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Variety
May 14, 1986
Producer-director David Sutherland has put together an appealing portrait of artist Paul Cadmus
in his documentary Paul Cadmus: Enfant Terrible at 80.
...Opting for an absence of any interviewer behind or in front of the camera is effective for the
most part...this technique brings concentrated attention to the artist and his reminiscences, his words of
wisdom and his quotes from other artists as diverse as Gustave Flaubert, E.M. Forster, Flannery O'Connor
and Federico Fellini.
The New York Times
By John J. O'Connor
May 16, 1986
Television has never been completely at ease in dealing with art and artists. At its best, the
medium can serve as a kind of college extension course, covering vast expanses or focusing
on intricate details. At its worst, it can hire a celebrity to oversee a second-rate essay. Then,
every once in a great while, a film comes along to demonstrate other possibilities, other approaches.
One such production is Paul Cadmus: Enfant Terrible at 80.
Mr. Sutherland dispenses with narrators or interviewers. "The goal," he explains, "was to get
the artist to act as host in a film about himself." Captured through the sensitive camera work
of Joe Seamans, the portrait is remarkable compelling.
Mr. Cadmus has been served well by Mr. Sutherland...The intense close-up succeeds in
illuminating something of the artistic process that, no matter the finished style, is always
profoundly serious. Mr. Cadmus quotes Flaubert, "Be regular and ordinary in your life like a bourgeois,
so you can be vigilant and original in your works."
His Works' Progress
By Edward Rubin
American Film, January-February 1985
Riding high on the success of his award-winning documentary, Paul Cadmus Enfant Terrible at 80, Boston filmmaker David Sutherland chortles good-naturedly, "Where others find lost footage and restore it, I find lost artists and restore them to their public."
Not exactly a household name, ex-Works Progress Administration painter Paul Cadmus was a cause célèbre during the thirties and forties when his overtly gay satires of the American scene-brash, bold, highly eroticized paintings-created controversy wherever they were shown. "The Fleet's In" (1934), a lurid tableau of sailors on leave picking up men and women, so outraged a high-ranking admiral that it was removed from Washington, D.C.'s Corcoran Gallery almost as soon as it was hung. Cadmus's "Aspects of Suburban Life: Main Street," so hot in 1936 that it was banished to the U.S. embassy in Canada to cool off, has since been restored to respectability and hangs in the National Museum of American Art in Washington.
Cadmus is now the subject of a small revival, with Horizon Press' recent publication of a book of reproductions and Sutherland's Enfant Terrible being shown around the country. The film has been picking up kudos: It was a finalist in both the American and National Education film festivals last year and won prizes at the Houston and Athens film festivals as well as a CINE Golden Eagle. Narrated by the painter himself, Enfant Terrible gives audiences Cadmus's view of places like Fire Island and the Fourteenth Street stop on the New York subway; it also shows the eighty-year-old artist at work in his Connecticut studio on a figure drawing of his longtime lover (and model) Jon Andersson.
Much to Sutherland's surprise, San Francisco...rejected the film as too "intimate" for its film festival. Now knee-deep in footage documenting his next artist, social realist Jack Levine, the filmmaker has made a deal with Arts and Entertainment, Hearst/ABC's cable network, for national showings of Enfant early this year. Having mortgaged his home to finish the film, Sutherland is crossing his fingers now that "perhaps I can buy my house back."
- Robert Flaherty Film Seminar- 1987
- Finalist, Banff Television Festival- 1987
- Best of Festival, Tyneside International Film Festival England-1986
- Berlin International Film Festival- 1985
- First Prize, Hemisfilm International Film Festival- 1985
- CINE Golden Eagle- 1984
- Finalist, American Film Festival- 1984
- Honorable Mention, National Educational Film Festival- 1984
- Silver Venus Award, Houston International Film Festival- 1983
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