Up for sale is a very well-preserved copy of the 1992 reprint of a 1984 monograph on Paul Cadmus (1904-1999), the gay American realist / representational artist, written by one of his good friends, and brother-in-law, the (relatively openly bisexual) author, impresario, art collector, philanthropist, and New York City Ballet co-founder Lincoln Kirstein (1907-1996), who was married to Cadmus’s sister, Fidelma, also an artist. The book's ISBN is 0-87654-941-5, and it was published by Pomegranate Artbooks, San Francisco, and printed in Hong Kong.

The handsome, richly illustrated title measures 10 inches wide by 11 inches high and comprises 144 pages. It has front and rear flaps of text attached to the wrapper, the text of which reads:

PAUL CADMUS, the American representational artist, has worked continually for six decades in a style that transcends prevailing fashion. A master of classic design, form, and technique, he has created a small but impressive body of work reflecting his unique and powerful vision of the human condition.

This book presents the entire range of Cadmus's remarkable achievement: the controversial, satiric social realism of The Fleet's In!, Bar Italia, and Subway Symphony; the haunting, allegorical Seven Deadly Sins series, completed in 1983 by The Eighth Sin: Jealousy; and the almost surreal Fire Island paintings, Fantasia on a Theme by Dr. S., and Point O'View. Also reproduced here are superbly drafted etchings and drawings, executed with the technical virtuosity and anatomical precision of the Renaissance masters, that celebrate the beauty of the human body.

Lincoln Kirstein, well known as the founding director of the New York City Ballet and author of several books on the arts, brings the full measure of his knowledge and sensibility to his critical appreciation of Cadmus's achievement. In a text that closely relates to the art as it is presented, Mr. Kirstein traces the development of the artist's life and work within a commentary rich in observations about the social, cultural, literary, and artistic influences and traditions that have shaped his subject's philosophy and method. Married to Cadmus's sister, Mr. Kirstein also offers an affecting portrait of the artist himself and discusses his relationship with other artists and writers, among them, Jared and Margaret French, Reginald Marsh, W. H. Auden, and E. M. Forster.

Excerpts from contemporaneous reviews and articles, comments by the artist about his method and viewpoint, and selections from E. M. Forster's letters to Paul Cadmus from a correspondence that spanned twenty-five years are included throughout the book in counterpoint to Lincoln Kirstein's text, creating an unusually immediate and resonant context for viewing artwork. In addition, the volume contains a concise biography, a complete, chronological catalogue of paintings, listings of public collections, awards, and honors, and selected exhibitions of the works of Paul Cadmus.

For those discovering much of his work for the first time within these pages, the exhilarating juxtaposition of Lincoln Kirstein’s words and Paul Cadmus’s images will provide the excitement and revelation of great discovery.

For Cadmus's ardent followers and collectors, this reprint of the 1984 edition now contains over 150 paintings, etchings, and drawings, 86 pages of color, and includes all of Cadmus’s paintings since 1984. This is the only major collection of his work now available.

On the front of the book is a detail of Cadmus’s 1953-55 Bar Italia, egg tempera on pressed wood panel, in the collection of the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

On the back of the jacket, where a color reproduction of the oil on canvas Bicyclists (1933) appears, there are quotes from reviews and articles in various publications, including The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Vanity Fair, Bestellers, The Orlando Sentinel, and Booklist, of the American Library Association.

From the book’s extensive front matter, I’ll just include this “Note on This Edition” from page 5:

This reprint fulfills a promise made to Paul Cadmus and Lincoln Kirstein, that the 1984 monograph remain in print and be brought current. Lincoln Kirstein has kindly contributed a new essay that includes all of Cadmus’s paintings completed since 1984, beginning on page 109. Except for a number of corrections and deletions, the original text has been retained. Most of the paintings are now in full color, including many early works which have never before been reproduced in color. The complete catalogue of paintings, biography and bibliography have been brought up to date; an all-color drawing section has been revised; a new jacket has been designed; and an index has been added.

