The Flight is on
· Paul Cadmus' The Aviator ·
I once saw an original Paul Cadmus drawing in a beach house on Cape Cod – the man knew muscles, and, for that matter, anything else of the male anatomy. When digging a bit deeper to write about him I came across the essay below by an art critic named Steve Jenkins. I could not find out much about the latter – it turns out there is a famous children’ books illustrator by that name, as is a famous musician who plays the bass, and many more….. but the writer sure loved his alliterations. And I quote: “In the gorgeous, occasionally garish, always gratifying works of the great American artist Paul Cadmus, sailors and sunbathers, models and mannequins, nitwits and nudes all are suffused with a sensuality born equally of idyllic splendor and urban squalor, natural grace and graceful artifice.” Or this: “Cadmus, to our enormous benefit, understands that beauty is bodies, brains, buttocks, bathtubs, bicycles, Bach, bravado and bad behaviour; beauty’s all things B”. Actually, his essay on Cadmus is sharp and instructive, flowery language notwithstanding, clearly worth a read.
http://www.queer-arts.org/archive/9809/cadmus/cadmus.html
The painter was – unintentionally as he claims in many interviews – early on depicting what we would now call gay life style. He also was not afraid of controversy and an honest assessment of American hypocrisy when it came to sexuality, our institutions, or the two combined. His most famous (and early controversial) painting was The Fleet is In, depicting highly sexualized scenes of sailors on leave. I chose his painting The Aviator
because it reminded me of the blond young man in my photograph. The latter might not be flying, but his hair is and his headband might just as well, given all the butterflies……
Below is a painting of a sailor by Bohumil Kubista one of the founders of modern Czech painting. (
If you google Eugène Carrière and click on images you’ll face an astonishing array of somewhat monochromatic brown/sepia/beige/black paintings. Lots of them, and all a little bit mysterious, glowing, or, as Wikipedia describes it, with a misty color scheme. I had first seen his famous portrait of Paul Verlaine at the Musée d’Orsay and then encountered the one below, of Alphonse Daudet, in some small museum in San Antonio, Tx.
( Music here:
Freud wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), “The present cultural state of America would give us a good opportunity for studying the damage to civilization which is thus to be feared.” His enduring nightmare, that America, with its notions of Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny, would be “gain[ing] control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man” was made real in 1945. In August of that year atomic bombs were deployed over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing over 100.000 people immediately, 10s of thousands through radiation exposure later, and devastated most of the attacked cities. Current talk of “Let’s make America great again!” hints at a willingness to repeat this kind of strategic annihilation, and one wonders if and what we’ve learned from history, if anything at all; it also makes Freud seem quite prescient.