in closer, and our two characters are struggling over the weapon.

Connie remembers spending hours sitting in a car with Rudolph posing for these. The sustained focus involved in completing two large paintings of this single scene, not to mention studies for it (like the pencil and paper closeup I showed a couple of weeks ago in the post on portraits) and the enlisting of the inner circle of close friends in the work, is all classic Sumner. It’s similar to the story Connie told me in our interview about how Sumner convinced four friends to form a bridge club, and play weekly for some period of time, because he wanted to paint that scene. (Whether the bridge club idea was also based on a book I don’t know, and unfortunately those paintings are now lost to us.)

This next one, Brother & Sister & Villain, painted a year earlier, is in the same vein. I have been so far unable to figure out from what specific book, if any, it’s derived, but clearly it’s inspired by the same body of detective fiction. The model for the woman at left is again Connie, the man in the middle again Rudolph, and we believe the man on the right to be Arto Lindsay. I’m not sure, but I’m guessing that Rudolph is the villain, while Arto and Connie are the brother and sister.

Shortly after finishing these detective novel-based pictures, Sumner turned to his next major literary source: Irish-American novelist J.P. Donleavy. He was particularly inspired by Donleavy’s Darcy Dancer series. I have recently read the first two (of three) books in this series, namely The Destinies of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman and Leila: Further in the Life and Destinies of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman. So it’s with a little pride in my research effort that I report on these books here, without having had to consult secondary sources.

The protagonist, Reginald Darcy Thormond Dancer Kildare, begins the first book as the teenage son of a noble family in the Irish countryside that has fallen on hard times. His mother has died, and his father and two older sisters are mostly absent. Darcy Dancer, as his name is abbreviated, lives with the servants at Andromeda Park, his mother’s old family estate. The house and grounds are in disrepair, the servants declining in competence and health, and various predators and scammers, including Darcy’s father, circle like vultures looking to extract what wealth remains. Darcy, ill equipped in his youth and inexperience to manage the situation, undergoes various trials and adventures as he comes of age.

They are funny books, with sex, foxhunts, and a broad spectrum of vividly drawn, mostly deeply flawed characters. They are written in a style I’ve seen nowhere else, in which verbs are gerunds, imperatives, or absent, as though the reader is seeing through the protagonist’s eyes in the moment as the story’s events occur. Here is a typical passage, chosen almost at random:

“Darcy Dancer emerging from the park. Walk by the fence, cross into the strange streets. Sound of engines puffing. Trains. Harcourt Street Station. Something cold, alone and wretched along these pavements. Go in this archway down this alley. Stout and whisky inside. One feels so many of these Dubliners leave their dead dreams on the smoke stained walls of a pub. Turn left, turn next right. A timber merchant’s. What on earth do all these people do in there behind all these twitching curtains.”

Sumner apparently loved these books to the point that he developed something of an obsession not just with them, but with Ireland itself — or more specifically, the aristocracy of the Irish countryside in the early 20th century. He took to wearing a tam-o-shanter cap, and Sue’s sister Sheila joked that his alter identity was “Sumner O’Schoenwetter1”. He had never been to Ireland; to the best of my knowledge, Sumner never in his life left the United States.

I’m showing a subset of these Donleavy-inspired works here. I’ve selected three different scenes, one of which we have in three separate paintings. These are ones that are clearly finished, of which I have decent photos, and that I like the best. They were painted in 1985 and 1986, after the detective scenes above, which in turn came after the sports scenes shown earlier. I’m showing a couple from his slides below, when that’s all I have. When I have my own photos of the originals, I’m showing them, as they look better than the slides, even with the weights we used to hold them down flat. (Next time I have a chance to photograph them, I’ll get a proper easel!)

