French received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Amherst College in 1925. He met and befriended Cadmus in New York City, became his lover, and persuaded Cadmus to give up commercial art for "serious painting". In 1937 French married Margaret Hoening, another artist. For the next eight years Cadmus and the Frenches summered on Fire Island and formed a photographic collective called PAJAMA ("Paul, Jared, and Margaret"). French painted numerous murals for the WPA.
Jungian psychology was probably an important influence upon the dream-like imagery in the paintings of French's maturity. The highly stylized, archaic-looking figures in his paintings suggest that they are representative of the ancestral memory of all mankind, what Carl Jung called "the collective unconscious". French himself was never explicit about the sources of his imagery, although on a stylistic level, the influence of early Italian Renaissance paintings by such masters as Mantegna and Piero della Francesca is evident, as it is also in the work of both Tooker and Cadmus. On the level of content, he made only one, short, public statement regarding his intentions:
My work has long been concerned with the representation of diverse aspects of man and his universe. At first it was mainly concerned with his physical aspect and his physical universe. Gradually I began to represent aspects of his psyche, until in The Sea (1946) and Evasion (1947), I showed quite clearly my interest in man's inner reality.
Paul Cadmus and Jared French by George Platt Lynes
Jared French was an American painter who specialized in the medium of egg tempera. In 1925 he met and befriended Cadmus in New York City. French persuaded Cadmus to give up commercial art for what he deemed, "serious painting". In 1937 French married Margaret Hoening, also an artist. For the next 8 years Cadmus and the Frenches summered on Fire Island and formed a photographic collective called PaJaMa ("Paul, Jared, and Margaret"). French left the USA and died, in seclusion, in Rome, in 1988.
Homesickness
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_French
Chuck Howard and Jared French, St Luke's Place, by Paul Cadmus
George Platt Lynes and Jared French, Fire Island, by PaJaMa
George Platt Lynes and Jonathan Tichenor, Fire Island, by Jared French
George Tooker, Jared French and Monroe Wheeler, Provincetown, by PaJaMa
Jared French by PaJaMa
Jared French by George Platt Lynes
Jared French, Clinton, by PaJaMa
Jared French, Hoboken, by PaJaMa
Jared French "Jerry" by Paul Cadmus
Jared French, Paul Cadmus and Donald Windham, by PaJaMa
Paul Cadmus and Jared French by PaJaMa
Jared French's Paintings
Business
Casein
Composition
Coppia
Coup de Pied
Coupla Girls
Crew
Elemental Play
Evasion
Glenway Wescott, George Platt Lynes and Monroe Wheeler
Mirror
Prose
Scena di Delitto
Seat by the Sea
Seated Man
Spectators
State Park
The Double
The Rope
Three Women and a Lifeguard
Washing the White Blood from Daniel Boone
Woman and Boys
In 1934 he painted The Fleet's In! while working for the Public Works of Art Project of the WPA. This painting, featuring carousing sailors, women, and a homosexual couple, was the subject of a public outcry and was removed from exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery. The publicity helped to launch his career. "The Battle of the Corcoran" was a critical turning point in the career of the young, 29 year-old Greenwich Village artist who was suddenly thrust into national prominence. Involving elements of overt censorship, it was brought back into the limelight decades later.
As a young scholar, Philip Eliasoph was given unprecedented access to work with Cadmus to record for posterity the biographical details of his career. Completing 'Paul Cadmus:Life & Work' [SUNY at Binghamton, 1979] Eliasoph realized there was a missing piece as Cadmus' notorious sailor painting was created for the first New Deal art project, the P.W.A.P. and rightfully belonged in the public domain as Federal property. 'The Fleet's In!' had been seized by Navy admirals at the behest of Roosevelt administration officials for the Corcoran's premier event showcasing the first examples of New Deal art patronage, the sexually explicit painting was overtly censored. Secretary of the Navy Swanson stated the [painting] "represents a most disgraceful, sordid, disreputable, drunken brawl.." [Time, April, 30, 1934]. Cadmus defended himself: "I owe the start of my career to the Admiral who tried to suppress it. I didn't feel any moral indignation about those sailors, even though it woundn't be my idea of a good time. I always enjoyed watching them when I was young. I somewhat envied the freedom of their lives and their lack of inhibitions."
