"Youth with Kite"

Click On Title To View A Larger Image

Click Here To View Additional Works by Paul Cadmus

(1941)

< Prev / Next >

"Youth with Kite" (1941) Etching on cream laid paper, 10 1/4" x 5 3/8"; 273x136mm.  Signed in pencil, from the 1941 edition of 75. With Midtown Galleries label and pencil annotation, bottom margin.  A very good impression [Davenport 46].

Paul Cadmus (1904-1999) was thrust into the national limelight and public notoriety in the 1930s, when his "The Fleet's In" was removed from a show of WPA art organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art.  He was the enfant terrible at the eye of a censorship storm and was severely castigated by public opinion for portraying uniformed American sailors carousing on shore leave. Thus began the public life of one of America's greatest artists

Amidst the controversy, Cadmus continued quietly working, aloof from prevailing art world issues, movements and controversies of the 20th century. In the 1940s, Cadmus embarked on a lifelong quest of perfecting the male nude as a very special visual endeavor by depicting the subject in a straightforward and non-sensational manner.  His male nudes are among the most beautiful created in the 20th century.  Never crude or shocking, Cadmus' male nudes focus in a classical manner on the beauty of the male body in a manner that emanates from the Renaissance and is axiomatic to the root of Western art.

"Youth with Kite" is in a Larson-Juhl 'Vermeer' burnished silver 27 1/8" x 21 3/4" frame.  The outer Monet Lily linen and inner loam colored rag mat are over a raised 8-ply rag mat and are acid and lignin free and protected with Acrylite-AR3 OP3 (UV) by CYRO...... $6,500.00