Following this note are Acknowledgments from Arnold Skolnick, the book’s creative director/designer, and I’ll just transcribe the first paragraph here:

Chameleon Books is enormously grateful to the staff of Midtown Payson Galleries in New York who contributed their support, encouragement, time and ideas in bringing this reprint to fruition. Special thanks to: Bridget Moore, Director; Edward De Luca, Assistant Director; and Carol Haas. We wish to thank Thomas F. Burke, publisher of Pomegranate Artbooks, whose interest and love of Paul Cadmus’s work and whose support and trust has made this reprint possible.

Here's most of Cadmus's biography, courtesy Wikipedia:

Paul Cadmus (December 17, 1904 – December 12, 1999) was an American artist widely known for his egg tempera paintings of gritty social interactions in urban settings. He also produced many highly finished drawings of single nude male figures. His paintings combine elements of eroticism and social critique in a style often called magic realism.

EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION. Paul Cadmus was born on December 17, 1904, at 103rd Street, East Harlem, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the son of artists, Maria Latasa, of Basque and Cuban ascendancy, and Egbert Cadmus (1868–1939), of Dutch ascendancy. His father, who studied with Robert Henri, worked as a commercial artist, and his mother illustrated children's books. His sister, Fidelma Cadmus, married Lincoln Kirstein, a philanthropist, arts patron, and co-founder of the New York City Ballet, in 1941.

At age 15, Cadmus left school to attend the National Academy of Design for 6 years. He then enrolled at the Art Students League of New York in 1928, taking life-drawing lessons while working as a commercial illustrator at a New York advertising agency. He furthered his education while traveling through Europe from 1931 to 1933 with fellow artist Jared French, who became his lover for a time.

CAREER. After traveling through France and Spain, Cadmus and French settled in a fishing village on the island of Majorca. In 1933, they headed back to the United States after running out of money, where Cadmus was one of the first artists to be employed by The New Deal art programs, painting murals at post offices. He maintained a studio at 54 Morton Street.

Cadmus worked in commercial illustration as well, but French, also a tempera artist, convinced him to devote himself completely to fine art. In 1979, he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an associate member and became a full member in 1980.

Cadmus is ranked by Artists Trade Union of Russia amongst the world's best artists of the last four centuries.

Controversies. In 1934, at the age of 29, he painted The Fleet's In! while working for the Public Works of Art Project of the WPA. This painting, which featured carousing sailors and women, included a stereotypical homosexual solicitation and erotic exaggeration of clinging pants seats and bulging crotches. It was the subject of a public outcry led by Admiral Hugh Rodman, who protested to Secretary of the Navy Claude A. Swanson, saying, "It represents a most disgraceful, sordid, disreputable, drunken brawl." Secretary Swanson stated that the painting was "right artistic" but "not true to the Navy." The painting was removed from exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery by Henry L. Roosevelt, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy at the time, and kept in his home until Roosevelt's death in 1936. The publicity helped to launch Cadmus’s career, and he stated at the time, "I had no intention of offending the Navy. Sailors are no worse than anybody else. In my picture I merely commented on them – I didn't criticize." The painting, which after Roosevelt's death hung over a mantel at the Alibi Club in Washington for more than half a century, was kept from public view until 1981, temporarily displayed at the Wolfsonian Museum in Miami, and eventually found a home at the Naval Historical Center.

In 1938, his painting Pocahantas Saving the Life of John Smith, a mural painted for the Parcel Post Building in Richmond, Virginia, had to be retouched when some observers noticed a fox pelt suggestively hanging between the legs of an Indian depicted in the painting. Cadmus used his then lover, Jared French, as the model for John Smith in the mural.

In 1940, two paintings, Sailors and Floozies (1938) and Seeing the New Year In, were removed from public view because the Navy "didn't like it" and there was "too much smell about it." The paintings were being exhibited at the Golden Gate International Exposition and were removed, while a third, Venus and Adonis, remained. The office of Commissioner George Creel was told by the Navy that the painting, Sailors and Floozies, was "unnecessarily dirty."

Artistic Style. Cadmus, considered to be a master draftsman, was interested in the Italian Renaissance artists, particularly Luca Signorelli and Andrea Mantegna, the so-called "masters of muscle." He was also influenced by Reginald Marsh, an American scene painter. Cadmus combined the elements of Signorelli and Mantegna along with Marsh to depict the street life of New York City.