Viewed in the light of the centaurs to come, it seems likely that one attraction of this material for Sumner was the horses that populate Donleavy’s books, sometimes to the point of acquiring the status of minor characters themselves. The human subject of Woman Rejoining the Hunt, on the other hand, below, is surely based on one of the two sexy blondes in the Darcy Dancer novels: either Miss Von B, the head housekeeper in the first book, or Baptista Consuelo. I can’t explain much about either character without introducing spoilers, but I can say that foxhunts have central places in these books, becoming scenes of sex and violence as well as equestrian contest.

This next one, Gentleman at his Bath, is, perhaps, not quite safe for work, due to the full frontal nudity. I don’t think the gentleman can quite be Darcy Dancer, as the white hair makes him too old. But with that substitution, there are plenty of scenes like this in the books.

It wasn’t just the horses that appealed to Sumner, apparently. Something else about Donleavy’s portrayals of rural aristocracy, with servants and masters and titles and old houses with their furnishings and art, all very remote from Sumner’s own life — he was a son of NYC public schoolteachers who, it seems appropriate to recall here, had been communists during his youth — drew him in.

This next one, Driving in the Country, is unusual in Sumner’s archive in that we have three distinct versions of what are clearly the same work, showing us more of his process. I don’t know the order in which they were done, but the first one below, from Sumner’s slides (hence the blurriness), is dated 1985, so it seems safe to assume the others were done in the same year, or at most late 1984 or early 1986.

In this next one the car is a different color, as are the trees and the road, and we see a little more of the sky, but it’s otherwise quite similar.

This next one, which hangs on my own apartment wall, is quite similar to the previous, but to my eye it’s the most carefully finished of the three (if still a little sketchy in some respects, like the house in the background). Zoom in and you can read most of the license plate numbers on the car:

What is clearest in this one is that the passenger sitting on our left, or the driver’s right — an inaccuracy, as Sumner apparently didn’t realize that one drives on the left side of the road in Ireland — is Sumner O’Schoenwetter himself, tam-o-shanter and all. Here’s a zoom in on him:

These Donleavy-based paintings, and other similar ones we have but that I’m not showing here, raise two questions for me.

First, most of them are watercolors on paper, whereas most of his other finished paintings from the early and mid-80s — and for that matter later as well — are oil, acrylic, or ink on cardboard. Did he just happen to have a watercolor phase at the same time he was most inspired by Donleavy, or was there some reason watercolors seemed right to him for this particular material? The latter seems more likely, as he also did oil paintings of streetscapes in 1985 and 1986. In that case I’d really like to understand what it was that connected the different subject matter to these different media for him; so far, I have not even a hypothesis.

Second, what was Sumner’s process here, given that he had no obvious visual models to work from? While both he and Rudolph appear in at least one other Irish country scene, as small figures (I’ll show this one later; I don’t have a good photo of it yet), it’s clear that none of these were painted from life. He couldn’t have got his friends to pose in the right clothes or in the right settings; and unlike Hammett’s and Chandler’s books, Donleavy’s had no film versions to use as visual inspiration.

Did Sumner find photographs somewhere that were close enough to what he wanted that he could paint directly from those, modifying only details as needed to get the scene he wanted? Maybe, but with many of his paintings of other material that we know are based on photos, he saved the photos and they’re in his archive. No such evidence remains with these Irish ones. Could he have possibly constructed these works straight out of his imagination? He obviously did that when the subjects were centaurs and mermaids, but these Irish ones would be the most substantive example of a whole set of works based on real-world material (i.e., no mythological creatures) that he painted in this way, if indeed he did.

We’re getting close now to having seen a good representative set of the different types of works that Sumner painted in the early and mid-80s, his last years in Manhattan. During this period he also conducted interviews, some of which were published; he wrote a couple of essays; and he recorded music, almost none of which has been properly released. We’ll get to all this eventually. And also to his other, very different, phases as a painter, before and after the 80s.

