American Art Collaborative

Public Dock depicts a group of vacationers recoiling from an electric eel that a hapless fisherman has caught. Paul Cadmus conveyed the boisterous atmosphere of an afternoon at the beach: the crush of bodies, the flap of flags on yardarms, the roar of a biplane overhead. A blowsy woman with bottle-blond hair and vivid make-up topples backward with a small child, and a bathing beauty at the lower right realizes what she is swimming with. Cadmus created this as part of his Aspects of Suburban Life series, which was intended for a post office mural. Administrators didn’t appreciate Cadmus’s humor, however, and the project was abandoned
“I’m called a realist painter, yet I don’t know how realistic I am---sometimes magic realist, sometimes symbolic realist, in any case always representational. I want people to know what I’m saying.” Cadmus, quoted in Kirstein, Paul Cadmus, 199