He was transfixed by the human body, both the ideal and the repulsive. His ideal was a stylized erotic version of the male body. He found the grotesque everywhere from Greenwich Village cafés, subway stations, the beach at Coney Island to American tourists in an Italian piazza. His art is a form of satire and caricature of his subjects that has been compared to fellow artists George Grosz and Otto Dix. Art critics have been divided on Cadmus's art, with Dore Ashton stating that "he's not a historical figure at all, he's an also-ran." Ashton described his paintings as "skewed Saturday Evening Post." In 1990, Michael Kimmelman wrote that Cadmus's art served "as a reminder that, contrary to the standard view, realism was still a vital tradition in American art during the middle of this century, one that drew from many of the same sources that inspired the Abstract Expressionists who were widely thought to have rendered realism obsolete."

PERSONAL LIFE. From 1937 until 1945, Cadmus, his lover, Jared French, and French's wife, Margaret Hoening, summered on Fire Island and formed a photographic collective called PaJaMa ("Paul, Jared, and Margaret"). In between Provincetown, Truro, Fire Island, and New York, they staged various black-and-white photographs of themselves with their friends, both nude and clothed. Most of these friends featured in the photographs were among New York's young artists, dancers and writers, and most were handsome and gay. In 1938, Cadmus and French posed for a series of photographs with the noted photographer George Platt Lynes (1907–1955). These photographs were not published or exhibited while Lynes was living and show the intimacy and relationship of the two. In the photographs, 14 of which survive today, Cadmus and French vacillate between exposure and concealment, with French generally being the more exhibitionist of the two.

Later in the 1940s, Cadmus and his then lover, George Tooker, formed a complicated relationship with French and his wife. When the Frenches bought a home in Hartland, Vermont, they gave Cadmus a house of his own on the property, which French later took back and gave to his Italian lover.

In 1965, Cadmus met and began a relationship with Jon (Farquhar) Anderson (July 30, 1937, New Haven, CT - October 21, 2018, Weston, CT), a former cabaret star, in Nantucket that lasted until Cadmus's death in 1999. From the beginning of their 35-year relationship, the then 27-year-old Anderson was Cadmus's model and muse in many of his works. Cadmus was also close friends with many illustrious artists, authors, and dancers including: Christopher Isherwood. W. H. Auden, George Balanchine, George Platt Lynes, George Tooker, Lincoln Kirstein (his brother-in-law), and E. M. Forster, who was said to have read his novel Maurice aloud while Cadmus painted his portrait.

In 1999, Cadmus died at his home in Weston, Connecticut, due to advanced age, just five days shy of his 95th birthday.

And here's most of Kirstein's biography, also courtesy Wikipedia:

Lincoln Edward Kirstein (May 4, 1907 – January 5, 1996) was an American writer, impresario, art connoisseur, philanthropist, and cultural figure in New York City, noted especially as co-founder of the New York City Ballet. He developed and sustained the company with his organizing ability and fundraising for more than four decades, serving as the company's general director from 1946 to 1989. According to the New York Times, he was "an expert in many fields," organizing art exhibits and lecture tours in the same years.

EARLY LIFE. Kirstein was born in Rochester, New York, to Jewish parents, the son of Rose Stein and Louis E. Kirstein (1867–1942). His sister was Mina Kirstein and his paternal grandparents were Jeanette (née Leiter) and Edward Kirstein, a successful Rochester clothing manufacturer who ran E. Kirstein and Sons, Company. He grew up in a wealthy Bostonian family and attended the private Berkshire School, along with George Platt Lynes, graduating in 1926. He then attended Harvard, the alma mater of his father, vice-president of Filene's Department Store, graduating in 1930. His maternal grandfather was Nathan Stein, a senior executive at Stein-Bloch & Co., in Rochester.

CAREER. Early Career. In 1927, while an undergraduate at Harvard, Kirstein was frustrated that the literary magazine The Harvard Advocate would not invite him to join its editorial board despite his having published several well-regarded pieces in the magazine. With his friend Varian Fry (who met his wife Eileen through Lincoln's sister Mina), he convinced his father to finance the Hound & Horn, a new literary quarterly. After graduation, he moved to New York in 1930, taking the quarterly with him. The publication gained prominence in the artistic world and ran until 1934 when Kirstein decided to focus his energy and resources on the career of George Balanchine and the development of the School of American Ballet. 