From the podcast site:

In this episode, Adam talks to musician, archivist, and historian Weasel Walter. As a musician, Weasel’s work spans (quoting from his web page) “extreme rock forms and free jazz”. He was a key figure in what has been called the second no wave movement, in Chicago in the 1990s. His bands and collaborations include the Flying Luttenbachers and (with Lydia Lunch) Retrovirus, among too many others to list. But Weasel is also known as one of the most knowledgeable archivists and historians of the original no wave scene. He was too young to be there in downtown NYC in the 70s, but he can tell you more about who did what, where and when than just about anyone, including the people who were there. Weasel and Adam talk about what happened back then, how it influenced Weasel’s own life and career, and the broader issues around art, culture and commerce that are raised by all of it and that form the context in which we can try to understand Sumner.

This interview was recorded in March 2025. You can find Weasel’s music on weaselwalter.com.

The portrait — a painting of a single person, showing the face, and where the person themselves, rather than anything about the setting or background, is clearly the focus — is arguably the purest form in which an artist can capture a human subject. Sumner painted portraits, from his artistic beginnings to the end. Today, we’ll look at some of them. As in the last few posts, we’ll focus on works from the 1980s, though with an exception or two.

Some of these are photos I took at Sue’s place without noting down the dimensions or medium. (I’m an amateur, turns out.) In some cases, namely the Jack Texas paintings done in the 80s, we have Sumner’s slides on which he wrote these facts, as well as title and date. The sports scenes and streetscapes of the last few weeks are in this category. Otherwise, we have only what we can infer from the style or content, or memories of what Sumner said. If there’s no caption, it means I don’t have the information.

Sumner painted a number of portraits of writers, artists and thinkers, often people whose work he appreciated. For example, he was a fan of the detective novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and even sometimes painted scenes from the books. Here he depicts Hammett:

As I’ve written before about several of his other works, I’m struck in this one by Sumner’s use of the color white. If not for the white paint, this would be something like a drawing, in the sense that the subject is depicted in strokes of a single color against a background whose color is allowed to come through — that is, the color of Hammett’s skin is that of the cardboard. Against that brown, though, the shock of white hair and glint off the glasses are particularly dramatic.

The cardboard’s corrugations, showing through clearly, don’t mar the work, to my eye. They bring the viewer into contact with its mechanics, something like the dots in Roy Liechtenstein’s blown-up comic book panels. Sumner didn’t have as much of a choice about it as Liechtenstein did; he used cardboard, presumably, because it was cheap. But he had learned how to make the most of his low-cost medium.

Here is Chandler, with white used in this picture for the background, as well as some delineation of the writer’s otherwise dark suit:

This paragraph updated from the original post: I hadn’t been able to identify this person. But my mother (aka Sumner’s sister) saw the post and immediately identified the subject here as Humphrey Bogart. I guess I’m showing my relative youth; I haven’t watched many of Bogart’s movies, or maybe I would have seen it — because looking at photos now, it’s a sufficiently close likeness that I’m almost sure my mom is right. The skin tone doesn’t look like Bogart’s, and is an interesting choice by Sumner. But the sad eyes sure are a match:

Sometimes Sumner just saw a photo he liked of someone in a newspaper or magazine, and painted it. This Business Man is one such:

We know this was based on a newspaper photo because Sumner saved it. The caption was cut off so that the name wasn’t showing, but based on what was showing I was able to find the article online (thanks NY Times for maintaining great online archives). The man in the portrait is the one on the right below, Charles E. Walker, “Washington’s best-known big business tax lobbyist,” as of 1982. You be the judge, but I think Sumner pretty much nailed this guy:

Sumner also painted portraits of people he knew. We don’t know who this woman is, but she was almost certainly a friend, or at least an acquaintance:

Nor do we know the identity of the subject of this one, a watercolor Sumner titled just Young Woman:

One may notice that these two women are clad in scanty bedroom wear, and the second in a bedroom pose, while the men are neither. Sumner did sometimes do male nudes, and plenty of muscular male superheroes and athletes, as well as fully clothed women. But the gender difference in the works shown in this post is nonetheless closer to representative than to incidental. Though there are multiple accounts of people thinking he was gay — he was an artist, downtown in the 1970s and 80s, and he had many gay friends — Sumner was straight, and into big and strong women (and mermaids and centaurs) especially, and he let his desires come out in his art more as he aged. Especially in the 80s and after, many of his female subjects, like these two, are sexualized in a way that his male subjects mostly aren’t. For whatever it’s worth, he’s a relatively mild example of this for an artist of his time. Read R. Crumb’s comics…

Besides the paintings, Sumner’s sketchbooks contain countless portraits: faces and figures, drawn on paper, some well-known friends, many of unknown identity.

