This magnetic likeness of the young painter Paul Cadmus (1904–1999) by his colleague Luigi Lucioni is a quintessential portrait of the 1920s. Portraiture was remade during that period, as progressive artists moved beyond abstract styles and reasserted the integrity of the human figure as part of a larger postwar impulse toward order. Deeply inspired by the art of early Italian Renaissance masters, Lucioni here embraced the new realism in the firmness and clarity of his forms, and in the aggressively cropped composition. A creased white cloth frames the likeness of Cadmus, whose regard offers a disarming combination of hesitancy and penetration.
