Paul Cadmus

Abstract

Statistics are notoriously unreliable markers of historical experience. Their claims to numerical objectivity, to bedrock truth, are ones we have come increasingly to distrust. There are times, however, when a statistic may reveal something else or something more: a snapshot of collective perception, a fragment of otherwise forgotten experience, a part of a history that has not been fully told. Consider the following as a case in point: Paul Cadmus has participated in thirty-seven Whitney Museum Annual and Biennial exhibitions of contemporary art, making him one of the most frequently exhibited artists in the history of that ongoing curatorial project.' Cadmus's repeated, indeed almost serial, inclusion in the Whitney's signature exhibitions of the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s marks both the centrality and the longevity of this artist's contribution to twentieth-century art. Until quite recently, however, Cadmus's achievement has been neglected, obscured, even denied outright by historians, critics, and curators of American art, including (paradoxically enough) the Whitney Museum, which declined to mount the artist's 1981 retrospective.