?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 200,000 - $ 300,000
PAUL CADMUS Venus and Adonis.
Egg tempra and oil on canvas on pressed wood board, 1936. 725x825 mm; 28 1/2x32 1/2 inches. Signed in oil, lower left recto.
Cadmus loosely based the composition of this work on the Peter Paul Rubens oil on canvas of the same subject, circa 1635-1640, now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Though Cadmus set the scene in a classical landscape, his Adonis is rushing to play tennis, clutching the racket in his right hand and two ballis in his left, while fending off his clinging Venus and a bawling baby, a microcosm of 1930s suburban life under the guise of a subject from antiquity.
Sold Christie's, New York, with the label on the frame back; Midtown Galleries, New York, 1974; Forbes Collection, New York.
Exhibited Indianapolis Museum, 1937; Museum of Modern Art, Paris, 1938; Springfield Museum, Springfield, Massachusetts, 1938; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, 1939; Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts, 1939; "Biennial," Richmond, Virginia, 1940; "Golden Gate International Exposition," San Francisco, California, 1940, number 1289; "Cadmus," Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, July-September, 1942; Metroplitan Museum of Art, New York, April 1941; "South American Traveling Exhibition," Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1941-1942, reproduced; "Traveling Group Show," Midtown Galleries, New York, 1951-1952; Philbrook Art Center, Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1969; "Tennis In Art," Fidelity Bank, Boston, Massachusetts, 1970; "Tennis In Art II," Provident National Bank, 1971; "Three Figurative Painters," Midtown Galleries, New York, 1971; "Collector's Exhibition," Akron Art Institute, Ohio, 1973; "Summer Group Exhibition," Midtown Galleries, New York, 1974; "Ranger Fund Exhibition," National Academy of Design, New York, 1974; "An Unfulfilled Dream: The Neglected Generation of American Scene Painters," Wichita Art Museum, Kansas, March-June, 1981; "Paul Cadmus: Yesterday and Today," Miami University Art Museum, Oxford, Ohio, September 12-October 25, 1981; Edwin A. Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University, Kansas, November 11-December 20, 1981; Gibbes Art Gallery, Charleston, South Carolina, January 16-February 28, 1982; William Benton Museum of Art, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut, March 20-May 2, 1982; Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, New York, May 20-July 11, 1982, number 19, reproduced; "Paul Cadmus: A Birthday Celebration", National Academy of Design, New York, December 3, 1994-February 19, 1995; "Paul Cadmus: The Sailor Trilogy," Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, June 1-September 1, 1996, page 5, reproduced; "From Allegory To The Portrait: Changing Faces," Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor, New York, September 21, 1997-January 4, 1998, reproduced, page 86; "In the Face of Abstraction," Forbes Magazine Galleries, New York, August 20-November 4, 1998, number 24; "Men Without Women: Paul Cadmus as Curator," National Academy of Design, New York, May 5-August 29, 1999.
Published in Harry Salpeter, "Paul Cadmus: Enfant Terrible," Esquire, July 1937, page 112, reproduced in color, page 106; Springfield Union Republican, 1942, reproduced; "Cadmus' Tars Under Fire at San Francisco Fair," Newsweek, August 19, 1940; Lincoln Kirstein, Paul Cadmus, San Francisco, 1991, reproduced page 133; Philip Eliasoph, Paul Cadmus, Catalogue Raisonnè Paintings 1931-1977, number 30; Bernard Hanson, "A Fresh Consideration of Cadmus," The Hartford Courant, April 18, 1982; William L. Vance, America's Rome, New Haven and London, 1989, reproduced page 385; Grace Glueck, "Paul Cadmus, a Mapplethorpe for His Times," The New York Times, June 7, 1996.
