Art: Sin in Frames

“I don’t think art should be shocking, necessarily,” says Painter Paul Cadmus, “but it should be disturbing.” Cadmus, who combines a steady hand with a jaundiced eye, had never failed to disturb people and earn a living by it, but his first exhibition of paintings in twelve years, which opened in a Manhattan gallery last week, made his earlier works seem almost sissified.

His sharply satirical pictures of sailors spliced to sausage-fat floozies, and Greenwich Village phonies on the loose, made Cadmus famous before he was 30.

At 44, a mild-seeming man with a crew cut and a boyishly diffident manner, Cadmus had turned to abstract themes. His new show centered around seven two-foot-high panels representing nothing less than the Seven Deadly Sins.

Blood & Cobwebs. Envy was a green-skinned wraith with a nest of snakes in its heart. Pride was a big-bosomed balloon about to burst—presumably, with pride.

Sloth slept with his eyes wide open in a sticky skein of cobwebs, and Anger was a spiky, comic-book monster which had just smashed a blood-spattered plate-glass window. Lust, the shock of the group—as well as the bottom in bad taste—was a leering, loathsome human figure, festooned with genitalia and en-ries cased in a prophylactic tube.

Cadmus hopes against hope that the series will be sold as a group to decorate a church (price: $20,000). “I don’t believe,” he says wistfully, “that any of my paintings would encourage anyone to sin.” As nightmare personifications of evil, the Sins were frightening enough; as pictures, they were merely unpleasant. It looked as if in this case Cadmus had sold his art for a mess of message.

Murder & Belief. A slow, meticulous worker in the early Renaissance technique of egg tempera on gesso panels, Cadmus builds his pictures up with thousands of tiny brush strokes, finds time to complete only three or four a year. He had interspersed his Sins with cleverly composed little pictures of ballet dancers practicing and handsome boys having fun on beaches. There was also a photographically sharp scene of mob violence, Herrin Massacre, which described in bloody detail the murder of a gang of strikebreakers by coal miners at Herrin, Ill. in 1922. Like many of Cadmus’ best works, Herrin was storytelling art, as carefully staged and realistically painted as a Satevepost cover. What saved it from banality was the unpleasantness of the subject and the academic brilliance of Cadmus’ draftsmanship.

Apart from Herrin and the Sins, the most ambitious picture in the show was a summer landscape seething with happy nudes and entitled What I Believe. The painting did not make Cadmus’ belief plain (unless he had meant to plump for nudism and close quarters), but it did at least indicate, said Cadmus, “that I don’t really hate people.”