Paul Cadmus (1904-1999)
Paul Cadmus 1937
American painter Paul Cadmus is best known for the satiric innocence of his frequently censored paintings of burly men in skin-tight clothes and curvaceous women in provocative poses, but he also created works that celebrate same-sex domesticity.
Born in New York City on December 17, 1904 into a family of commercial artists, Cadmus studied at the National Academy of Design and the Arts Students League. He lived in Europe from 1931 to 1933, where he traveled with artist Jared French and where he produced his first mature canvases.
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In the 1930s, Cadmus became the center of a circle of gay men who were prominent within the arts in New York City. This circle included his brother-in-law, Lincoln Kirstein, who helped found the American School of Ballet, and the photographer George Platt Lynes, for whom Cadmus frequently modeled.
Along with fellow painters Bernard Perlin, Jared French, and George Tooker, Cadmus became known as a “Magical Realist,” though none of the artists truly accepted the term.
In Cadmus’s paintings, significant exchanges of glances signal sexual longing and availability, often in the very midst of mundane activities. His work documents the surreptitious cruising rituals of an urban, gay male subculture in the 1930s.
In 1999 he died in his home in Weston, Connecticut due to advanced age, just five days short of his 95th birthday.
You sense it would have been interesting to know this man.