Paul Cadmus and Jon Andersson
Paul Cadmus was an American artist. Cadmus's sister, Fidelma, was the wife of philanthropist and arts patron Lincoln Kirstein. He is best known for his paintings and drawings of nude male figures. Jon Andersson, a former cabaret singer, who became Paul Cadmus's longtime companion of 35 years, was a subject of many of his works. The two met on a pier on Nantucket in 1964, when Andersson was twenty-seven and Cadmus was fifty-nine. "I never wanted to be with anyone else", Cadmus remarked. Thirty-six years later, at sixty-three and ninety-five, when Paul died, they were still together.
"This, then, is my viewpoint – a satirical viewpoint: and I think I'm correct in saying that genuine satire has always been considered supremely moral," Cadmus wrote in his "Credo", a broadside for his first exhibition at Midtown Gallery in 1937. In the tradition of Hogarth, Rowlandson and Daumier, Cadmus felt the urgency to use his artistic expression towards exposing the "replusive" and "malignant" aspects of human behavior towards a "nobler" society. In preparing for the artist's first and only national Retrospective tour in 1981, Eliasoph sought restitution of the painting. He sought out the counsel of Karel Yasko, Counselor for Fine Arts and Historic Preservation of the General Services Administration, in Washington D.C. Since the end of the New Deal, the GSA had been given supervisory authority for federal property created by artists. Cadmus showed Eliasoph evidence that his painting – which he had last seen when he delievered it to Juliana Force at the old Whitney Museum on 8th Street in 1934 – had been confiscated and sequestered in an elite private men's social club in Washington. The Alibi Club on "I" street had received the painting from FDR's cousin, Henry Latrobe Roosevelt, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and a club member. The second 'Battle of the Corcoran' ensued when Eliasoph commenced a legal campaign to recover the painting aided by Yasko's threat to the club to seize it using federal marshalls. With amicable negotiations, and a public airing of this "censorship" matter in The Washington Post, the painting was legally transferred back to the U.S. Navy Historical Center in Washington, D.C. where it is now proudly displayed. It was not until the opening night of Cadmus' retrospective, at the Miami University Art Museum, in Oxford, Ohio, that Cadmus was re-united with the work he had not seen in over 47 years.
The third "Battle of the Corcoran" took place decades later when the homo-erotic photographic exhibit of Robert Mapplethorpe was removed due to pressures about its funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. In a published letter to The New York Times, [Nov. 26, 1989] Eliasoph reminded readers of "The Other Time Censorship Stormed Into the Corcoran Gallery," noting: "while members of the curatorial staff..might be too young to remember the history of their predecessors, an earlier storm of controversy forced the censorship and removal of an offending artwork from the very same institution 55 years ago...As in most cases of artistic censorship, Mr. Cadmus' work seems mildly tame and lighthearted compared with today's notions of sexuality as seen in magazine ads and music videos."
He worked in commercial illustration as well, but Jared French, another tempera artist who befriended him and became his lover for a time, convinced him to devote himself completely to fine art.
Jon Andersson, who became Cadmus's longtime companion of 35 years, was a subject of many of his works. The two met on a pier on Nantucket in 1964, when Andersson was twenty-seven and Cadmus was fifty-nine. "I never wanted to be with anyone else", Cadmus remarked. Thirty-six years later, at sixty-three and ninety-five, when Paul died, there were still together.
In 1999 he died in his home in Weston, Connecticut due to advanced age, just five days short of his 95th birthday.
Cadmus's sister, Fidelma, was the wife of philanthropist and arts patron Lincoln Kirstein. Cadmus is ranked by Artists Trade Union of Russia amongst the world-best artists of the last four centuries.
Burial: Cremated, Location of ashes is unknown.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Cadmus
Paul Cadmus by George Platt Lynes
Paul Cadmus by George Platt Lynes
Paul Cadmus by George Platt Lynes, 1953
Paul Cadmus and Monroe Wheeler, Clinton, New Jersey, 1941, by PaJaMa
Paul Cadmus, Provincetown, by PaJaMa
The painter Paul Cadmus felt "the naiveté of the public was a great benefit if one didn't want to be exposed. I don't think I ever worried about exposure exactly - although I like reticence and I don't like flaunting. But then the world has gotten much more extreme.
