David Graham - Almost Paradise

 Benson, Arizona, 2002

David Graham was born in 1952 in Abington, Pennsylvania.  He received a BA from The University of the Arts in Philadelphia and his MFA in Photography from the Tyler School of Art. He has taught at Moore College of Art and is currently on the faculty at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Graham has published several books of his work including Taking Liberties, Ay, Cuba!, Alone Together, as well as American Beauty and Land of the Free, which were published by Aperture, and most recently Almost Paradise  published by Pond Press.  His work has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, The New Yorker, and The Philadelphia Inquirer.  His work has been collected by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Biblioteque Nationale in Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Tirelessly traveling the United States, Graham captures the colorful, sometimes surreal, and often bizarre, in the thoroughly American landscape. You can visit his personal website here.  

 Route 64, West of Route 89, Arizona, 1986

 Bonneville, Salt Flats, Utah, 1992

 Yosemite National Park, CA, 1999

 South of Osh Kosh, Wisconsin, 2003

 Westley, California, 2003

 Golden Meadow, Louisiana, 2006

 Gulfport, Mississippi (Pawn Shop), 2006

 Stanislaus County, CA, 2003

 Hallam, Pennsylvania, 1995

 Little Pete, Gibsonton, Florida, 1993

 West Quincy, Missouri, 1993

 Music Store, North of Quakertown, Pennsylvania, 1991

 Grants, New Mexico, 1989

 Post Bulletins Practicing at Graham Park, Rochester, Minnesota, 1988

 Matthew Demo, Eldridge, New York, 1985

 Omaha, Nebraska, 2006

 Pass Christian, Mississippi, 2006

 Studio City, California, 2006

 Waveland, Mississippi, 2006

 National Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame, Hayward, Wisconsin, 1984

 Linden, California, 2003

 P-Star Parking, Dallas, Texas, 1997

 Glen Avon, California, 1995

 Paradise, Pennsylvania, 2005

 Viejas, California, 2005

George Tooker

George Tooker, Self-Portrait, 1947

George Tooker was born August 5, 1920, in Brooklyn, New York. He was the first child of a Cuban-American mother and a father who was a bond broker. The trajectory of his life began to manifest itself from the age of seven, when he began taking painting lessons from Malcolm Fraser, a family friend whose oeuvre was in the Barbizon tradition. Tooker began high school in Bellport, Long Island; however, his parents weren't much impressed with the quality of the school, and he spent his last two years at the more rigorously academic Phillips Academy, in Andover, north of Boston. He developed an intense dislike of the straight-laced school, with its orientation toward business and finance, and its concern that its students learn to hide their emotions. Tooker gravited instead toward the school's art studio, where he worked at landscape drawing and watercolors. By virtue of its location, Andover did furnish some additional, if unintended education: Tooker became aware of effects of the Depression on the mill towns north of Andover. He was angered by the sharp contrast between the comfortable lifestyle of the children of the economic elite who attended the academy, and the many unemployed.

George Tooker, The Artist’s Daughter, 1955

After graduation from Phillips in 1938, Tooker went on to Harvard, where he majored in English literature, that having been the only academic subject of interest to him at Phillips. Yet he spent much of his time at the Fogg Art Museum, and in the towns surrounding Boston, where he made watercolor sketches of the urban and rural landscapes. He also took up with some radical political organizations. It was during this time that he first became interested in the potential of art as a tool for social justice. Especially inspirational was the work of Mexican painters like David Alfaro Siqueiros and Jose Clemente Orozco.

George Tooker, Coney Island, 1947

Graduating from Harvard in 1942, Tooker decided to pursue his long-standing desire to study art. Securing his parent's support, he enrolled in the Art Students League in New York. Here he studied for two years with Reginald Marsh, Kenneth Hayes Miller (who also taught Edward Hopper), and Harry Sternberg. From the standpoint of influence, it cannot be entirely coincidental that all three of these artists were men of social conscience who expressed their concerns in their work.

