Tag: paul cadmus

George Platt Lynes: “José Martinez”

George Platt Lynes, “José ‘Pete’ Martinez”, 1937, Photo Shoot at Lynes’s Studio, Vintage Silver Prints, Private Collections

Born in Mexico in March of 1913, José Antonio Martinez-Berlanga was a ballet dancer who in the early 1940s danced with both the American Ballet Caravan and the Ballet Society, precursor ensembles of the New York City Ballet. 

José Martinez at a very young age moved with his family to Houston, Texas. After graduating high school, he relocated to New York City where he studied at the School of American Ballet founded in 1934 by Lincoln Kirstein, Edward Warburg and George Balanchine. Martinez eventually gained a full scholarship and, upon graduation, was invited to join The Ballet Caravan, a touring company founded by Lincoln Kirstein to provide off-season employment to American ballet dancers. Martinez gradually became involved with the group’s creative process and provided ideas and librettos for ballets. 

Martinez eventually began an intimate relationship with Lincoln Kirstein; they lived together in a Greenwich Village townhouse at St. Luke’s Place. After Kirstein married graphic artist Fidelma Cadmus, the younger sister of artist Paul Cadmus, Fidelma moved into the apartment for the first year of the marriage. This triangular romantic relationship was similar to that of their friends, Paul Cadmus, Jared French and his wife Margaret Hoening. 

José Martinez performed with the Ballet Caravan in the 1941 “Pastorela”, a one-act ballet choreographed by Lew Christensen and dancer José Fernandez, that toured Latin America with great reviews. The work included music by Paul Bowles and traditional songs orchestrated by Blas Galindo with words by Rafael Alvarez. Martinez tried in 1942 to enlist in the Army but was denied. He moved to Haverford, Pennsylvania and began work at a Jewish refugee hostel where writer Christopher Isherwood, whom he had met through Kirstein in 1939, was already employed. From Isherwood’s diaries, it is known that their relationship, except for one sexual encounter in August of 1942, was platonic. 

José Martinez and Christopher Isherwood traveled together several times to New York City to visit the Fidelma and Lincoln Kirstein. They both left Haverford in September of 1942 and went their separate ways. Their friendship, however, continued and they met several times in California and New York after the war years. Called up for service during the Second World War, Martinez was trained at Norfolk, Virginia, and served in the United State Army in northern France until 1945.

As a member of the Ballet Society, Martinez toured the United States with visits in both large and smaller cities. The Society’s repertoire was very different from those trained by Sergei Diaghilev, who founded the Ballets Russes. Martinez danced in the original cast of George Balanchine’s “Four Temperaments” in which he performed the first Theme with Beatrice Tompkins in the 1946 performance tour. He also originated and danced the role of the minister in dancer and choreographer William Dollar’s 1947 “Highland Fling”. 

In late 1947, José Martinez suffered a knee injury which forced an end to his performances. Hesitant about the next part of his life, he drifted for a year before beginning life as a dance teacher in Norfolk, Virginia. Over the next two decades, Martinez founded dance studios in Ohio and California where he continued to teach ballet until his retirement in the mid-1960s. José Martinez-Berlanga died at the Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, California on the twenty-fourth of June in 1997 at the age of eight-four. 

Notes: Paul Cadmus, Jared French and his wife Margaret Hoening would spend the summers from the late 1930s to the early 1950s on Fire Island where they painted and took photographs. This collaborative artistic endeavor became known as the PaJaMa collective, taken from the first two letters of their names. Artist George Tooker would later join the collective during the period of 1944 to 1949 when he was in a relationship with Paul Cadmus.

Many friends would often visit the group on Fire Island, among whom were ballet impresario Lincoln Kirstein, artist Bernard Perlin and photographer George Platt Lynes. Lynes became acquainted with José Martinez through this group of friends and would also photograph him. Although Martinez appeared in many of the pre-war photographs, Lynes’s studio portraits of Martinez wearing the straw hat are the best known. 

The Fire Island Pines Historical Preservation Society has an  article entitled “The Fire Island Muses of George Platt Lynes & the PaJaMa Collective” by Brian Ferrari on its site located at: https://www.pineshistory.org/the-archives/fire-island-muses

Top Insert Image: William Caskey, “José Martinez”, circa 1935-1955, Vintage Print

Second and Bottom Image: Photographers Unknown, “José Martinez”, circa 1935-1955, Vintage Prints, Fire Island Pines Historical Preservation Society

Paul Cadmus

Paul Cadmus, “Dancers Back Stage No. 1”, Date Unknown, Pastel and Charcoal on Gray Paper, 61 x 41.3 cm, Private Collection

The son of artists, illustrator Maria Latasa, of Basque and Cuban ancestry, and lithographer Egbert Cadmus, of Dutch ancestry, Paul Cadmus is widely known for his erotic and socially critical egg tempera paintings of social interactions in urban settings. His sister Fidelma Cadmus married Lincoln Kirstein, a New York impresario, philanthropist, and cofounder of the New York City Ballet. 