"There were never magazines like Screw", Cadmus continued. "The only gay publication that I knew in those days was published in Switzerland, called Der Kreis/Le Cercle. It was bilingual; I think it had French and English. It published some of my drawings and paintings. George Platt Lynes used the pseudonym Roberto Rolf when the magazine published his photos. It printed very good art and had very good stories - not necessarily very gay things but generally homoerotic, I suppose. Not porn. It was quite a charming magazine actually. I would send them photographs of my drawings. It was mailed in a plain wrapper, but it was not junk. I think they published Thomas Mann".
[...]
In 1937 Lincoln Kirstein met the painter Paul Cadmus, who pioneered his own style of "magic realism". Cadmus believed Kirstein championed Johnson (Philip n.d.r) later on mostly because he thought he was a good architect. "Lincoln's always been very supportive of good art", said Cadmus, "even when it wasn't popular. He didn't give a damn about what other people liked".
When Kirstein met Cadmus the talented painter had a gentle charm and a magnificent face, and many of their friends believed that Kirstein immediately fell in love with him. Cadmus said Kirstein fell in love with his work; in any event, the painter never reciprocated Kirstein's romantic feelings. "Quite soon after he met me, he met my sister", Cadmus remembered almost six decades later. "I think he met her twice, and then he came to see me one day, and he said "Paul, I want to marry Fidelma".
"But you hardly know her", Cadmus replied. "And she's not like me". But Kirstein was insistent. "I know what I want, I want to marry Fidelma".
"Please don't suddenly surprise her like this", said Cadmus. But "very shortly afterwards", Kirstein took Fidelma to the Plaza and proposed to her, and she soon accepted, although the engagement spanned three years. The marriage lasted until Fidelma was institutionalized for mental illness many years later, but Kirstein continued to sleep with men all his life. Partly through Fidelma, he also kept Cadmus close to him until Kirstein died in 1996. Kirstein also bought many of Cadmus's canvases, and eventually wrote a book that was an homage to the painter's work. In the 1970s, Kirstein built Cadmus a house on the grounds of his Connecticut estate. There, Cadmus lived with his lover, Jon Andersson, and the two of them took care of dinners for Kirstein and his weekend guests every Saturday for years - sort of a friendly catering service.
"He had glamour of course", said Cadmus. "Very dynamic. He knew everybody. He used to have very good parties with people like Callas and Nelson Rockfeller". At a memorial service at the New York State Theater - a building that Kirstein had chosen Philip Johnson to design - Cadmus described his friend as a "benevolent hurricane".
During the war, Cadmus began to send food packages to E.M. Forster in England, after the painter's close friend Margaret French told Cadmus that Forster had seen his work in Time or Newsweek and greatly admired it. They began a correspondence that blossomed into a fine friendship. "He was not shy with me", Cadmus remembered. "He was very astute always. He was no ninny. And he was very scornful of people who didn't enjoy going to Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon. He thought those were wonders that people should see. He enjoyed visiting them very much".
Later Forster came to America and visited Cadmus and French in Provincetown, where she and her husband, Jared, had rented a house for the summer. "I and George Tooker were their guests for the summer there", said Cadmus. Provincetown was not particularly gay. "It wasn't like it is now. We weren't there for that. We were there to be at the beach and for working".
Then Cadmus visited Forster in his rooms in Cambridge. "I sat on the window ledge drawing his portrait as he read Maurice to me" - the gay novel that was first published many years after Forster's death. "In two sessions, I guess he read the whole book to me. I loved it. He had no intention of publishing it because of his relationship with his policeman friend. That would have been very damaging to him and (the policeman's) wife".
Like Forster, Cadmus considered himself a moralist: "I admire the virtues of long-term friendships and all the things that Forster writes about: tolerance, sympathy, and kindness".
[...]
Paul Cadmus remembered Capote at an outdoor café in Venice shortly after the war. "Truman lifted his cape up and down, up and down, and said, "Come to Taormina! Come to Taormina!"" Cadmus recalled. The painter took Capote's advice and met him at the Italian resort. One day Capote returned from the post office with the mail. "I bring tidings of disaster!" he shouted. "Tennessee's play is a great success!"