George Tooker, Bathers, 1950

In 1944 Tooker met the painter Paul Cadmus. Cadmus was a painter who worked with egg tempera (using traditional Reanissance techniques), and transmitted this expertise to Tooker, whose use of this medium marks his mature style. A year later he moved to a flat on Bleecker Street in Greewich Village, New York. In 1949 Cadmus and Tooker spent six months travelling in Italy and France. In the same year Tooker met painter William Christopher, who was to become his life partner until Christopher's death in 1973.

George Tooker, The Waiting Room, 1959

In 1950 Tooker and Christopher moved into an illegal loft located at W. 18th St. Here, in order to support themselves, they made custom furniture. However, Tooker was beginning to earn both recognition and income from his art: the Whitney Museum bought his best-known painting, The Subway, that year. With greater means as their disposal, the two first bought and renovated a brownstone on State Street in Brooklyn Heights (1953), and then, in the late 50s, he and Christopher built a weekend home near Hartland, Vermont.

George Tooker, Subway, 1950

During the 1950s, Tooker painted some of the 20th century's most memorable images of modern angst. In Cornice, a young man on a high building ledge apparently contemplates escaping life's complexities for good. With its lost souls haunting the New York underground Subway (above) envisions modernity as a spiritual prison system. The Kafkaesque Government Bureau (below) pictures an office of seemingly infinite extent, where people wait like penitents at the windows of terminally unresponsive bureaucrats.

George Tooker, Government Bureau, 1956

In the wonderfully weird Highway (below), a man dressed entirely in black except for the red jewels dotting his belt holds up a gloved hand like a traffic cop to halt three strangely bulbous cars. In his other hand he wields a circular red reflector on a pole, hiding his face from our view. A set of white arrows on posts point straight downward, directing our thoughts, maybe, to the underground energies of the unconscious. 

George Tooker, Highway, 1953

The one-man shows in New York galleries picked up speed, taking place in 1960, '62, '64, and '67. Then it was time to give something back: he return to the Art Students League to teach himself from 1965 to 1968. However, at the end of this period, Christopher's health was beginning to deteriorate to such an extent that Vermont winters were too severe for him. They began a search for a home in Europe where they could winter over, and ultimately found an apartment in Malaga, Spain. Christopher died in Spain in 1973, and Tooker spent most of 1974 there, wrapping up disposition of his estate. Also in '73, a major survey exhibition of Tooker's work was organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. That exhibition traveled to Chicago, New York, and Indianapolis. Tooker still lives and works in Harland, Vermont.

George Tooker, Ward, 1970

Why Tooker never achieved the status of, let's say. Jackson Pollock is a puzzling problem. The obvious answer is that he was crowded away from the center stage of the New York art world by the sweeping success, critical and commercial, of Abstract Expressionism during the 1950′s and early 1960′s. Abstract Expressionism was extolled by Nelson Rockefeller as “free enterprise painting.” As the United States confronted the Soviet Union during the Cold War, the CIA-sponsored Congress for Cultural Freedom and other American cultural organizations promoted AbEx and jazz music to combat the Soviet’s Socialist Realism schools of art and literature. Some writers like Frances Stonor Saunders, in her book Who Paid the Piper?: CIA and the Cultural Cold War, contend that the CIA actually sponsored exhibitions of AbEx art in Europe.

Leap Before You Look

George Tooker, Cornice, 1949

 Leap Before You Look
by W.H. Auden

The sense of danger must not disappear:
The way is certainly both short and steep,
However gradual it looks from here;
Look if you like, but you will have to leap.

Tough-minded men get mushy in their sleep
And break the by-laws any fool can keep;
It is not the convention but the fear
That has a tendency to disappear.

The worried efforts of the busy heap,
The dirt, the imprecision, and the beer
Produce a few smart wisecracks every year;
Laugh if you can, but you will have to leap.

The clothes that are considered right to wear
Will not be either sensible or cheap,
So long as we consent to live like sheep
And never mention those who disappear.

Much can be said for social savoir-faire,
But to rejoice when no one else is there
Is even harder than it is to weep;
No one is watching, but you have to leap.

A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep
Sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear;
Although I love you, you will have to leap;
Our dream of safety has to disappear.

