Cumming, Robert. A Training in the Arts by Robert Cumming.

Self-published artist's book, 1977. Second edition (previously published by Coach House Press, 1973). Wraps, 24 pages. [A fictional comical autobiography about the author's art education, illustrated with photographs of nude women and men with irrelevant captions.] Like new. Summary:

Training in the Arts (1973) is an influential, self-published conceptual artist's book by American artist and photographer Robert Cumming, produced during his landmark period of West Coast conceptual bookmaking in Southern California.

Key Summary & Highlights

• Ironic Narrative Structure: Formatted as an autobiographical, instructional guide, the booklet uses a deadpan, narrative voice paired with staged black-and-white photographs to chronicle a series of absurd "training" exercises and artistic dilemmas.

• Staged Illusion and Deception: Cumming constructs elaborate, low-tech props and visual puzzles that trick the eye or challenge basic logic—such as artificial shadows, impossible perspective tricks, and fabricated studio "accidents."

• Parody of Academic Art Training: The work pokes fun at traditional art school pedagogy and the rigid seriousness of formalist art theory, recasting artistic skill as a set of eccentric, pseudoscientific, and highly theatrical maneuvers.

• Interplay of Text and Image: By pairing dry, matter-of-fact captions with perplexing visuals, Cumming forces the viewer to question the authority of both photographic truth and written documentation in modern art.

Robert Cumming (1943–2021)

Robert Cumming was an American painter, sculptor, photographer, and printmaker renowned for his witty, cerebral investigations into perception, illusion, and the mechanics of representation. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, he earned a B.F.A. from the Massachusetts College of Art and an M.F.A. in painting and printmaking from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Moving to Southern California in the late 1960s, Cumming embraced photography not to document reality, but to construct theatrical set-ups, optical illusions, and pseudoscientific experiments that challenged how viewers process visual information. His work combined rigorous draftsmanship with deadpan humor, spanning artist's books, large-format Polaroid photographs, prints, and sculptures. Over a distinguished career that included teaching positions at institutions such as UC Riverside, Hartford Art School, and MIT, Cumming received multiple National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship, leaving a lasting mark on conceptual art and post-modern photography.