His interest in ballet and Balanchine started when he saw Balanchine's Apollo performed by the Ballets Russes. Kirstein became determined to bring Balanchine to the United States. In October 1933, together with Edward Warburg, a classmate from Harvard, and Vladimir Dimitriew, Balanchine's manager, they started the School of American Ballet in Hartford, Connecticut. In 1934, the studio moved to the fourth floor of a building at Madison Avenue and 59th Street in New York City. Warburg's father, Felix M. Warburg, invited the group of students from the evening class to perform at a private party. The ballet they performed was Serenade, the first major ballet choreographed by Balanchine in the United States. Just months later, Kirstein and Warburg founded, together with Balanchine and Dimitriew, the American Ballet, which later became the resident company of the Metropolitan Opera. According to Kirstein, this arrangement was unsatisfactory because the opera company failed to provide the ballet company with financial resources and artistic freedom.

World War II and Monuments Men. Kirstein's theatrical career was interrupted by the United States' entry into World War II. He enlisted in 1943, and before going overseas, he started working on a project gathering and documenting soldier art. He eventually developed this as the exhibit and book Artists Under Fire. In the spring of 1944, Kirstein traveled to London for the U.S. Arts and Monuments Commission, and after a month, he was transferred to the unit in France that came to be known as the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA). The section was devoted to rescuing and preserving European art. In January 1945, Kirstein was promoted to private first class in Patton's Third Army, and his unit moved to Germany. Kirstein was involved with retrieving artworks around Munich and from the salt mines at Altaussee. His article "The Quest for the Golden Lamb" about the quest was published in Town & Country in September 1945, the same month he was discharged from the army. 

Ballet. In 1946, Balanchine and Kirstein founded the Ballet Society, which was renamed the New York City Ballet in 1948. In a letter that year, Kirstein stated, "The only justification I have is to enable Balanchine to do exactly what he wants to do in the way he wants to do it." Kirstein served as the company's general director from 1946 until 1989.

In a 1959 monograph titled What Ballet Is All About Kirstein wrote: "Our Western ballet is a clear if complex blending of human anatomy, solid geometry and acrobatics offered as a symbolic demonstration of manners—the morality of consideration for one human being moving in time with another."

In 1976 poet Vernon Scannell said that Kirstein "regarded dancers not as artists but as acrobats; their skills were, he maintained, entirely physical and he felt his involvement with the dance was a salutary escape from the cerebral and sedentary life into a world that was closer to that of the athlete than the artist." Kirstein's and Balanchine's collaboration lasted until the latter's death in 1983. 

PERSONAL LIFE. Beginning in 1919, Kirstein kept a diary, continuing with the practice until the late 1930s. In writing a 2007 biography of Kirstein, The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein, Martin Duberman drew on these diaries, as well as Kirstein's numerous letters, to gain insight to Kirstein's personal life. Kirstein wrote about enjoying sex with various men, including Harvard undergraduates, sailors, street boys, and casual encounters in the showers at the 63rd Street YMCA. He had longer affairs with dancer Pete Martinez, artist Dan Maloney, and conservator Alexander Jensen Yow. Kirstein had both platonic relationships and many that started as casual sex and developed into long-term friendships. 

He also maintained relationships with women. In 1941, he married Fidelma Cadmus, a painter and the sister of the artist Paul Cadmus. Kirstein and his wife enjoyed an amicable if sometimes stressful relationship until her death in 1991, but she withdrew from painting and then from life, suffering breakdowns that eventually were more permanent than his. Some of his boyfriends lived with them in their East 19th Street house; "Fidelma was enormously fond of most of them." The New York art world considered Kirstein's bisexuality an "open secret," although he did not publicly acknowledge his sexual orientation until 1982.

Kirstein's eclectic interests, ambition and keen interest in high culture, funded by independent means, drew a large circle of creative friends from many fields of the arts. These included Glenway Wescott, George Platt Lynes, Jared French, Bernard Perlin, Pavel Tchelitchev, Katherine Anne Porter, Barbara Harrison, Gertrude Stein, Donald Windham, Cecil Beaton, Jean Cocteau, W. H. Auden, George Tooker, Margaret French Cresson, Walker Evans, Sergei Eisenstein and others.

