Wright Auction

The PaJaMa photographic collective emerged from what writer Cassie Packard dubs the “erotic-familial-artistic triad” of its founding artists: PAul Cadmus, JAred French, and MArgaret French, nèe Hoening. Cadmus and Jared French became lovers after they met in 1926 at the Arts Student League, and French would marry Margaret Hoening in 1937. Together, the three young artists began to stage portraits of themselves and their close community—usually in the summer, while vacationing to Fire Island, Provincetown, or Nantucket. PaJaMa’s friends were generally, as Roberta Smith noted, “young, beautiful and gay,” and included George Tooker, George Platt Lynes, Monroe Wheeler, and Paul Cadmus's sister Fidelma and her husband, Lincoln Kirstein.

“PaJaMa’s photographs transport us to a surreal, soporific domain where escape, respite, and pleasure reign supreme,” writes Packard. “In the suspended moment of the photograph and the conditions constructed around its making, the compulsory heteronormativity of the artists’ time faded into the background, and the dark shadow cast by World War II and the Holocaust seemed to retreat.”