Mobile

A figure painter known from the 1930s on for his baldly satirical commentaries on human appetites and desires, Paul Cadmus was throughout a master draftsman. Although he undertook still-life subjects only rarely and, as he once stated, as “practice works like scales,” he achieved parity between figure and still life in Mobile. Here, a beautifully proportioned young man holds a mobile composed of beach detritus (wood, feathers, shells, and bones) in a delicate state of balance—a reference to the weightlessness of spent forms, and a meditation on mortality.