Paul Cadmus - Beauty's all Things B

Cadmus, to our enormous benefit, understands that beauty is bodies, brains, buttocks, bathtubs, bicycles, Bach, bravado and bad behaviour; beauty's all things B. (Steven Jenkins)

Luigi Lucioni, Portrait of Paul Cadmus, 1928

Paul Cadmus (1904-1999) was born in New York City into a family of commercial artists. (NYC isn't exactly located in Central Europe - which is, more or less, the gravity center of this blog - but I feel free to shift focus once in a while). Cadmus' father, who had little money, was a commercial lithographer who had studied with Robert Henri, and his mother was an illustrator of children's books. At 15, before he finished high school, he was enrolled in art classes at the National Academy of Design. 

 Paul Cadmus, Jerry, 1931. "I've never had a good chest. My chest has always been rather weak. It's one reason why I think I draw such beautiful chests on other people", Cadmus observed in 1988.

Within two years Cadmus was admitted to the life drawing classes and by 1926 had completed his course work, having won numerous prizes and scholarships. Cadmus did advertising jobs until 1931 and studied at the Art Students League. There he met the painter Jared French, who became his lover and urged him to quit commercial art. In 1931, Cadmus made one of his first paintings depicting French. The painting, Jerry (above), remained in the French family until recently, when it was acquired by the Toledo Museum of Art. The small painting - it's just 20-by-24 inches - is strikingly intimate. French is holding James Joyce's Ulysses, then banned in the United States for being obscene. (According to Richard Meyer's Outlaw Representation, a friend of Cadmus had smuggled the book into the US from Europe and had given it to him as a gift).

Paul Cadmus, Byciclists, 1933

After hopping on an oil tanker to Europe and cycling through France and Spain, Cadmus and French stayed on the island of Majorca (1931-1933), where Cadmus painted two of his best-known early works, YMCA Locker Room and the above Bicyclists (later bought by Cole Porter). After his return to New York in 1933, Cadmus became the center of a circle of gay artists including his brother-in-law, Lincoln Kirstein, who helped found the American School of Ballet, Pavel Tchelitchew, and the photographer George Platt Lynes, for whom Cadmus frequently modeled. 

Paul Cadmus,  Self Portrait, Mallorca, c. 1932

Along with Bernard Perlin, Jared French, and George Tooker, Cadmus became known as a "Magical Realist", though none of the artists truly accepted the term. At the time, he worked for the Public Works of Art Project, which was later incorporated into the WPA. This experience was to help shape his style for the rest of his long career. Nearly illustrative, his paintings remained linked to a realist style found in many WPA works of the 1930s.   

Paul Cadmus, The Fleet’s In, 1934

In 1934, Cadmus' above painting The Fleet's In, depicting the pleasures of uniformed sailors, was removed from an exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington (at the same venue and in similar circumstances fifty years later, Robert Mapplethorpe's pictures were to suffer a similar fate). Outraged Navy officials saw a newspaper reproduction of the painting and pulled the work from the show. This "disreputable drunken brawl" came from "the sordid, depraved imagination of someone who has no conception of actual conditions in our service", fumed Secretary of Navy Claude Swanson. Like a stealth cruiser, The Fleet was kept from public view until 1981 and is now temporarily displayed at the Navy Art Gallery in Washington.

Paul Cadmus, Coney Island, 1935

Cadmus' painting Coney Island (above) also became the subject of controversy. Its portrayal of local residents enraged Brooklyn realtors, who threatened to file a civil suit against the Whitney Museum of American Art. Similarly, his commission for the Port Washington post office, Pocahontas and John Smith (1938) was also regarded as scandalous and cancelled. As a result of Cadmus' notoriety, his 1937 exhibition at Midtown Galleries in New York attracted more than 7.000 visitors.

Paul Cadmus, Aviator, 1941

After yet another successful show in 1937, Time magazine reported of the paintings on display: "Around the walls sailors tousled their trollops, perverts beckoned from a cafeteria washroom, and slatterns rioted on public beaches. These are the principal aspects of US life that attract Cadmus' attention, and he shrewdly draws and crudely colours them." 1937 was also a significant year in Cadmus’s private life - his lover Jared left him and married a mutual friend, Margaret Hoening. The three of them remained close friends, however, and worked together on a number of photography projects.