This is Sumner’s friend, the late Paul Ambrose:

And this is Paul Ambrose as well, a little sketchier:

Connie Burg shows up in Sumner’s art, and in his archive, repeatedly. She was apparently more willing to model for Sumner — a time-consuming and tiring job — than most of his other friends were. Unlike some of his other, generally unnamed female subjects, she is never portrayed in a sexualized manner; if we need an example to demonstrate that Sumner’s view of women wasn’t one-dimensional, she provides one. (The importance of women to no wave in general, unusual compared to its adjacent scenes, as well as to Mars and the rest of Sumner’s immediate circle in particular, provide another. Women, including of course Connie herself, were some of Sumner’s most important collaborators.)

This drawing of Connie is a study for a couple of larger paintings, and so not really a portrait per se, but I’m taking the liberty of including it. In the completed paintings, to be shown later, the man is Rudolph Grey. He’s not particularly recognizable here, but Connie absolutely is:

I don’t know who these ladies are:

Nor who this guy is:

though the sketch, dated October 2001, shows that Sumner never abandoned his cartoon roots.

This being an ongoing research project, let’s close with a question that these portraits — particularly those of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler — raise for me. Why didn’t Sumner draw or paint his true artistic heroes? His oeuvre contains no portrait of Bukka White, Bob Powell, Thelonious Monk (at least none he did as an adult; he did attempt Monk in his childhood musician sketch phase), or Søren Kierkegaard. Why Hammett and Chandler, second-tier figures in the Sumner pantheon of fandom, but not anyone in the top tier?

The best I can hazard is that maybe he didn’t feel worthy. Maybe these most-admired creators loomed so large in his psyche that he didn’t feel he could, or perhaps even should, capture them with ink on cardboard, or any other medium. This is just a speculation, supported by nothing but the lack of a better answer (in particular, it can’t be that it never occurred to him to paint these people). But Sumner’s fandom was so important to him, both as a person and an artist, that it seems to me a worthy question.

Sumner did, however, paint portraits of some family members, and of himself. Some of these pictures have stories that go with them. We’ll get to them soon.

In the early 1980s, while Sumner was still living in his East Fourth Street basement apartment, he had a sports phase.

That is, he painted pictures of scenes from sporting events. Sumner never, to my knowledge, had the kind of interest in sports that any actual sports fan would recognize. He didn’t play sports, he didn’t generally watch sports on tv, and he didn’t care or keep track of how any team was doing. But for a brief period — most of these works are dated 1982, the latest 1984 — sports caught his interest as an artistic subject.

He was surely drawn to the action. Sumner’s art began with comics, and never lost that influence. The sports that he chose to paint tended to be those with the most physical contact, the most violence, the ones where you can most easily imagine the “bam” or “pow” of a superhero comic book panel. And the athletes themselves, big and strong, are as close to comics’ superheroes as real humans get.

In Football Players, above, the receiver is airborne, heading down, caught ball clutched tightly, his leg over both his own head and that of the nearest defender. The first time I saw the painting, it took me a couple of moments to tell what I was looking at, as it’s not a configuration in which one normally sees human bodies. No detail, shading or wrinkles are painted over the white of the receiver’s legs, so they delineate negative space over the greyscale in which the rest of the scene is rendered, and layer an element of abstraction on an otherwise very concrete image.

