Featured White Papers
Content provided in partnership with
Profiles: Paul Cadmus
Art Journal, Fall, 1998 by Richard Meyer
Statistics are notoriously unreliable markers of historical experience. Their claims to numerical objectivity, to bedrock truth, are ones we have come increasingly to distrust. There are times, however, when a statistic may reveal something else or something more: a snapshot of collective perception, a fragment of otherwise forgotten experience, a part of a history that has not been fully told. Consider the following as a case in point: Paul Cadmus has participated in thirty-seven Whitney Museum Annual and Biennial exhibitions of contemporary art, making him one of the most frequently exhibited artists in the history of that ongoing curatorial project.(1) Cadmus's repeated, indeed almost serial, inclusion in the Whitney's signature exhibitions of the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s marks both the centrality and the longevity of this artist's contribution to twentieth-century art. Until quite recently, however, Cadmus's achievement has been neglected, obscured, even denied outright by historians, critics, and curators of American art, including (paradoxically enough) the Whitney Museum, which declined to mount the artist's 1981 retrospective.
The neglect to which Cadmus has been subject in the past cannot be rectified by compensatory glorifications in the present - by casting the artist, as did one speaker at a recent symposium at Yale University, as a "modern day Michelangelo." Covering Cadmus in the cloak of greatness distorts his career no less dramatically than does dismissing it altogether.(2) Rather than frame the artist in terms of either failure or mastery, we might consider the challenge his work presents to conventional understandings of realism, satire, sexuality, and the "modern" with respect to modern American art.
Throughout his career, Cadmus has held artistic allegiances to the erotic idealization of the male body, to the painterly traditions and techniques of the Italian Renaissance, and to the pictorial protocols of social satire. Satire, as a form that "diminishes a subject by making it ridiculous and [by] evoking toward it attitudes of amusement, contempt, indignation, or scorn,"(3) would seem singularly ill-suited to the work of eroticization. Yet it was Cadmus's surprising dialectic of satire and the ideal - of denigration and delectation - that enabled him to depict homoeroticism as early as the 1930s, a time when it was virtually invisible within the public sphere of American painting and all but unspeakable within the official discourses of art criticism. Through the combination of seemingly incompatible pictorial modes, of the classical and the contemporary, of the carnal and the carnivalesque, Cadmus wrought an utterly original vision of the human body and the volatile forces of desire that swirl around it. It is this vision which the present essay seeks, however briefly, to consider.
Cadmus's conception of the human form, of its mass and musculature, its mobility and torsion, is inspired by Italian Renaissance artists such as Luca Signorelli, Andrea Mantegna, and Marcantonio Raimondi - artists who were themselves reclaiming the classical forms and themes of antiquity. Yet Cadmus's work is never a simple borrowing of Renaissance sources. Instead, it fuses Renaissance forms with contemporary satire, creating a pictorial dialogue between classicism and American vernacular culture.
The treatment of the foreground figure in Cadmus's Horseplay (1935) [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED], for example, is strongly reminiscent of Agostino Veneziano's Soldier Attaching His Breeches to His Breastplate (1517) [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]. In Cadmus's picture, as in the Venetian print, the muscular body of a young man, framed from behind, assumes a contrapposto stance. With their down-turned heads, cocked elbows, and twisting, spread-legged postures, both figures convey a sense of vigorous physicality and convincing athleticism. And in both prints, an act of personal grooming or dressing (the soldier putting on his armor, the young man toweling off) provides the narrative justification for the eroticized exposure of the male body. Yet, where Veneziano's soldier is frankly heroic, Cadmus's male nude is lightly comic. Where the Renaissance print looks back to antiquity, Cadmus's scene insists on the period details and contemporary props of 1930s America.(4) The half-buzzed haircut of the foreground figure in Horseplay, the shirt and trousers of the man seated behind him, the metal lockers of the changing room they inhabit, even the athletic towels they hold - these details attest to the modernity of the depicted moment. Cadmus "updated" the Renaissance by placing classical figures in twentieth-century clothing and contexts, in American locker rooms and city parks. As Lincoln Kitstein wrote of Cadmus's early work, "the heroic is mocked in its modernity."(5)
One problem with mocking modernity is that certain viewers (particularly those who wield official power) may not be amused. Recall, for example, the controversy surrounding Cadmus's 1934 painting of sailors on shore leave, The Fleet's In! [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 3 OMITTED]. Having been denounced by the Navy as a "disgraceful, drunken, sordid, disreputable brawl," the painting was confiscated by federal officials from the Corcoran Gallery of Art shortly before it was to go on display. The censorship of The Fleet's In! provoked a media sensation, with scores of newspapers and national news magazines running articles and editorials on the episode, many accompanied by reproductions of the work.(6) While the Navy had successfully removed The Fleet's In! from public exhibition, it had unwittingly insinuated the picture into the far more powerful flow of mass culture. As the July 1937 Esquire put it, "for every individual who might have seen the original at the Corcoran, at least one thousand saw it in black and white reproduction."(7)