Paul Cadmus, Aspects of Suburban Life, 1935

Throughout the late 1930s Cadmus continued to shock. His Aspects of Suburban Life series (above) commissioned as murals for a post office were rejected as "unsuitable for a public building" and in 1938 he showed once again what can be done with a drunken sailor in Sailors and Floozies (below), this one temporarily removed from the Golden Gate International Exhibition in San Francisco in 1939. Putting it back on the wall, the director of the Palace of Fine Arts said: "If every picture to which some may object is removed, none would remain."

Paul Cadmus, Sailors and Floosies, 1938

In 1940 came another rejection, this time from Life magazine, which had commissioned 16 artists to paint significant events in American history after 1915. Cadmus chose to depict the tragic Herrin massacre (shown below), a labor contract dispute which occurred in the mining town of Herrin, Illinois in 1925. The bloody riot resulted in twenty-six dead strikebreakers, slain by labor union members. Some were hanged, others lined up against a fence and shot, and in some cases, some were forced to dig their own graves. Cadmus' painting was never published by Life, most likely because the magazine did not wish to offend organized labor just as the nation was gearing up for war production.

Paul Cadmus, Herrin Massacre, 1940

Despite the stream of rejections, the 1930s and 1940s were Cadmus' most successful years. Professionally, he was at his peak and his social life was an endless whirl of glamorous Manhattan parties where he was feted by friends including W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Edith Sitwell,  George Platt Lynes, and  E.M. Forster ("I do not believe in belief"). Cadmus' painting What I Believe was inspired by Forster's essay of the same name, in which he expressed his faith in personal relations: "Love and loyalty to an individual can run counter to the claims of the state. When they do - down with the state, say I, which means that the state will down me." Forster, the story goes, read his homoerotic novel Maurice aloud while Cadmus was painting his portrait.

Paul Cadmus, Fences, 1946

Cadmus' own favourite work dates from 1958. Once asked which painting he would save from the flames in the event of a fire, he responded quickly, "Night in Bologna is the summa of my career" (G.B. Shaw once had responded to the same silly question: "The one next to the emergency exit"). Night in Bologna depicts a farce of miscalculated seductions. An Italian soldier yearns for a curvaceous female hooker; she, in turn, tries to seduce a crewcut American tourist, while he gazes back at the Italian man with envy and lust.

Paul Cadmus, Night in Bologna, 1958

In real life, meanwhile, Cadmus spent much of this period in a triangle of his own. In the post-war 1940s he had been involved with artist George Tooker but the pair broke up in 1949. Said Tooker: "I was looking for a relationship and my relationship with Paul always included Jared and Margaret French." But Cadmus was once again to find love in 1964 when he met Jon Andersson, a singer and actor who became his boyfriend for the next 35 years. The young man inspired a series of exquisite nude drawings and the striking Study for a David and Goliath, a homage to Caravaggio, in which Jon brandishes a T square above Cadmus' head, the painter's red scarf marking the point of decapitation. Cadmus also explored his relationship with Andersson.  in later works, such as The Haircut:

Paul Cadmus, The Haircut, 1986

Cadmus' narrative style - he referred to himself as a ''literary painter'' - fell out of favor with the art establishment after the rise of Abstract Expressionism in the 1940's. But by that time he had already achieved more than one widely publicized succès de scandale. Near the end of his life there was a renewed interest in his work, sparked at least in part by the success of the gay and lesbian liberation movement, as well as by a resurgence of interest in representational art. The revival of interest in Cadmus was given impetus by the first edition of Lincoln Kirstein's illustrated biography. 

Paul Cadmus, Finistère, 1952

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, however, more prolific in other forms, including drawing, printmaking and, early on, photography. Although Cadmus stopped painting towards the end of his life, he continued to draw at his home in Weston, Connecticut, particularly portraits and figure studies of Jon Andersson. Paul Cadmus died in his home in Weston in 1999, just five days short of his 95th birthday. The Smithonian Archives have published online an excellent 1988 interview with Paul Cadmus.