Paul Cadmus: The Male Nude [Hardcover]

Justin Spring (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 9, 2002

One of the most accomplished artists of the twentieth century, Paul Cadmus is best known for his provocative satires of American life. He first gained national recognition in 1934 when his bawdy painting The Fleet's In! was barred from a Public Works of Art exhibition in Washington, D.C. For more than six decades following, Cadmus led a career as a meticulous craftsman devoted to Renaissance-era traditions of figurative realism. But his drawings of the male nude, which always formed the heart of his work, were often overlooked.

Here for the first time in one volume are seventy of Cadmus's most stunning tributes to the male form. Cadmus continued to produce these works up until his death at age ninety-four, and this volume includes many drawings that have never been seen before. The artist's most frequent model was his lifelong partner Jon Anderson, and the drawings offer up not just an elegant fluency and technical virtuosity but also a tender emotional resonance. Introducing each era of the artist's career is an illustrated essay by respected critic and writer Justin Spring, placing Cadmus in the context of the rich history of the male nude.

Paul Cadmus reminds us-- poignantly, eloquently, humbly-- of the sincere beauty of the male form and of humanity itself with each masterful rendering. As Guy Davenport wrote in The Drawings of Paul Cadmus, "His drawings of male nudes are of bodies, but of achieved, perfected bodies that serve as symbols, as in ancient Greece, of a perfect unity of spirit and flesh, mind and body. For Cadmus the body is the person."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Coming off the success of Fairfield Porter: A Life in Art, a wonderfully judicious biography of the iconoclastic mid-20th century figurative painter, Spring, a critic and journalist, returns to introduce six decades of determined realist Cadmus’s Apollonian drawings, comprising a recent exhibition at New York’s DC Moore gallery. Cadmus, who died in 1999 at 94, studied academic drawing beginning at age 15, and Spring convincingly links him to artists ranging from Carracci and Ingres to Alta-Tadema, Eakins and Cadmus’s contemporary and lover Jared French. In a biographical narrative drawing on Cadmus’s letters, artist’s statements and unpublished interviews, Spring does an excellent job in delineating the context Cadmus created for himself, as an artist not so much opposed to the abstraction dominant for most of his career as indifferent to it. The 70 drawings here—done in chalk, crayon, pencil and watercolor, pencil and charcoal, and egg tempera, and often on hand-toned paper—speak for themselves: their lines are classically confident and fluid in a way that acknowledges but does not seek to stress the figures’ homoerotic allure, and their depiction of well-sculpted men in a variety of poses reveals a variety of affects, from contemplative to fearful to exultant. Many of the post-1962 drawings feature Cadmus’s life partner Jon Anderson, whose gaze at the viewer in a 1967 drawing is even and open. Spring’s care and feeling in presenting the drawings for the first time as a coherent body of work (apart from Cadmus’s paintings) will make this book attractive to anyone with an interest in 20th century art and culture. 120 illustrations, 70 in full color.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Abstraction gets the most ink whenever modern art is the subject, but surely another vital modernist development was the revival of the male nude. Paul Cadmus (1904-99), saw men's bodies erotically, for he was an uncloseted, though very private, homosexual. Still, his male nudes, mostly in his drawings, aren't pornographic. In them eroticism appears as affection and delight--attitudes informed by Cadmus' lifelong admiration for the sculptural nudes of Renaissance art, whose sinuous postures and musculature he emulated. Spring's marvelously fluent, biographically organized discussion of Cadmus' nude drawings argues that they are his best work. Given the satire and didacticism of Cadmus' better-known, painstakingly executed, brilliantly colorful egg-tempera paintings, which one associate characterized as "statements," and also the technical brio yet loving delicacy of texture of the drawings, Spring carries the day on this point. Surely Cadmus' highly traditional nudes are also modern because of their eroticism and, perhaps, timelessness, because of their tenderness and wonder. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: Universe (November 9, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0789305895
• ISBN-13: 978-0789305893
• Product Dimensions: 10.8 x 1 x 11.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,012,707 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Justin Spring is a New York based writer specializing in twentieth-century American art and culture. His biography SECRET HISTORIAN is a 2010 New York Times Notable Book of the Year, a 2010 National Book Award Finalist, an Amazon Top 10 Biography of the Year, an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book for 2011,winner of the 2011 Lamda Literary Award in Biography; the winner of the 2011 Randy Shilts Prize in Non-Fiction from the Publishing Triangle; and winner of the 2011 Geoff Mains Non-Fiction Prize of the National Leather Association. It is also an ARTFORUM Top 10 of 2010 pick and a Top 10 Book of the Year for 2010 in the San Francisco Chronicle.