In his later years, Kirstein struggled with bipolar disorder – mania, depression, and paranoia. He destroyed the studio of friend Dan Maloney. He sometimes had to be constrained in a straitjacket for weeks at a psychiatric hospital. His illness did not generally affect his professional creativity until the end of his life. He also suffered two heart attacks in February 1975.

LEGACY. The English critic Clement Crisp wrote: "He was one of those rare talents who touch the entire artistic life of their time. Ballet, film, literature, theatre, painting, sculpture, photography all occupied his attention."

Kirstein helped organize a 1959 American tour for musicians and dancers from the Japanese Imperial Household Agency. At that time, Japanese Imperial court music, gagaku, had only rarely been performed outside the Imperial Music Pavilion in Tokyo at some of the great Japanese shrines.

Kirstein commissioned and helped to fund the physical home of the New York City Ballet: the New York State Theater building at Lincoln Center, designed in 1964 by architects Philip Johnson and John Burgee. Despite its conservative modernist exterior, the glittery red and gold interior recalls the imaginative and lavish backdrops of the Ballets Russes. He served as the general director of the ballet company from 1948 to 1989.

On March 26, 1984, President Ronald Reagan presented Kirstein with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his contributions to the arts.

Kirstein was also a serious collector. Soon after the opening at Lincoln Center of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, he contributed a significant amount of historic dance materials to the Jerome Robbins Dance Division. Before his death in 1996, Kirstein also donated his personal papers, artworks, and other materials related to the history of dance and his life in the arts to the division. Kirstein was also the primary patron of the artist Paul Cadmus, Fidelma's brother, buying many of his paintings and subsidizing his living expenses. Cadmus had difficulty selling his work through galleries because of the erotically charged depictions of working class and middle class men, which provoked controversy.

The overall condition of this 1992 softcover book is very good. The wrapper may have minor spotting, smudging, etc., as may some of the pages within, but on the whole the title is in great condition both inside and out. All the pages within are clean and unmarked by human hands, so there are no annotations, marginalia, underlining, scribbles, etc., anywhere within, nor any major flaws or damage in the way of clipped or missing pages, large tears, tape repairs, water or other liquid damage, etc. (note that I did not look closely at each and every page and may have missed something). The book has neither a musty nor smoky odor.

This lovely book on Paul Cadmus by his brother-in-law and great patron, Lincoln Kirsten, is being sold AS IS, AS DESCRIBED ABOVE AND PICTURED WITHIN. I am setting what I feel is a very reasonable starting price for the auction, and there is NO RESERVE. I am also including a Buy It Now option.

Shipping and handling for the title: $6 to U.S. addresses (via Media Mail).

Note that eBay has now instituted a shipping program whereby bidders from outside the U.S. can bid on or buy all sellers' items, and the seller sends everything to an eBay facility in the US for shipping. So far, this seems to be working out well (though one item bought by someone in China never made it to its destination, though eBay very quickly refunded the buyer).  

If you want this publication sent more quickly to you (e.g., via Priority Mail in the U.S.), you must request this asap after winning or purchasing it (or beforehand, if possible), and I will adjust the amount accordingly.

I will do my best to send the book out to you no more than 2-3 business days following receipt of payment (that is, when eBay informs me that your payment has been posted to or otherwise cleared in my account). 

If you are the winner or buyer of this monograph on Paul Cadmus, PAYMENT IS EXPECTED WITHIN ONE WEEK (7 DAYS) FROM THE PURCHASE DATE. If you cannot pay within this time frame, PLEASE contact me asap so we can work something out. I'm very flexible and understanding, but I would appreciate communication from you one way or another.

PLEASE NOTE THAT RETURNS WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED NOR REFUNDS MADE FOR THIS BOOK, SO PLEASE READ MY DESCRIPTION CAREFULLY, LOOK CLOSELY AT THE PHOTOGRAPHS I’VE UPLOADED, AND ASK ME ANY QUESTIONS YOU MAY HAVE ABOUT THE CONTENTS OR CONDITION OF THE ITEM. THANKS FOR YOUR UNDERSTANDING! 

Thanks for looking, and please don't hesitate to email me if you have any questions about this richly illustrated 1992 softcover monograph on Paul Cadmus.   

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