"American Art"
Featuring Paul Cadmus & His Circle

Auction: Thursday, June 4, 1:30 pm

Public exhibition: Saturday, May 30 from 12 pm to 5 pm; Monday, June 1 through Wednesday, June 3, 10 am to 6 pm; and Thursday, June 4 from 10 am to noon.

Catalogue: available for $35 from Swann Galleries, online www.swanngalleries.com

Further information: Todd Weyman (212) 254-4710, extension 32, or tweyman@swanngalleries.com.

Live online bidding is also available via Invaluable.com.

Swann's June 4, 2015 auction of American Art features a large selection of work by the playful and boundary-pushing artist Paul Cadmus. Tucked in among the paintings, drawings and etchings are a group of photographs from PaJaMa, a two-decade long collaboration between Cadmus, Jared French and Margaret French, depicting the PaJaMa (an acronym formed from the first two letters of each collaborator's name) members and others in their extensive creative circle. Most of the photographs were taken during their summers working on Fire Island beginning in 1937 and continuing into the 1950s.

Many of the photos' subjects are nude, echoing the keen attention to the human form in many of Cadmus' other works, though much of the appeal of the photos is the window they provide into both the intimate friendship of the collaborators and the artistic community that thrived on Fire Island in that era.

Cadmus himself seemed to focus on the fun of the photos as objects noting, "we would go out late and take photographs when the light was best. They were just playthings. We would hand out these little photographs when we went out to dinner parties, like playing cards" (from Glenway Wescott Personally: A Biography by Jerry Rosco, 2002).

In addition to the PaJaMa photos, there are photographs of author Glenway Wescott, painter George Tooker, ballerina Alexandra Danilova and others by Cadmus, Jared French and George Platt Lynes, showing the wide range of relationships these artists fostered across various mediums and genres.