Mobile

Paul Cadmus

Brooklyn Museum photograph

Object Label

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.

Caption

Paul Cadmus (American, 1904–1999). Mobile, 1953. Serigraph, Image: 15 3/4 x 18 1/4 in. (40 x 46.4 cm) Sheet: 18 7/8 x 21 1/8 in. (47.9 x 53.7 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the artist, 68.164.1. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)

Gallery

Not on view

Title

Mobile

Date

1953

Medium

Serigraph

Classification

Print

Dimensions

Image: 15 3/4 x 18 1/4 in. (40 x 46.4 cm) Sheet: 18 7/8 x 21 1/8 in. (47.9 x 53.7 cm)

Signatures

Signed, "LXXV 72/ Cadmus" middle of composition in colored graphite

Inscriptions

Inscribed at bottom by artist "Completed Serigraph 'Mobile' print no. 72 edition of 75 (print reproduced in monograph" in colored graphite

Credit Line

Gift of the artist

Accession Number

68.164.1

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