Here’s another one about, and entitled, Football:

(A note in my role as archivist: while this one looks a little darker in tone and a bit blurrier than the first one above, with the brushstrokes less visible, I believe this is because with this second one I’m showing you Sumner’s slide, digitized by me with a Kodak device —I’ve never seen the actual painting and don’t know if it still exists —while the first one is my photo of the painting itself, taken at Sue’s place, with an iPhone. All else equal, I would be inclined to go with Sumner’s slides every time; after all, he was the artist and surely knew how he wanted his paintings photographed, and I’m no pro at this myself. But he didn’t have today’s equipment, and seemed to get somewhat inconsistent results. In at least some of the cases where I have both to compare, my photos are clearly truer to the paintings. When I have both, I’ll show whichever looks better to my eye.)

Another factor leading Sumner to this material might have been a negative one, namely, his challenges getting live models. It would have been impossible to paint these athletes in motion live; they move too fast. If he had had easy access to models, perhaps he might have stuck to the kinds of subject matter for which he could get them to pose. (As we’ll see, he certainly did such work, as much as he could.) But to the extent that you can’t get people to pose for you anyway, and you have to work from photographs, there’s no real difference between a scene that lasts a millisecond and one that is held for minutes or hours, and maybe you’re more inclined to consider moving subjects. For example, these Hockey Players, depicted in a similar black-and-white scheme as their football counterparts above:

Sumner’s sports paintings are not only about action, though. They also capture character, drama, and celebrity. He did at least a few paintings of boxer Sugar Ray Leonard, and none featuring any other boxer. Sumner clearly found Leonard interesting, and followed his career in the media, as he did with some other celebrities who ended up in his paintings (e.g., Naomi Campbell). Here’s an action picture, Sugar Ray Leonard vs. Tommy Hearns, that’s very much like a comic book panel, with one boxer’s face being compressed by the other’s glove:

But then another picture from the same match, titled Victory, Sugar Ray Leonard vs. Tommy Hearns (based, I believe, on this photograph), is not of the combat itself, but the moment just after it. The champion’s arms are raised in triumph, acknowledged by the referee, who is mostly hidden from our view, while the loser looks at him from the back, literally still in the picture, but figuratively now out of it:

Sumner also painted Leonard with his wife at his (first) retirement, demonstrating further that his interest in the boxer went beyond the fights. There’s no violence in this intimate portrait:

Professional wrestling is famous for being scripted and absurd, perhaps even more so when the combatants were women and it was the 1980s. None of that comes across to me in Lady Wrestlers. Instead, this rendition of combat in the ring is just as serious, to my eye, as Leonard vs. Hearns, notwithstanding the matching blonde hair and colorful suits of the two team members preparing to throw their masked, rope-gripping opponent to the floor:

Finally for today, another pro wrestler: The American Dream (Dusty Rhodes). This one is scanned from Sumner’s slide, so the original is likely a little brighter and sharper than this image. In any case, it’s not an action scene but a portrait. And I don’t see any comedy here, either, though I’m sure Sumner must have seen some in this material. The black background suggests that the subject is on a stage, spotlight on him, looking up at the crowd, his robe indicating that the match is either about to start or just over:

Soon we’ll get to Sumner’s other portraits, those unrelated to sports.

Today we’re continuing on the theme of city scenes from lower Manhattan in the early 1980s. The particular subject matter is two paintings, one at night (above) and one in the daytime (below), of the view just outside Sumner’s basement apartment on East Fourth Street, between First and Second Avenues.

In both paintings, the close-up iron grillwork of the banisters situate the viewer intimately, making us feel —like the artist was — a resident, sitting on his stoop. In both, the block is quiet, with a lone woman walking down the street in about the same place, the daytime one walking two dogs. We see the same fire escape on the adjacent buildings, the storefronts with apartments above across the street, and cars lining the sidewalks. In the daytime view, the cars are, after the closest one, painted impressionistically, forms and colors both blending into a blur that stretches down the block, while they are more crisply delineated in the night view.

