Born On This Day... Paul Cadmus

My favorite book of 2010 is not a novel, a collection of essays, or a memoir, but rather the catalogue for unprecidented exhibit at The Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, now showing through Februaury 2011. Hide/Seek: Difference & Desire in American Portraiture, surveys the presence of same-sex desire in American portraiture through a seductive selection of more than 140 full-color illustrations, drawings, & portraits from leading American artists. Starting at the end of the turn of 19th century, to Stonewall & the gay liberation movement in 1969, the tragedies of the AIDS epidemic, & on to to the new century, Hide/Seek openly considers what has long been suppressed & ignored, even by the most progressive members of our society: the influence of gay & lesbian artists in creating important American modern art.

Hide/Seek shows how questions of gender and sexual identity dramatically shaped the artistic practices of influential American artists  Thomas Eakins, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe,  Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andrew Wyeth, Paul Cadmus, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Robert Mapplethorpe, & many of my other favorites & introductions to artists unfamiliar to me. Gay artists were frequently not fully a part of the society they portrayed, often occupying a place on the outskirts, & from that vantage point they crafted innovative & revolutionary ways of doing portraits.

One of the artists featured is Paul Cadmus, a long time favorite artist of the Husband & mine. We have a “coffee table” book of his work that has had a great deal of attention & perusing. We have been thrilled at seeing many of his works in museums. I am hard pressed to choose a favorite.

Paul Cadmus' life spanned the 20th century, beginning with his birth on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in 1904, & ending, after taking his daily walk down his country road, & getting into bed with his partner of 35 years- singer Jon Anderson, where he died peacefully in his sleep, with no apparent illness, on December 12, 1999, 5 days before his 95th birthday & 11 days after 300 friends had gathered to celebrate. In between, his combination of meticulousness, classicism, & exuberance made him one of America's greatest artists--a "magic realist" in more ways than one. In the 1920s, he traveled through Europe with his lover- painter Jared Smith. When they returned to Manhattan, they formed an informal group of gay artists including photographer George Platt Lynnes, for whom Camus was a frequent model, & Lincoln Kirstein, who founded New York City Ballet.

He became an unlikely cause celebre in 1934, when the U.S. Navy went berserk over The Fleet's In! a truly glorious epic scene of uniformed sailors that included prostitutes & a homosexual pickup, & led Secretary of the Navy-Henry Latrobe Roosevelt to remove it from a WPA showing. Because of that controversy, his first show, at Corcoran Galleries in Manhattan, attracted more than 7,000 visitors. "I owe that admiral a very large sum," Cadmus remarked 6 decades later. 
 
 

The Fleet's In! (1934)

 
With a beautiful posture, a life long lovely full head of hair & piercing blue eyes, Camus was as luminous as his paintings. From everything I have read about Camus, he sincerely cared about other people, which may sound like a small thing, but is actually quite rare among artists of his caliber. "He had a remarkable memory," says openly gay Josef Asteinza, an architect who lived down the road from Cadmus in Connecticut. "We brought scores of people there & he always enjoyed meeting them & he never forgot a name. Edith Sitwell said, `A gentleman is never unintentionally rude,' but Paul said, `I don't think a gentleman should ever be rude under any circumstances.” I can’t help but wonder how amazing it would have been to have been a member of his circle.
 
 

Jon Anderson, his last partner

 

The handsome artist in the late 1990s

 
Some things never change. A full month into the exhibition of Hide/Seek, one video, by the late David Wojnarowicz, was removed from the exhibit. Crazy Conservative Christians called the video, with ants crawling over a crucified, bleeding man, sacrilegious. It’s meant to symbolize the suffering of AIDS, the disease that eventually claimed the artist.



The Portrait Gallery Spokesperson Bethany Bentley: "The video is being removed because the publicity is distracting from the themes of the exhibition. We wanted the larger themes to be able to stay in place. "Nothing else will be removed from the exhibition." Asked if that would still hold even if somebody has an objection over another piece of art, Bentley replied, "Nope, this is it."