Jared French
1905–1988

Jared French met fellow artist Paul Cadmus while attending the Art Students League in New York, and both developed a deep interest in life drawing and the idealized human figure as an expressive form. French painted the unsettling State Park—with its strangely stylized and isolated figures— at the height of his most innovative period, when he was exploring Surrealist-influenced imagery and portraying static, ideal bodies in minimal, airless landscapes. French, his wife, Margaret, and Cadmus developed a collective photography practice named PaJaMa—a combination of their first names. Using a few props and carefully staged juxtapositions of themselves and friends in the sandy, sunlit summer landscape of Fire Island, the artists created dreamlike tableaux for the camera, which inspired French to paint related scenes. A bleached wood platform similar to the one in State Park appears in several PaJaMa photographs.

French’s preferred medium was egg tempera, a technique common in early Italian panel painting that allows for precise buildup of form through small brushstrokes; it results in a hard clarity of edge and surface that French masterfully exploits in State Park. He carefully contrasts a family unit under an umbrella with two statuesque male figures, clearly inspired by archaic Greek sculpture. This separation likely alludes to the outsider status that he and his circle of friends and lovers—including Cadmus, the painter George Tooker, the photographer George Platt Lynes, and the arts patron Lincoln Kirstein—felt in the bourgeois conventionality of the time.

Introduction

Jared French (February 4, 1905 – January 8, 1988) was an American painter who specialized in the medium of egg tempera. He was one of the artists attributed to the style of art known as magic realism along with contemporaries George Tooker and Paul Cadmus.

Wikidata identifier

Q3162702

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Introduction

French studied at Amherst College, 1921-1925. In 1926, he met Paul Cadmus, who was to become his lover, lifelong friend, and collaborator. He later married Margaret Hoening, and three became photographic collaborators.

Roles

Artist, painter, sculptor

ULAN identifier

500053389

Names

Jared French

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Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed December 10, 2024.