Paul Cadmus: The Male Nude
October 10 through November 9, 2002

This major exhibition presents a comprehensive overview of drawings dating from the 1950s to the 1990s and is the largest exhibition to date of Paul Cadmus's (1904-1999) male nude drawings. Included are a number of important and rarely seen examples from private collections.

The exhibition coincides with the October, 2002 publication of the Rizzoli/Universe hardcover monograph Paul Cadmus: The Male Nude. The 176 page book features an essay by critic and writer Justin Spring which details the full significance of Cadmus's male nude drawings through an examination of the influences that shaped them, the context in which they were created, and the life story of the artist. The exhibition and monograph mark the first time that Paul Cadmus's male nude drawings have been examined as a distinct body of work.

Lavishly executed in colored chalk and crayon on hand-toned papers, Cadmus's male nudes are among the most beautiful drawings created in the twentieth century. As Justin Spring explains, "In an age of sensation, Cadmus suggests an alternative to crude or shocking images of male nudity. In essence, a return to finer and simpler sources of delight, a return to the beauty of the body as experienced through the transformative act of drawing. By working in a medium that connects his artistic practice in the twentieth century directly to that of the Renaissance, Cadmus reminds us that a very similar loving appreciation of the male form by male artists lies at the very heart of the Western visual-arts tradition."

As a young artist, Paul Cadmus was catapulted to national recognition and notoriety during the 1930s, when his painting The Fleet's In! was removed from a show of WPA art organized by the newly founded Whitney Museum of American Art. The controversy overshadowed much of Cadmus's career but the artist continued to work quietly, in his own way, remaining outside of much of the prevailing art-world issues, movements and controversies of the latter half of the 20th century.

Beginning in the early 1940s, Cadmus began to create drawings expressly intended as finished works of art. Though he had executed drawings in pencil or pen and ink during the 1930s, around 1943 he introduced greater visual and technical variety into his drawings through the use of hand-toned papers, colored crayons, chalk, silverpoint, and casein. From this time on, Cadmus devoted the majority of his art-making time to drawing, and the vast majority of his drawings were male nudes. This work culminated with the series depicting model Jon Anderson that was started in 1965 and had expanded to over 270 works by the time of Cadmus's death in 1999.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Cadmus did not consider the sketch to be the highest form of drawing. Instead he preferred the finished drawing, feeling that it expressed the full articulation of the artist's intention. Cadmus believed that a good drawing needed to be a fully resolved work, one which, like a novel, poem or musical composition, was worthy of consideration only in its final, perfected state. Over time, the poses of his nudes increased in complexity, creating challenges to the artist's vision and skill in rendering problems of foreshortening, an extraordinary variety of angles, and the development of form and mass on a flat surface.

The monograph "Paul Cadmus: The Male Nude" by Justin Spring can be purchased from DC Moore Gallery for $49.95 plus $8.00 shipping and handling. (New York State residents add 8.25% sales tax). Send check or money order ONLY (payable to DC Moore Gallery).