American Artist Paul Cadmus

 American Artist Paul Cadmus (17.12.1904-1999)

At the age of 14, Cadmus enrolled in art courses at the National Academy of Design, where his parents had once met. His parents approved of his son's action, and Paul dropped out of high school to devote himself entirely to studying painting and enter the Academy.

Most of all, the future artist was inspired by the art of the Italian Renaissance, he studied with interest the technique and basic principles of depicting the human figure. He “stuffed his hand” with numerous sketches, studied the work of Italian painters, for example, Michelangelo, Mantegna and Piero della Franceschi. Subsequently, this will allow the artist to be called a magnificent draftsman, and interest in the naked body was born, apparently, just then.

After graduating from the Academy in 1926, Paul got a job as a freelance illustrator for a newspaper and continued his studies at the Student League in New York, where he studied for two years.

In the League, Cadmus met and became friends with fellow student, the artist Jared French (Jared Blandford French, 1905 - January 15, 1988). Prior to that, Jared managed to get a Bachelor of Arts degree from Amherst College, from which he graduated in 1925. French became the first lover of Cadmus, their love affair lasted almost ten years.

In 1930, Cadmus got tired of being a freelancer (from the English freelancer - a free spearman, in a figurative meaning - a free artist, that is, a person who does work without concluding a long-term contract with an employer) and got a well-paid job as a layout artist in a small advertising agency ... But his friend and beloved French constantly convinced Paul that it is not worth doing commercial art, you need to declare your talent with the help of "serious painting."

As a result, Jared convinced Paul, who in the fall of 1931 quit his job at an advertising agency and decided to become a professional artist. In the same year 1931, friends went to Europe.

Initially, Paul and Jared went to France in an oil tanker. In Chartres, they bought bicycles, organized a cyclocross to Paris, and then traveled around France and Spain in the same way, visiting museums and churches.

In addition to the recreational part of the trip, Paul studied the historical and artistic traditions of France and continued to hone his own style.

In the end, the artists decided to rent cheap accommodation somewhere and paint all day.

Cadmus and French settled in Mallorca, one of the Balearic Islands off the coast of Spain, in the fishing town of Puerto de Andratx, and lived there for almost two years until the money ran out.

Cadmus later said in an interview that “I actually painted very little of Mallorca. Most of my paintings were subjects that I remembered from America. " In Mallorca, the artist painted the pictures “YMCA Locker Room”, “Shore Leave”, “Sailors Night”.

After living in Mallorca for a year, Paul and Jared again went to “hang out” in Europe - they visited Germany, Austria and Italy, and then returned to Mallorca.

In 1933, friends-lovers ran out of money, and there was nothing to pay even for housing. Paul complained about this in a letter to his sister, and Fidelma sent him a flyer for the government's Public Art Works Project, in which it was possible to earn a penny. In October, Cadmus returned to New York, applied for and got a job on this PWAP in December. Later, the PWAP Project entered the federal agency Works Progress Administration (WPA), whose goal was to reduce the huge unemployment in the country by providing job seekers with the right jobs in government-funded projects. WPA workers built roads and other infrastructure, but the agency also hired artists and writers for various cultural programs.

When the artist returned to America, the country was in the midst of an economic crisis.

Finding any job was very difficult, so Cadmus was glad to get even this job for $ 32 a week.

In 1937, Cadmus signed a contract with the prestigious Midtown Gallery on Madison Avenue in New York, in the same year the artist's first solo exhibition was held in this gallery, which was attended by seven thousand people.

1937 was also significant for Cadmus personally. The thing is that his friend, colleague and lover Jared French ... got married. The artist Marguerite Hening became his chosen one.

French moved out of Paul's apartment, but continued to share the studio with him in Greenwich Village, communicate and be friends. During this period, French also worked on numerous WPA commissions for frescoing public buildings, more successfully than his friend Paul.

Moreover, the three of them spent the next eight years regularly spending their summers on the Island of Fire, one of the remote islands adjacent to the southern coast of Long Island, where, fascinated by photography, they organized a photo collective called PAJAMA (their abbreviation is Paul, Jared , and Margaret).

In 1938, French and Cadmus posed for a series of photographs with renowned photographer George Platt Lines (1907-1955). These photographs were not published or exhibited while Lynes was alive, and show the close relationship between the two.

French died in Rome in 1988.

In a large interview that Paul Cadmus gave in 1988 to the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution, he said that after 50 years of creativity he feels happy, although he never achieved great fame or critical acclaim.

Cadus also quoted the words of one of his favorite artists, the French classic Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres: “People say that my paintings are not suitable for this time. Perhaps they are wrong, and I am the only one who keeps up with the times. "