"I always liked Truman", said Cadmus. "He didn't give a damn what people thought of his voice or anything else. Brave little thing".
[...]
Paul Cadmus spent many happy hours gazing at the sailors who flooded Riverside Park: "A lot of my "gay life" was visual mostly. Not all of it, but more than I wanted. I was rather timid, I guess. I kept most of my dreams about sailors to myself. I used to like watching them, thinking what a good time they were having".--The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America by Charles Kaiser
Jerry, 1931, Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio
Paul Cadmus, Selfportrait, 1932
Mallorcan Fisherman, 1932
The Fleet's In!, 1933, Navy Art Gallery, Washington Navy Yard
YMCA Locker Room, 1933
Byciclists, 1933
Shore Leave, 1933
Greenwich Village Cafeteria, 1934
Coney Island, 1934, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Aspects of Suburban Life: Main Street, 1935, D.C. Moore Gallery
The Gilding of the Acrobats, 1935
Horseplay, 1935
Aspects of Suburban Life: Golf, 1936, Virtual Museum of Canada
Polo Spill, 1936
Public Dock, 1936
Venus and Adonis, 1936
Fidelma, 1937
Sailors and Floozies, 1938, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City
Pocahontas and John Smith, 1938, Port Washington Post Office
Two Boys on a Beach #1, 1938, D.C. Moore Gallery
Bathers, 1939
The Herrin Massacre, 1940, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio
The Aviator, 1941
Reflection, 1944
The Shower, 1943
Point O' View, 1945, Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts
Fences
Fantasia on a theme by Dr. S, 1946
The Inventor, 1946
What I Believe, 1947–1948, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas
Playground, 1948, Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, Georgia
The Architect, 1950
The Bath, 1951
Manikins, 1951
Finistere, 1952
Bar Italia, 1953
Mobile, 1953
Night in Bologna, 1958, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
Sunday Sun, 1958–1959
Apple Peeler, 1959
Le Ruban Dénoué: Hommage à Reynaldo Hahn, 1963, Columbus Museum of Art (Philip J. & Suzanne Schiller collection), Columbus, Ohio
Male Nude, 1966, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Missouri
The Haircut, 1986
Final Study for the House that Jack Built, 1987, D.C. Moore Gallery
Me: 1940–1990, 1990, D.C. Moore Gallery
Jon Reading NM248, 1992, D.C. Moore Gallery
Jon Extracting a Splinter NM255, 1993, D.C. Moore Gallery
Book Buff, 1994
Paul Cadmus, Selfportrait
Jon Andersson
Paperback: 760 pages
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform; 1 edition (July 1, 2014)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1500563323
ISBN-13: 978-1500563325
CreateSpace Store: https://www.createspace.com/4910282
Amazon (Paperback): http://www.amazon.com/dp/1500563323/?tag=elimyrevandra-20
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Days of Love chronicles more than 700 LGBT couples throughout history, spanning 2000 years from Alexander the Great to the most recent winner of a Lambda Literary Award. Many of the contemporary couples share their stories on how they met and fell in love, as well as photos from when they married or of their families. Included are professional portraits by Robert Giard and Stathis Orphanos, paintings by John Singer Sargent and Giovanni Boldini, and photographs by Frances Benjamin Johnson, Arnold Genthe, and Carl Van Vechten among others. “It's wonderful. Laying it out chronologically is inspired, offering a solid GLBT history. I kept learning things. I love the decision to include couples broken by death. It makes clear how important love is, as well as showing what people have been through. The layout and photos look terrific.” Christopher Bram “I couldn’t resist clicking through every page. I never realized the scope of the book would cover centuries! I know that it will be hugely validating to young, newly-emerging LGBT kids and be reassured that they really can have a secure, respected place in the world as their futures unfold.” Howard Cruse “This international history-and-photo book, featuring 100s of detailed bios of some of the most forward-moving gay persons in history, is sure to be one of those bestsellers that gay folk will enjoy for years to come as reference and research that is filled with facts and fun.” Jack Fritscher
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