Throughout his career,  particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, Paul Cadmus produced many works on paper illustrating the subject of the dancer in the mediums of crayon, colored pencils, charcoal, and pastels . Most of these capture the dancer, not in the act of dance, but rather in the moment of rest, either before or after his practice and performance.

In 1965, Paul Cadmus met and began a thirty-five year relationship with former cabaret star Jon Farquhar Anderson, residing in Nantucket, Massachusetts until his death in 1999. Jon Anderson became Cadmus; muse and model for many of his works. Cadmus became close friends with many authors, artists and dancers including: novelist and playwright Christopher Isherwood, English-born poet Wystan Hugh Auden, New York City Ballet choreographer George Balanchine, photographer George Platt Lynes, painter George Tooker, and English fiction-writer and novelist Edward Morgan Forster.

Paul Cadmus

Paul Cadmus, “The Fleet’s In!”, 1934, Tempera on Canvas, 94 x 170 cm, Naval History and Heritage Command, U.S. Navy Art Collection

Paul Cadmus, “The Fleet’s In!”, 1934, Etching, 18.9 x 35.7 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Paul Cadmus’s work is imbued with the compositions of the Renaissance period, the firm and expressive lines of Jean-Auguste Ingres, and the sharp, figurative appearance of Magical Realism. However, Cadmus received his greatest influence from his lover and fellow painter Jared French, with whom he studied and traveled extensively. French instilled within Cadmus the traditions of the Old Masters that became a fundamental part of his work.

Cadmus is best known for his erotic depictions of nude male figures, charged with satire, social criticism, and a strongly idealized sexuality. He  first gained recognition for his 1934 Public Works of Art Project (WPA) tempera painting “The Fleet’s In!”, where the controversy of a group of sailors he pictured carousing among prostitutes and homosexuals inspired a public outcry. 

The tempera “The Fleet’s In!” was removed in 1934 from the WPA exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC before public viewing by order of the US Secretary of the Navy and transferred to the custody of the US Department of the Navy. it was not seen in a public exhibition until September of 1981, when it was shown, on loan, in a traveling Cadmus retrospective. Upon the retrospective’s end in July of 1982, the painting’s repository remained the US Navy’s Art Collection, which has continued the practice of loaning it to domestic and international museums.

For more extensive information on the censorship of Paul Cadmus’s paintings, please visit Anthony J. Morris’s dissertation entitled “The Censored Paintings of Paul Cadmus, 1934-1940: The Body as the Boundary Between the Decent and Obscene”, 2010, Department of Art History and Art, Case Western Reserve University. The dissertation can be found at:  

https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_file?accession=case1270569282&disposition=inline  

Paul Cadmus

Paul Cadmus, “Nude #1”, Nude #2, and “Nude #3”, Etchings, 1984

After traveling to Italy in the early 1930s, American artist Paul Cadmus became fascinated with Renaissance art, particularly the works of painters Luca Signorelli, known for his structure of the nude, and Andrea Mantegna, known for his strongly marked forms of design and the parallel hatching used to portray shadow.  Cadmus adopted certain Renaissance drawing techniques, especially when rendering male nudes.

Cadmus placed nudes like these in tight boxes, focusing on how the tension of the body conveys physical and emotional struggle. The lines in the background  imply a shifting momentum from left and right toward the center. Like Michelangelo, he rendered his nudes sculpturally, employing finely hatched lines to define their musculature and to create the effect of light reflecting on marble.

Paul Cadmus

Paul Cadmus, “Gilding the Acrobats”, c 1935, Pen and Ink, 24.8 x 13.3 cm, Private Collection

Paul Cadmus, “Gilding the Acrobats”. 1935, Tempera and Oil on Masonite, 93 x 47 cm., Metroopopitan Museum of Art, New York

Paul Cadmus is best known for his erotic depictions of nude male figures, charged with satire, social criticism, and a strongly idealized sexuality. Cadmus first gained recognition for his 1934 painting “The Fleet’s In”, where the controversy of a group of sailors he pictured carousing among prostitutes and homosexuals inspired a public outcry. Cadmus’s work is informed by themes of surrealism, compositions of the Renaissance era, the Neo-classical works of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres with their expressive distortions of form and space, and the sharp, figurative verisimilitude of Magical Realism.

