?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 18,000 - $ 22,000
PAUL CADMUS Male Nude, NM 276.
Color crayons on pale bluish gray paper toned with old rose acrylic, 1996. 330x520 mm; 13x20 1/2 inches. Signed and inscribed "NM 276" in white crayon, lower right recto.
Ex-collection the artist's estate; Jon F. Anderson and Philis Raskind-Anderson, Connecticut.
Exhibited "Collector's Show and Sale," The Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock, November 21, 1997-January 4, 1998; and "Paul Cadmus and His Muse," DC Moore Gallery, New York, April 14-May 14, 2005.
Cadmus was in his early 90s when he made this series. One of his last, the evolution of his career culminates here as a master draftsman of the human form, specifically males. Paul's opinion was not that men were more beautiful than women, but that men were more vain and knew how to pose better for longer. The Male Nude, NM series were of his long time lover, Jon Anderson, 32 years younger, whom he met in Nantucket in 1965, "NM" standing for "Nantucket Man."
"From 1965 onward, Paul Cadmus, in collaboration with Jon Anderson, explored all aspects of the male nude, combining a reserved but blissful eroticism with formal explorations of torsion and foreshortening in the context of innovative, often witty composition," observes Justin Spring in his book Paul Cadmus: The Male Nude. "One of the most delightful aspects of the Anderson drawings is their variety. Cadmus was continually exploring and innovating even as he strove for formal perfection through his repeated drawings of the same model." Cadmus and Anderson stayed lovers for the rest of Cadmus' life, when he died in their home of 25 years together of old age, 5 days shy of his 95th birthday.