For a full review of SECRET HISTORIAN by Mark Harris in the New York Times Book Review:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/books/review/Harris-t.html?_r=1&ref=bookreviews

For a feature on Justin Spring's discovery of the Steward Archive, by Patti Cohen in the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/books/26secret.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Justin%20Spring&st=cse

For a slide show in the New York Times about the Steward Archive:
www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/.../20100726-secret.html

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An artist in step with a better time, January 1, 2003

By 

Charles S. Houser (Binghamton, NY) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Paul Cadmus: The Male Nude (Hardcover)

This book is a treasure for any Cadmus fan. While Lincoln Kirstein's 1992 monograph includes reproductions of all of Cadmus's major paintings, it only has a dozen or so of his figurative drawings. Justin Spring's book more than makes up for this lack (it has 67 color plates). The fact that he does so by taking on the seemingly narrow focus of male nudes is truly appropriate. While the paintings are often highly active, heavily detailed social satires with not-so-subtle homoerotic elements, the drawings are calmer, context-free, more admiring meditations on the male form. They are clearly the work of an attentive observer and a disciplined draughtsman. When the art world was going ga-ga over abstract expressionism and slap-dash gestural drawing, Cadmus was painstakingly working in virtual isolation. And though a number of sketches are included in this volume, it is the finished drawing that most interested Cadmus. Reginald Marsh, Jared French, Pierro dela Francesca, Michaelangelo, Signorelli, and Ingres were his dominent influences. Along with ballet photographer George Platt Lynes. And from writer E.M. Forster he acquired a philosophic outlook that would guide him both as an artist and as a man: "tolerance, good temper and sympathy--they are what matter...if the human race is not to collapse."

Spring's five essays (Introduction, Beginnings, Development, Maturity, Conclusion) provide everything you need to know to fully appreciate the plates. He addresses Cadmus's homosexuality directly and without sensation and discusses Cadmus's well-reasoned reluctance to be associated with more blatantly sexual gay art (including his refusal to have one of his works reproduced in a biography of Tom of Finland, an admirer of Cadmus). Spring also identifies the models for many of the drawings; this is significant because Cadmus considered his drawings to be a collaboration between himself and his models. Cadmus's life partner Jon Anderson was his frequent subject from the late 60s until the artist's death, and it is fascinating to see how Anderson's body changed over time; the model clearly never lost his sense of comfort and ease modeling nude.

Not revisionist history, just a long overdue update on a neglected but significant American artist of the 20th century. Universe Publishing (a division of Rizzoli International Publications) is to be commended on the design and quality of this book.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful and sensual, September 9, 2005

By 

Rebecca Huston "telynor" (On the Banks of the Hudson) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Paul Cadmus: The Male Nude (Hardcover)

I only discovered about Paul Cadmus a little bit ago, but was simply blown away by his style and art. This book is a wonderful introduction to the life and art of one of the twentieth century's quietest artists who remained active to the very end of his long life, and managed to cross both gender and sexual barriers to breathe new life into what most of us would regard as a dry subject -- namely, art. Here Cadmus' love for, and vigor, show through in more than seventy drawings, many of them of his life partner and lover, Jon Anderson. Techinically brilliant, they are also sensitive without being overtly erotic -- enough so that I wouldn't mind hanging any of the artist's prints in my own home. Both lovers of art and artists will like this one, the reproductions are crisp enough that Cadmus' style of crosshatching and use of charcoal and chalk will both inspire and bring enjoyment. Recommended.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Incredible collection of work, January 5, 2007

By 

T. Fox "tfox" (Mooresville, NC USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Paul Cadmus: The Male Nude (Hardcover)

Excellent resource for figure drawing, beautiful images, full page in most cases, wonderful information on the artist Cadmus, would recommend to anyone interested in drawing, figure drawing, or art in general!