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Margaret French

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Margaret French
Margaret French and Paul Cadmus, Fire Island, c.1941
Born
Margaret Hoening

1906
Hoboken, New Jersey, US
Died1998 (aged 92)
New York City, US
Alma materArt Students League
Known forPainting, photography PaJaMa
SpouseJared French

Margaret French (nee Hoening, 1906–1998) was an American artist, best known for her photographs as part of the photo collective PaJaMa.[1][2]

Education

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After attending Smith College, she settled in New York, where she attended a formal artistic education at the Art Students League. There she met Paul Cadmus and Jared French.[2]

Life and work

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French was a magical realist painter,[3] and also produced etchings, although her best known works were made as part of a collective, personal and professional, with Jared French and Paul Cadmus.[4]

In 1937 she married Jared French, who had a sexual relationship with Paul Cadmus. Despite the marriage, Jared continued his relationship with Cadmus. Together the trio formed the photo collective PaJaMa, (Paul Jared Margaret).[5][2]

Using Margaret's camera, they took pictures of themselves, their artist friends, and their gay acquaintances, arranging and staging their motifs on the beaches along Provincetown, for the next eight years.[5]

Some of the people photographed were photographer George Platt Lynes, Christopher Isherwood, George Tooker, Cadmus' sister and artist Fidelma, artist Bernard Perlin and Monroe Wheeler, then director of the exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art.[2]

In the 1940s, she and her husband befriended E.M. Forster, who in 1947 stayed at their home while visiting New York, and spent time with them in Provincetown. Forster returned in 1949 for another visit.[4]

French's paintings have been described as symbolic and dreamlike.[4] She produced few known works,[6] but her paintings show clear influences from French and Cadmus, especially the time-consuming paintings in egg tempera, which were a technique that Cadmus and Jared French also used. When Cadmus began a relationship with the young artist George Tooker in 1944, the trio became a quartet, and Tooker is featured in many of PaJaMa's photographs, such as Margaret French, George Tooker and Jared French, Nantucket,[7] and George Tooker at 5 St. Luke’s Place with Paul Cadmus and Jared French in Mirror.[8]

Margaret French died 1998 in New York, at the age of 92.[5]

Collections

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French's work is held in several museum collections including the Smithsonian American Art Museum,[9] the Museum of Modern Art,[1] the Whitney Museum of American Art,[6] the Hood Museum,[10] the Munson Williams Proctor Art Museum[11] among others.

References

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  1. ^ a b "PaJaMa on MoMA". Moma.org. Retrieved 16 June 2022.
  2. ^ a b c d Packard, Cassie. "The Sensual, Surreal, and Queer PaJaMa Collective". Hyperallergic. Retrieved 3 July 2022.
  3. ^ Smith, Roberta (5 November 2015). "PaJaMa, Whose Photographs Breathed Eroticism". The New York Times. Retrieved 3 July 2022.
  4. ^ a b c Earnest, Jarrett; Carmack, Kara (2020). The Young and Evil Queer Modernism in New York, 1930–1955. New York: David Zwirner Books. p. 138. ISBN 9781644230268. Retrieved 3 July 2022.
  5. ^ a b c "Images from Provincetown". Americanart.si.edu. Retrieved 16 June 2022.
  6. ^ a b "Works of Magaret French". Whitney.org. Retrieved 16 June 2022.
  7. ^ PaJaMa, Margaret French, George Tooker and Jared French, Nantucket, c. 1946.
  8. ^ George Platt Lynes, George Tooker at 5 St. Luke’s Place with Paul Cadmus and Jared French in Mirror, c. 1940
  9. ^ "Margaret French". Smithsonian American Art Museum. Retrieved 3 July 2022.
  10. ^ "PAJAMA, American, active 1937 - 1950 Margaret Hoening French, American, 1906 - 1998". Hood Museum. Retrieved 3 July 2022.
  11. ^ "Gandegg Hut, Night - Margaret Hoening French". MWPAI Online Collections. Retrieved 3 July 2022.
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