I love both of these paintings, but the night one especially. Sumner had a thing with white light, and to me it works magic here: the nearby streetlamps with their glare and streaks against the dark blue, partly cloudy sky, and the speckles of the farther-away ones; and the reflections off the cars, the fire escape, the up-close ironwork, and the building details. The color and shade of the sidewalk are about the same, equally well-lit in both paintings, and in that the pair of them captures, to my eye, the way the city famously doesn’t sleep — or perhaps sleeps equally in night and day.

This apartment occupies a central place in the story of Sumner’s life and art. Some of its significance is due to the particulars of his story. Some is because that story is an exemplar of the history of the downtown art scene in general, and no wave in particular, in that so much of that history revolves around the availability, and then non-availability, of cheap housing.

So here, I use these two paintings as visual prompt, to share what I have been able to reconstruct of the where, when, who, why and how of Sumner’s housing before, during, and just after this period, from both extant written evidence and oral accounts of those who knew him then. Some of the oral accounts are available in the podcast interviews with the relevant people.

For around a decade, beginning in the mid-1960s, Sumner shared a loft on lower Broadway, near City Hall, with painter David Reed. My best guess is that this was the first place Sumner lived after moving out of his parents’ home in Elmhurst, Queens. Sumner and Reed met originally at the New York Studio School, where they both were students for a period beginning around 1965. Sumner turned 19 in April of that year, and we know from Sumner’s journals that he left home at that age.

Artist Nancy Arlen, Sumner’s romantic partner during this time (whom he also most likely met at the Studio School) lived in another loft upstairs in the same Broadway building, with her daughter Bridget (from her previous marriage to artist Robert Godfrey) and Reed’s ex-wife, painter Judy Rifka. Rifka and Reed shared custody of their son, who went back and forth between the two apartments.

Sumner was still in the Broadway place when Mars began rehearsing in 1976. Reed remembers clearly hearing them playing through the walls while he was painting. Nancy, of course, became Mars’ drummer.

I don’t know exactly when or why Sumner moved out of the Broadway loft, but it must have been in 1977 or 1978. Among the letters in Sumner’s archive is one from Lydia Lunch (with whom he was an item at the time; Sumner and Nancy had separated amicably by sometime in 1976 or 1977, as best as can be reconstructed from the memories of their two living bandmates), postmarked 1978 — the month is irreparably smudged and unreadable — to Sumner, co/Jim Sclavunos (a member of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, with Lydia), at an East 12^th Street address. So Sumner was out of the Broadway place by then. He couldn’t have been on 12^th Street long before settling on Fourth Street, though, as many people have memories of Sumner being in his basement apartment while also still being in Mars, or at least very close to that time, and Mars’ last gig was in December 1978.

The apartment was rent controlled. I don’t know how much the rent was, but it must have been quite cheap. Sumner didn’t have his name on the lease, though. He must have been subletting from someone, I know not whom. If he had been the leaseholder, he could have kept the place indefinitely. Instead, he was evicted in 1986, when the landlord insisted that no one who didn’t have a lease in their own name could stay. I know the year because of letters in his archive that Bridget, Nancy’s daughter, wrote him for several years in the 1980s, when she was in her 20s. In 1986 his address on the envelopes changes to King’s Highway, Brooklyn, and in the months just before that, she asks him about the upcoming move.

The Fourth Street place was a basement apartment, with an entrance directly from the street. It had previously been a Chinese laundry. I don’t know whether Sumner was the first resident after the laundry closed, or if there had been others in between. We do know that Ikue Mori, of DNA, lived in an apartment upstairs in the same building. That couldn’t have been an accident; she must have been involved in his getting his place. For about two years — I believe post-Mars, but not long after; something like 1980-82 or maybe more likely 1979-81, overlapping with the making of John Gavanti in 1979 — Sumner and Ikue were a couple, and Sumner more or less moved upstairs to her place. He wrote extensively in his journal about his anguish when they broke up and he moved back downstairs.

