Recently I read an article online about Paul Cadmus. I recognized one of his most famous paintings as one I bought as a child on a bookmark at the smithsonian! 'Bar Italia' was painted in Italy while he lived there in the mid 50's and satorizes the tourist in Italy. I think you can see a few similarities between his style of figure painting and John Currin's whom I blogged about earlier. While even more cartooney, it's the same modern but realism style of sketching figures and capturing their essence.
Paul had a very controversal career -I think you can see why and how that went in this painting. In this closeup, he included himself -he is in between the gigilo and the fat guy, his face leaning on his hand. I love learning little things like that about artists - it's sort of like Hitchcock doing cameos in his own films!
