Artist of the day: Artist of the day, January 20-21: Paul Cadmus, American painter

Paul Cadmus (1904 – 1999) was an American artist. He is best known for his egg tempera paintings of gritty social interactions in urban settings. He also produced many highly finished drawings of single nude male figures. His paintings combine elements of eroticism and social critique in a style often called magic realism.

In 1919, at the age of 15, Cadmus left high school and entered the National Academy of Design, studying first under Charles Hinton. He received a bronze medal from the Academy the following year for excellence in the discipline. He began to study printmaking under William Auerbach-Levy in 1923, and soon after began exhibiting his work and publishing illustrations for the weekly book review section of The New York Herald-Tribune.

From 1928 to 1931 Cadmus was employed as a layout artist at a New York advertising agency. He continued taking sketch classes, studying with Joseph Pennell and Charles Locke at the Art Students League. It was here that he met fellow student Jared French who was to become perhaps the single most important influence on Cadmus’s life and work.

In 1933, Cadmus’s sister Fidelma sent him newspaper clippings on the newly organized, government-sponsored Public Works of Art Project. Cadmus was accepted into the PWAP in December as one of the program’s first participants, and in 1934 his painting The Fleet’s In!

Controversy followed Cadmus throughout this period. When Coney Island was exhibited in 1935 at the Whitney Museum, the satirical panorama caused neighborhood realtors to threaten a civil suit. In 1936 Cadmus was commissioned by the Treasury Relief Art Project to execute murals for the Port Washington, Long Island post office, and he chose a series satirizing Aspects of Suburban Life for his subject.

Cadmus’s first one-man show was held at Midtown Galleries in New York in 1937. The exhibition attracted more than 7,000 viewers, many of whom were eager to see for themselves these controversial works that had received such extensive newspaper and magazine coverage and caused such unprecedented public outcries.

At the 1939 Whitney Annual Cadmus’ painting Seeing the New Year In, a picture based on the artist’s experiences at Greenwich Village parties, caused friction because of its recognizable portraits. In 1940 Life commissioned Cadmus to paint one panel of a historical series documenting the labor movement in the United States.

Cadmus’s first important museum exhibition was “Three American Painters,” mounted in Baltimore in 1942. The following year sixteen of the artist’s works were included in the seminal exhibition “American Realists and Magic Realists” at the Museum of Modern Art, curated by Lincoln Kirstein.

In 1943 Cadmus had discovered the writings of E. M. Forster and, finding the author’s ideas inspirational, began a long-term correspondence with the author. During Forster’s first visit to the United States in 1947, Cadmus served as a co-host. The painter interrupted work on the “Sins” to paint his visualization of the writer’s credo What I Believe. Forster stayed at the Greenwich Village studio, and also visited with Cadmus and Jared and Margaret French, who were in Provincetown. In turn, Cadmus visited Forster in Cambridge in 1949 and drew a portrait of the author.

In 1950 several of Cadmus’s works were included in “American Symbolic Realism” at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art, and Architect was exhibited at the Whitney Annual. In the years 1951 to 1953 Cadmus lived and worked in France and Italy.

Cadmus moved from Manhattan to a studio on Remsen Street in Brooklyn Heights in 1961. That same year he received a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1965 he began work on a series of highly developed drawings of the male nude for which Jon Anderson is the principal model. The large sheets of paper are often hand-toned, and the rendering is sensuous and deliberate. Cadmus continues to work on this series today.

A monograph with a catalogue of Cadmus’s prints and drawings was published by the Brooklyn Museum in 1968. In 1969, a few months before E. M. Forster’s death, Cadmus and Jon Anderson journeyed to England to visit the novelist in Cambridge. Cadmus was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1974. The following year he moved from Brooklyn to a house and studio in Weston, Connecticut. Subway Symphony, his largest painting, was completed in 1976. In 1980 Cadmus visited Margaret and Jared French, who had settled in Rome.

Cadmus was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition initiated by Miami University of Art in Ohio in 1981, which traveled to four other U. S. museums. The first edition of Paul Cadmus by Lincoln Kirstein was published in 1984, and Paul Cadmus: Enfant Terrible at 80, a documentary film by David Sutherland, was also produced that year.

Recent solo exhibitions of Cadmus’s work include: “The Fleet’s In! Paintings by Paul Cadmus,” which was on view at the National Museum of American Art in 1992 and traveled to other major American museums; a 1994 exhibition at the National Academy Museum in New York celebrating Paul’s 90th birthday; “The Seven Deadly Sins and Other Works from the Permanent Collection,” held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1995; “Paul Cadmus: The Sailor Trilogy,” featuring the 1930s works The Fleet’s In!, Shore Leave, and Sailors and Floosies, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1996; the exhibition “Chuck Close/Paul Cadmus: In Dialogue” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1997; and “Paul Cadmus: 90 Years of Drawings”, a 1998 retrospective exhibition of drawings at DC Moore Gallery. The hardcover monograph “Paul Cadmus: The Male Nude” was released by Rizzoli/Universe in the fall of 2002. The book coincided with an exhibition of the same name at DC Moore Gallery.