I visited Sumner there once when I was in high school. The year must have been 1984 or 85 (I graduated and went to college in 1985). The place was dark and windowless. He didn’t have a proper kitchen, but cooked (or at least, heated up food) on an electric hot plate. I don’t think he had a proper shower either, though I’m not sure about that. I found it a little depressing, but I don’t think he did. To him, I think, it was freedom, and artistic possibility.

He had many visitors. People stayed with him there. He took in friends who needed places to sleep, sometimes for extended periods. Bridget asked to stay when she was in town. Arto Lindsay remembers spending a cold winter there (the heat was minimal to nonexistent), when Sumner himself was away for some reason.

Sumner recorded a lot of music in the apartment. I have the tapes. In his early days there, not long after Mars’ breakup, he held rehearsals for Gavanti, with Mark, Connie, and Ikue. He played blues: the first tapes of that are with Ikue and Duncan Lindsay, and then there are many from the early 1980s with two Japanese musicians, Shuzo Kuraya (drums) and Taeko Yamada (viola), as well as solo ones with Sumner alone. He played guitar and sang. They were songs inspired by his favorite Delta bluesman, Bukka White, but with lyrics White would never have written, inspired instead by Sumner’s own obsessions, and sometimes Yamada’s viola adding a no wave skronk. He intended to put out a record, Coffin Full of Blues, with a cover by Rudolph; tapes circulated informally, but it was never properly published. (We’re working on it now; more later on that!) With Kuraya, he also recorded free jazz improvisations where he played piano in a style that evokes both Cecil Taylor and Thelonious Monk.

Sumner became friends with a homeless man on the block, Anthony John Candia. He recorded several interviews with John, and published them in Vacation, a magazine published by Patrick Roques, a California artist and graphic designer who lived both in San Francisco and New York during this period. More on this in a future post!

Rudolph Grey, who became Sumner’s best friend around the time he got the Fourth Street place and retained that status for the rest of Sumner’s life, surely spent a lot of time in the basement with him. Rudolph released a record in 2007 (four years after Sumner’s death) of which the B side was a duet with Sumner, listed as “Recorded June, 1980, Chinese Laundry, E. 4th St., NYC”. No wave archivist and historian Joshua Moore has shared with me scans of the front and back cover, below; the drawing on the back cover is by Sumner. The artwork on the front was by Sumner and Rudolph together, based on a Bob Powell comic panel; this same work was used on the flyer for their Jack Texas show, with Arto Lindsay, at Danceteria in 1983.

In a recent interview (that I sadly failed to record, but took notes), Rudolph recalled to me that being evicted from the Fourth Street place caused Sumner much unhappiness and stress. In fact, Rudolph attributes the onset of Sumner’s cancer, over a decade later, to this eviction. There’s no way to refute or validate that hypothesis, but the record does show that Sumner stopped painting city scenes after he moved to King’s Highway in 1986. Not only did the artist leave Manhattan, the art did too.

Sumner’s gentrification story has a happy ending, though. He remained in King’s Highway until around 1990. Then, he spent some months in the Catskills, taking care of his dying father. He met Susan Lehman around the same time; she recalls that the first part of their courtship occurred in large part through long distance phone calls to the family home in Woodbourne, NY (where Sumner had spent summers as a child and his parents eventually retired; his mother died in 1980). Soon after that, in the early 90s, he moved in with Sue to her place in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. He stayed there until his death in 2003 — and in fact his ashes remain in that neighborhood today, in Greenwood Cemetery. This last phase, the Sue era, will be the subject for another day.

The ending to the story of today’s two paintings, though, is bittersweet. I don’t know if these two paintings of his Fourth Street block still exist. I didn’t see them at Sue’s when I was there, and she doesn’t recall them. These images are from Sumner’s slides. At least we have those.

Meanwhile, the Laundry itself is now a hookah bar and Middle Eastern restaurant. One can go there, during business hours, and inhabit Sumner’s space. I did that last year, and found it profoundly spooky. The place is entirely different than it was when he lived there, and yet it’s the same. Much like the rest of the city, really.

