PaJaMa

Vacation is boring, but does it have to be? I found myself reconsidering after seeing vintage photographs at Gitterman Gallery by the artists’ group PaJaMa, a loosely defined collaboration formed by American painters Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret French during the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s. PaJaMa is an acronym made out of the first two letters of each member’s name. Jared and Margaret were husband and wife; Paul was Jared’s lover. All three shared affinities as painters, like tastes for the male nude and egg tempera.

The history of American art in New York in the 1930s and ’40s entails much more than the rise of Abstract Expressionism. One fascinating group of outliers was PaJaMa — the Magic Realist painters Paul Cadmus, Jared French and Margaret Hoening French, his wife — who fashioned their moniker from their first names. 

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In the late nineteen-forties, the American artists Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret French made a portmanteau of their first names and collaborated on a series of photographs that owe much to Jared’s mannered, oneiric realist paintings.

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