Pastries are sweet baked cakes made with dough that typically contains a simple combination of flour, butter, shortening, eggs, baking powder and sugar- you can see these things sprinkled all over our Little Pastry Chef's coat. You can feel him thinking about the dough awaiting him.
Pastry has a higher fat content than bread and a flaky consistency. Nearly every culture has its own version of regional pastries. From the dawn of man, pastes of cereal have been cooked in the sun to create a tasty pancake. These gave way to modern breads and baked goods. According to the encyclopedia of gastronomy, “Larousse Gastronomique,” as early as the Neolithic Age, prehistoric man made foods based on honey, fruits, seeds, and maple or birch syrup. It’s thought that Mediterranean baklava and filo are the original pastries, made in Assyria on special occasions and for the rich. Medieval crusaders to the Middle East brought the recipes for these sweet treats back with them upon their return to Europe. Over the next century, according to FoodTimeline.org, French and Italian Renaissance chefs perfected puff pastry to an art form, adapting these original recipes to create Napoleons, brioche, éclairs and cream puffs.
Later, early European settlers brought pies to America along with the first apple seeds. Modern pastries are still prepared nearly the same way as they were centuries ago, despite advancements in kitchen technology. All that has really changed is the availability of exotic fillings, spices and ingredients.
The Little Pastry Chef (to the left) and Portrait of Bill Cumming (above)– another unlikely duo here at Fifty Two Pieces. Portrait of Bill Cumming by Morris Graves hangs just around the corner and half way down the corridor from The Little Pastry Chef. Some think these two paintings were separated at birth or at least at the easel. Bruce Guenther, Chief Curator at the Portland Art Museum has been heard saying that Morris Graves followed in the Expressionist footsteps of Chaim Soutine with this portrait. Cumming is certainly painted with a similar elongated curving body. And the expression – Cumming might be considered to be looking bemused or a more vernacular saying about what's up with this fellow artist. Spend a moment in the gallery, look at the brush strokes, check out the paint color and ask Cumming yourself about life, his thoughts, what he was experiencing. Thinking about Graves' work, portraits are not unrepresented but are certainly not his usual choice of format. We'll probably never know why he chose to paint this younger artist's portrait. Cumming had teamed up with Graves, and the rest of the Northwest School – Guy Anderson, Kenneth and Margaret Callahan, Mark Tobey, and Lubin Petric. Maybe Graves was fascinated with Cumming's style, his love of music that he both played and composed, his love of poetry that he both read and wrote. Or perhaps it was Graves wonderment when he thought about Cumming having married seven times or finally dealing with his lingering tuberculosis from his Christian Scientist heritage. Whatever it was that prompted this painting, we are left with this unusual portrait around the corner and linked to The Little Pastry Chef. To read more about Bill Cumming and Morris Graves, take a look at "Cumming, William (b. 1917): The Willie Nelson of Northwest Painting". It is well written and follows Cumming through the Northwest as he becomes both politically active and a well known artist.
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