reviews_and_ramblings | Jared French (1905

Jared French (1905–1988) was a painter who specialized in the ancient medium of egg tempera. He was one of the masters of magic realism, part of a circle of friends and colleagues who all painted surreal imagery in egg tempera. Others included George Tooker and Paul Cadmus. (Picture: Jared French by George Platt Lynes)

French received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Amherst College in 1925. He met and befriended Cadmus in New York City, became his lover, and persuaded Cadmus to give up commercial art for "serious painting". In 1937 French married Margaret Hoening, another artist. For the next eight years Cadmus and the Frenches summered on Fire Island and formed a photographic collective called PAJAMA ("Paul, Jared, and Margaret"). French painted numerous murals for the WPA.

French's early paintings are eerie, colorful tableaux of still, silent figures derived from Archaic Greek statues. His later work shows "a kind of classical biomorphism," strange, colorful, suggestive organic forms.

Homesickness

Jungian psychology was probably an important influence upon the dream-like imagery in the paintings of French's maturity. The highly stylized, archaic-looking figures in his paintings suggest that they are representative of the ancestral memory of all mankind, what Carl Jung called "the collective unconscious". French himself was never explicit about the sources of his imagery, although on a stylistic level, the influence of early Italian Renaissance paintings by such masters as Mantegna and Piero della Francesca is evident, as it is also in the work of both Tooker and Cadmus. On the level of content, he made only one, short, public statement regarding his intentions:

My work has long been concerned with the representation of diverse aspects of man and his universe. At first it was mainly concerned with his physical aspect and his physical universe. Gradually I began to represent aspects of his psyche, until in The Sea (1946) and Evasion (1947), I showed quite clearly my interest in man's inner reality.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_French

Chuck Howard and Jared French, St Luke's Place, by Paul Cadmus

George Platt Lynes and Jared French, Fire Island, by PaJaMa

George Platt Lynes and Jonathan Tichenor, Fire Island, by Jared French

George Tooker, Jared French and Monroe Wheeler, Provincetown, by PaJaMa

Jared French by PaJaMa

Jared French by George Platt Lynes

Jared French, Clinton, by PaJaMa

Jared French, Hoboken, by PaJaMa

Jared French "Jerry" by Paul Cadmus

Jared French, Paul Cadmus and Donald Windham, by PaJaMa

Paul Cadmus and Jared French by George Platt Lynes

Paul Cadmus and Jared French by PaJaMa

Jared French's Paintings

Business

Casein

Composition

Coppia

Coup de Pied

Coupla Girls

Crew

Elemental Play

Evasion

Glenway Wescott, George Platt Lynes and Monroe Wheeler

Mirror

Prose

Scena di Delitto

Seat by the Sea

Seated Man

Spectators

State Park

The Double

The Rope

Three Women and a Lifeguard

Washing the White Blood from Daniel Boone

Woman and Boys

Further Readings:

Jared French's Myths (Essential Painting) by Nancy Grimes
Hardcover: 88 pages
Publisher: Pomegranate; 1st edition (October 1993)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1566403227
ISBN-13: 978-1566403221
Amazon: Jared French's Myths (Essential Painting)

Collaboration: The Photographs of Paul Cadmus, Margaret French and Jared French
Hardcover: 96 pages
Publisher: Twelvetrees Pr; 1st edition (December 1992)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0942642414
ISBN-13: 978-0942642414
Amazon: Collaboration: The Photographs of Paul Cadmus, Margaret French and Jared French

Intimate Companions: A Triography of George Platt Lynes, Paul Cadmus, Lincoln Kirstein, and Their Circle by David Leddick
Paperback: 336 pages
Publisher: Stonewall Inn Editions; 1st edition (June 1, 2001)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0312271271
ISBN-13: 978-0312271275
Amazon: Intimate Companions: A Triography of George Platt Lynes, Paul Cadmus, Lincoln Kirstein, and Their Circle

Photographer George Platt Lynes, painter Paul Cadmus, and critic Lincoln Kirstein played a major role in creating the institutions of the American art world from the late 1920s to the early 1950s. The three created a remarkable world of gay aesthetics and desire in art with the help of their overlapping circle of friends, lovers, and collaborators.

Through hours of conversation with surviving members with their circle and unprecedented access to papers, journals, and previously unreleased photos, David Leddick has resurrected the influences of this now-vanished art world along with the lives and loves of all three artists in this groundbreaking biography.