American Art Collaborative

Golf is from Paul Cadmus’s Aspects of Suburban Life series, which was commissioned by the Treasury Relief Art Project for a post office mural that was never completed. The paunchy golfers in this painting are more concerned with jawboning and smoking cigars than they are with perfecting their swings, and two of them appear preoccupied with the young, muscular caddy who waits to do their bidding. The caddy wears a poorer man’s clothes, and Cadmus included holes in the young man’s shoes to emphasize the distance between his social class and theirs
“I never aimed to be controversial. I suppose it was just my objection to society as it was.” Cadmus, quoted in Kirstein, Paul Cadmus, 199