Paul Cadmus

Paul Cadmus is one of the few artists who can celebrate 90 years of drawing and painting. Born to artist parents in New York, he was encouraged towards his artistic inclinations. Because of this, several of his earliest drawings have been preserved (from age 4). He and his family endured an impoverished life and Paul himself suffered from malnutrition and rickets. He says that this accounts to his love of health, fitness and eternal beauty today. At the age of 15, Paul Cadmus left to study art at the National Academy of Design. At the age of sixteen, he earned a bronze medal for his proficiency in drawing. He left the academy after six years of course work, and began his work at an advertising agency until his friend, Jared French, persuaded him to "become an artist". This meant using his savings and travel to Europe. It was then 1931. Cadmus' hero was Ingres whom he loved above Rembrandt. Yet his keen awareness of line and detail came from another artist, Luca Signorelli, whose work he observed in Orvieto. His other influences while traveling through the old word included Piero della Francesca, and Matthias Grunewald. In 1933, his savings finished, Cadmus returned to New York and enrolled in the Public Works of Art Project. A year later, a painting causing scandal for its depiction of drunken and lecherous sailors, (The Fleet's In), gave Cadmus instant notoriety and prompted a new phase of his career. Paul Cadmus continued controversial works through the 1930's that had a grotesque and satirical feel to them, while at the same time giving them a fresh, street smart and all American vibe. During the 1940's Cadmus' drawings continued to explore social satire, but he now seemed to give more attention to the human form; a quieter, more sensual nude form. He increasingly created drawings as finished works of art, working with hand toned papers, colored crayons, chalk, silverpoint and casein as a way of enriching and adding depth to his work. "Drawings for paintings are one thing, drawings for drawings are another," he says. " I often do a preparatory drawing for a finished drawing. I do a preliminary sketch just to make sure I've got everything as I like it. Then I transfer the outline to a prepared paper." "And I do think a sketch can have more vitality than a finished work." In Cadmus' drawings of the male nude a distance always seems to exist between the artist and his beautiful subjects, as if to suggest that the encounter is made more satisfying by distance and restraint. In 1965, he met Jon Anderson, the man who would become his muse, model, life partner, and the subject of some of his most beautiful drawings. These grand, classically inspired works (reminiscent Ingres), have a relaxed sensuality pouring out of them. When asked how his own age, ninety at the time, affected his perception of physical beauty, he replied, "I don't know. Sometimes I'm ashamed that I am so interested in physical beauty, but I am. I like looking at beautiful people." Drawing, that seemingly most simple of artistic acts, is in fact the most demanding. To draw as Cadmus did requires years of discipline, years of training, years of paying close attention to the complex visual experience most of us, particularly in an age of photographic reproduction, take almost entirely for granted. Cadmus' seemingly effortless drawings (whatever their politics, whatever their subject) represent nothing less than a ninety year engagement in the art of craft and drawing.Born in New York City in 1904, Paul Cadmus has spent the past nine decades honing a singular, remarkably complex style of aesthetic idealization and social critique in justly celebrated paintings, drawings and etchings of nude figures, fantastical scenes and supercharged allegories. After abandoning a career in advertising, Cadmus studied fine art, traveled throughout Europe in the early 1930s, and returned to the U.S. as an employee of the Public Works of Art Project. When The Fleet's In!, his notoriously erotic painting of sailors on leave, was simultaneously rejected by the PWAP and embraced by critics and patrons, Cadmus was inspired to devote himself as a full-time artist, uniquely able to render mythological beauty and daily grime, homoerotic fever dreams and emotionally naked self-portraits. Throughout the ensuing decades, Cadmus' work has been exhibited internationally at major museums and galleries, earning controversy and reverence in equal measure. Now 93 years young, Cadmus lives and works in Weston, Connecticut with his partner, Jon Andersson. He is the subject of Paul Cadmus, a lavishly illustrated monograph by his brother-in-law, Lincoln Kirstein, and of Paul Cadmus: Enfant Terrible at 80, a 1984 film by David Sutherland.