Going South,

1936

Best known for his gritty, urban social critique and his stylized erotic renderings of the male figure, Paul Cadmus was an important American painter and printmaker of the middle decades of the twentieth century. Trained at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League, Cadmus worked in commercial illustration; his experiences in both fine and commercial art informed the blending of styles found in his work. Here, the careful attention to anatomical accuracy and proportion, a hallmark of realism, meets a kind of magical realism exemplified by the compressed composition as well as the exaggerated poses and gestures of the two figures. <br>