However, Cadmus’s greatest influence was from fellow painter Jared French with whom he had a life-long relationship, studying and traveling extensively. French instilled within Cadmus the traditions of the old master painters such as an egg tempera technique that became an integral part of Cadmus’s process. French’s influence also furthered Cadmus’s drive to transcend these methods and define his own artistic legacy.

A renowned satirist, Cadmus was one of the most accomplished draftsmen of the twentieth century. Featuring a circus acrobat who, with help from two companions, covers his muscular body with gold radiator paint, “Gilding the Acrobats” reenacts literally the experience of painting the figure with thinly veiled homoeroticism. In an era when homosexual behavior was criminalized and homoerotic imagery was intensely policed, Gay artists like Cadmus and Richmond Barthé turned frequently to circus performers and athletes as the few socially permissible subjects that offered the opportunity to lavish attention on the male body.

For more extensive information on the censorship of Paul Cadmus’s paintings, please visit Anthony J. Morris’s dissertation entitled “The Censored Paintings of Paul Cadmus, 1934-1940: The Body as the Boundary Between the Decent and Obscene”, 2010, Department of Art History and Art, Case Western Reserve University. The dissertation can be found at:

https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_file?accession=case1270569282&disposition=inline 

Paul Cadmus

Paul Cadmus, “Architect”, 1950, Tempera on Panel, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut

Paul Cadmus has participated in thirty-seven Whitney Museum Annual and Biennial exhibitions of contemporary art, making him one of the most frequently exhibited artists in the history of that ongoing curatorial project. Cadmus’s repeated, indeed almost serial, inclusion in the Whitney’s signature exhibitions of the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s marks both the centrality and the longevity of this artist’s contribution to twentieth-century art.

The “Architect” was exhibited at the 1950 Whitney Annual. The model in the painting was Charles “Chuck” Howard.

Paul Cadmus and Truman Capote

Paul Cadmus, “Playground”, 1948, Egg Tempera on Panel, 59.7 x 44.5 cm, Georgia Museum of Art

Paul Cadmus remembered Capote at an outdoor café in Venice shortly after the war. “Truman lifted his cape up and down, up and down, and said, “Come to Taormina! Come to Taormina!”“ Cadmus recalled. The painter took Capote’s advice and met him at the Italian resort. One day Capote returned from the post office with the mail. “I bring tidings of disaster!” he shouted. “Tennessee’s play is a great success!” “I always liked Truman”, said Cadmus. “He didn’t give a damn what people thought of his voice or anything else. Brave little thing”.

Paul Cadmus

Paul Cadmus (American, “Jerry”, Oil on Canvas, 1931. Toledo Museum of Art, Gallery 6

In this frank and intimate portrait, painter Jared French gazes candidly out at the viewer. Completed while Paul Cadmus and French were traveling together, specifically shortly after their arrival in Europe in 1931, “Jerry” represents Cadmus’s move toward the techniques and style for which he is best known. Indeed, Cadmus considered this painting his first mature work as an artist.  At the time “Jerry” was painted, French and Cadmus were lovers, and the two would maintain a relationship and friendship that lasted the rest of their lives, even after French married in 1937.

“Jerry” does not include the social or political commentary or satire present in other Cadmus paintings; instead, and very unusually for the artist, it reveals an intimacy and emotional depth that can feel startling in its unequivocal directness.  While the painting may lack overt social commentary, the decision to depict French holding a copy of “ulysses” by James Joyce was by no means an innocent one. From its publication in 1922, the book was controversial, inciting scrutiny ranging from early obscenity trials to protracted textual battles. Now considered one of the most important works of modernist literature, in 1931 the book would have symbolized everything these young American expatriates considered desirably European and avant-garde.

This work is currently on view in Gallery 6 at the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio.

Paul Cadmus

Paul Cadmus, “Stone Blossom: A Conversation Piece”, 1939-40, Oil and Tempera on Lnen on Pressed Wood Panel

Cadmus was a slow, meticulous worker who favored the complicated, time-consuming medium of egg tempera. He finished an average of only two paintings a year. He was more prolific in other media, including drawing, printmaking and photography. Although Cadmus stopped painting toward the end of his life, he continued to draw at his home in Weston, Connecticut, particularly portraits and figure studies of his partner Jon Andersson. Paul Cadmus died in his home in Weston in 1999, just five days short of his 95th birthday.

“Stone Blossom: A Conversation Piece” is signed and inscribed with title and dated lower center in the New York Times newspaper on the ground. The group portrait from left to right consists of the Curator of Exhibitions and Editor of Publications at MOMA Monroe Wheeler, the novelist Glenway Wescott, Hollywood photographer George Platt Lynes, and Paul Levitt pictured mowing the lawn.