In the mid-1960s, when Sumner studied with Milton Resnick at the New York Studio School, his painting became abstract. I showed some of his works from this period in an earlier post. In the mid- and late 1970s, including the Mars period, it remained abstract, though it evolved, particularly in the use of found wood, like two-by-fours, instead of canvas as a medium. We do still have some works from that time, and I’ll show them later.

But today and for the next few weeks we’ll focus on the 1980s, post-Mars. Sumner’s work became figurative again, and would remain so, for the most part, for the rest of his life. The centaurs we saw in the last and next-to-last posts, and the mermaids and galaxy gals that we haven’t seen yet, became his favored subject matter in the late 80s and thereafter. But before this, in the early to mid 80s, was a productive period in which Sumner painted realistic scenes.

He worked from life when he could. With human subjects, arranging this was often challenging, as he had no money to pay professional models. A few friends were willing to put in the considerable time and effort it took to pose for him, but only so often. (For a good story, listen to Connie talk about the bridge club he organized so that he could paint it; unfortunately these particular works are, to my knowledge, lost.) So he often worked from photographs.

Sumner’s material during this period can be grouped into several distinct themes. In this and a few following posts I’m going to introduce them one at a time. Today’s theme is city scenes. These are works depicting his neighborhood and nearby parts of lower Manhattan.

We have accurate dates for some of these paintings, because Sumner took a set of slides which we still have — he didn’t write dates on the paintings, but he did write them on the slides. They indicate years from 1982 to 1986. In 1986, Sumner was evicted from the East Fourth Street basement apartment that he had occupied for close to a decade, and moved to Kings Highway, Brooklyn. While we don’t have dates for others, I believe — based on the dates we do have, as well as the material in his sketchbooks — that they all date from these years, and that he stopped painting these urban landscapes in 1986.

Sumner could have kept painting city scenes after that. He could have painted Brooklyn, or he could have painted Manhattan from photos, or by taking the subway there. But from the evidence we have, it appears he didn’t. So these paintings are, to me, poignant documents, evoking both some aspects of the city that haven’t changed — some of these views would look similar today, notwithstanding a few new buildings and different-looking cars — and, in hindsight, the gentrification that drove this artist, like so many others, away.

Sumner had painted on canvas earlier in his career, particularly when he was a student. But by now it was a luxury that, for the most part, he couldn’t afford any more. He worked mostly on cardboard. No special cardboard, either: it’s normal cardboard, the kind used to make packing boxes, with a corrugated interior covered by paper. In some of these paintings, one can see the corrugations poking through.

A note on the archive: some of these are photos I took of the actual paintings, at Sue’s house. Some are Sumner’s slides, digitized by me with a gizmo purchased for the purpose. In some of the latter cases, Sue has the painting itself (and in most of those cases I also have my own photo of it), while in other cases, to the best of my knowledge the current existence of the painting, not to mention its location, is unknown. Sumner kept the slides in plastic sheets designed to hold them, and over the decades, the plastic stuck a bit to some of them, requiring me to wiggle them to remove them, and in some cases they’re a little dirty. I’ve tried to clean them, but I’m afraid of being too aggressive, so you’ll still see a few spots.

I’m struck by the different light and color schemes in these works. These reflect not just the colors of the actual subject matter — buildings, streets, cars, trees — but also the different times of day and, presumably, weather. In some, like the Red Roofs shown at top here, he likely intentionally altered or exaggerated the colors for effect. Notice the white highlights, suggesting reflected sunlight, that outline the cars in Houston Street and the outfielder in Baseball Players, and that prefigure the chalk outlines used later in the Zebra centaurs.

The perspectives here are also diverse. There are views from rooftops and from street level; grand, sweeping views and intimate close-ups, including some of rather gritty and unromantic details. I don’t know if Sumner was a fan of Edward Hopper, but some of these views, and even more so the collection of them together, remind me of Hopper’s work in this respect.

I’ll end with the work itself today. Here are seven more Manhattan urban landscapes, painted by Sumner Crane in the early to mid-1980s.