Coming off the success of Fairfield Porter: A Life in Art, a wonderfully judicious biography of the iconoclastic mid-20th century figurative painter, Spring, a critic and journalist, returns to introduce six decades of determined realist Cadmus's Apollonian drawings, comprising a recent exhibition at New York's DC Moore gallery. Cadmus, who died in 1999 at 94, studied academic drawing beginning at age 15, and Spring convincingly links him to artists ranging from Carracci and Ingres to Alta-Tadema, Eakins and Cadmus's contemporary and lover Jared French. In a biographical narrative drawing on Cadmus's letters, artist's statements and unpublished interviews, Spring does an excellent job in delineating the context Cadmus created for himself, as an artist not so much opposed to the abstraction dominant for most of his career as indifferent to it. The 70 drawings here'done in chalk, crayon, pencil and watercolor, pencil and charcoal, and egg tempera, and often on hand-toned paper'speak for themselves: their lines are classically confident and fluid in a way that acknowledges but does not seek to stress the figures' homoerotic allure, and their depiction of well-sculpted men in a variety of poses reveals a variety of affects, from contemplative to fearful to exultant. Many of the post-1962 drawings feature Cadmus's life partner Jon Anderson, whose gaze at the viewer in a 1967 drawing is even and open. Spring's care and feeling in presenting the drawings for the first time as a coherent body of work (apart from Cadmus's paintings) will make this book attractive to anyone with an interest in 20th century art and culture.
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