Tag: jared french

Jared French

Jared French, “Lunchtime with Early Miners”, 1938, Mural in the Plymouth US Post Office Building in Pennsylvania, New Deal Public Works of Art Project

Nudity was to be avoided, and Treasury Department Section Director Edward Bruce was emphatic about this point. “Anybody who wanted to paint a nude ought to have his head examined!” he declared. Bruce’s officials were quick to advise artists to remove or tone down anything that might be deemed risqué. Once again, however, depictions of Native Americans proved to be an exception to the rule. Artists who specialized in figurative art could portray muscular, nearly naked Native Americans in poses deemed inappropriate for whites.

Jared French (1905–1987), an artist who devised an unusual pictorial language to explore human unconsciousness and its relation to sexuality, could not resist testing the boundaries. In 1937, he was working on two post office murals, one for Plymouth, Luzerne County, and the second for Richmond, Virginia. For the Richmond commission, he proposed depicting a group of Confederate soldiers in various states of undress preparing to cross a stream to flee advancing Union forces. The Section advised French that the figures must be clothed. “You have painted enough nudes in your life so that the painting of several more or less should not matter in your artistic career,” wrote a Section administrator. French capitulated on the Richmond mural—he wanted to be paid after all—but as a final jab at Rowan and the Section, he did manage to paint one more nude.

Before finishing the Plymouth mural, “Mealtime with the Early Coal Miners”, French inserted into the background a male figure piloting a barge, inexplicably unclothed. The nude pilot, like the union buttons of the railcar workers, went undetected by Treasury Department officials. The offending image appeared too small to be detected in the final eight-by-ten-inch photographs, and “Mealtime” became the only example of full-frontal nudity in a United States post office.

Note: For those interested in more information on Jared French, I recommend Emily Sachar’s “Jared French’s State Park: A Contextual Study”, which was submitted for his Master of Arts degree. It includes a chapter of French’s artistic circle of friends, including his freindship with Paul Cadmus, as well as several images of French’s most notable works. The article can be found at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1289&context=hc_sas_etds

Jared French

Top Image: Jared French, “Evasion”, 1947, Tempera on Canvas Mounted to Panel, 54.5 x 29.2 cm, Cleveland Museum of Art

Bottom Image: Jared French, “Learning”, 1946, Egg Tempera on Gesso Panel, 61.6 x 58.4 cm, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

French was well regarded during the 1940s and 1950s as one of the most accomplished and fascinating magic realist painters. A still understudied group of artists, the magic realists revived painstaking old master techniques to make convincing their enigmatic images that address a wide range of personal and social concerns. Part of a series of works French made to chronicle the human condition, “Evasion” symbolizes an individual’s attempt to deny the physical self. As such, the painting manifests tensions regarding sexual mores in mid 20th-century America. While it is reductive to attribute French’s iconographic interest in “Evasion” solely to his bisexuality, the fact remains that French was one of the first American artists whose same-sex desires were recognized and acknowledged by contemporaries who viewed his work.

Note: For those interested in more information on Jared French, I recommend Emily Sachar’s “Jared French’s State Park: A Contextual Study”, which was submitted for he Master of Arts degree. It includes a chapter of French’s artistic circle of friends, including his freindship with Paul Cadmus, as well as several images of French’s most notable works. The article can be found at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1289&context=hc_sas_etds

George Platt Lynes, “Jared French”

George Platt Lynes, “Jared French, August 1938”, 1938, Gelatin Silver PrintThe Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

George Platt Lynes took his first photographs as a young artist living in New York and Paris in the 1920s. He maintained an interest in the male figure throughout his career and was part of a close-knit group of artists, including Paul Cadmus, Jared French, Margaret French, and George Tooker, who explored sexuality and the body in an age that increasingly favored abstraction. 

The subject of this photograph, Jared French, was an important painter in the world of gay New York artists. French also served as the subject of Luigi Lucioni’s portrait as well as the model for Paul Cadmus’s “Gilding the Acrobats”, both of which are housed in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.