Emil Cadoo

(1926 - 2002)

Emil Cadoo was one of the defining photographers of the Sixties. His semi-storied career perfectly exemplifies that decade’s lust for change and its commitment to experiment. Cadoo’s work ranged from high level photojournalism at Life, to Beat generation portraiture, to artistically ambitious and sexually ambiguous erotica.

Born in 1926 in the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, in 1960 Cadoo emigrated to Paris and has lived there until his death in 2002 (except for an extended visit to New York in 1965, when he created his classic Children of Harlem series). Cadoo’s energy and personality put him at the center of the expatriate community and he encountered and photographed many of the most important artistic and literary lights of his time. Like his friend and subject James Baldwin, he found easier acceptance in Paris as an African American and as a homosexual. Paris was also a congenial atmosphere for Cadoo’s interest in erotica; it was there that he created the work he is best known for: Sexus and his book covers and portfolios for Barney Rosset’s Grove Press and Evergreen Review (a cause célèbre in the fight against artistic censorship).

Much of Cadoo’s work was devoted to creating double exposures ¾ photomontages made in the artist’s eye—often combining images of statues, the human form and botanical forms, with more abstract images of varying textures. Often the double exposures involved erotica, but he did not exclusively rely on the erotic. (One of his best-known images, the cover of Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers, is a simple, elegant, almost somber montage of foliage and a face.)

Following Cadoo’s first New York exhibition at the Janos Gat Gallery in 2001, his photographs were exhibited at various institutions, such as the Houston Museum of Fine Art (Edith Piaf) and the de Menil Collection (Children of Harlem). Both museums have a large selection of Cadoo’s work, and so does the Getty in Los Angeles.

– Glenn O’Brien

2022

SEXUS

First published in 1949 and banned for years, Sexus is acclaimed as one of Henry Miller's (1891-1980) greatest works. Sexus is the daring first tome of The Rosy Crucifixion, a trilogy that also includes Plexus and Nexus. In this loosely autobiographical series, Miller presents a memoire of his tumultuous life, rich in inner experiences and adventures. Sexus is a story of great love which, through the unforgettable Mara-Mona, acts as a revelation to Miller. It is also the lucid analysis of the formidable crisis which shook him to his core and which catalyzed who he became. Certain passages, very raw and of an exacerbated sexuality, engender provocation. This ardent and powerful work gives testimony to the richness and truth of Miller's deeply personal creative life.

On June 12, 1964 a Federal Court in Brooklyn put an end to one of the more bizarre episodes of censorship in America's history. On that day, three judges condemned police seizure at the bindery of 21,000 copies of Evergreen Review April/May No. 32 as "unconstitutional" and ordered their immediate return to the publisher. The county's District Attorney had deemed the publication obscene. The issue contained works by Norman Mailer, Jean Genet, William Burroughs, Bryon Gysin, Michael McClure and Karl Shapiro–a who's who of the day's practitioners of perceived outrage–but what provoked the seizure was a portfolio of erotic photographs by one Emil Cadoo created for a memorable 1963 edition of Henry Miller's Sexus published in Paris.

Inquiries welcome. Exhibition catalogue available.

2001

Works from the Sixties

Cadoo was a painterly photographer, whose experimental imagistic duets contain magical juxtapositions of image and texture. Always an improviser, Cadoo’s Children of Harlem, Sexus and Statue series are filled with image upon image that attest to the photographer’s prescient sense of rhythm and harmony. This, and the sense of timing exhibited in his portraits⎯which always seem to find the syncopated moment⎯mark him as a rare visual artist whose mastery of time and texture relates conceptually to the classical art of Jazz.

Inquiries welcome. Exhibition catalogue available.