THE RELEVANT QUEER: Paul Cadmus, Erotic Painter of the Satiric and Gay Domesticity Born December 17, 1904

“I wasn’t trying to foster gay rights, I recorded what I saw and thought and knew.”

TRQ: Paul Cadmus, Born Dec. 17, 1904

Painter of the erotic and satiric, Paul Cadmus was born on December 17, 1904. He is known for provocatively confronting heteronormativity and pushing the bounds of acceptable taste. As a Magic Realist painter, Cadmus brought the homoerotic into urban realism through using innuendo, caricature, and suggestive gaze. As a model he posed nude with other artists and dancers in collaborations with photographers like George Platt Lynes and Jared French.

Cadmus was born into an artistic family on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. His mother, Maria Latasa, illustrated children’s books. His father, Egbert Cadmus, was a commercial artist who studied with Robert Henri.

In 1920, he enrolled at the National Academy of Design at age 15. Cadmus studied there for six years. Afterwards, he started work as a commercial illustrator in advertising. 1928, he studied life drawing at the Art Students League of New York.

During these years Cadmus socialized with New York artists and met Jared French, who became his lover. Together they traveled to Europe in 1931. Having spent time in France and Spain, Cadmus and French return to the United States in 1933.

On his return, Cadmus worked for the Public Works of Art Project, later the WPA, an art program associated with The New Deal. Painting murals for government buildings, Cadmus developed an illustrative, realist style common to many of the WPA projects of the time.

When the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. exhibited his painting The Fleet’s In (1933) in a show of PWAP art, Cadmus attracted controversy.

In the painting, with his characteristic use of caricature and suggestion, Cadmus wraps his intoxicated sailors and civilians (male and female) in an atmosphere of debauchery. Surrounded by a sea of fleshy bodies with highlighted curves, a well-dressed man wearing a red tie (a gay fashion signal) offers a sailer a cigarette. Between them sprawls a passed-out sailor whose crotch is openly vulnerable.

Cadmus created a scandal. In one of the first acts of government censorship, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Henry Latrobe Roosevelt removed the painting from the show and kept it at his home. After Roosevelt’s death, the painting was shipped to the prominent yet secretive Alibi Club in Washington, where it stayed for several decades. In 1981, the painting was shown at the Wolfsonian Museum before arriving at the Naval Historical Center.

Similarly, his painting Coney Island (1935) brought threats of legal action against the Witney Museum of Art by Brooklyn realtors, and his Pocahontas and John Smith (1938) mural was altered to obscure his emphasis on Native American genitalia.

”I believe in exaggeration. People’s noses should be rubbed in all sorts of things – pleasant and unpleasant.”
— Paul Cadmus

Through the 1930s, Cadmus produced homoerotic works depicting gay cruising, longing and seduction, including YMCA Locker Room (1933), Shore Leave (1933), and Greenwich Village Cafeteria (1934). In his paintings, Cadmus gives viewers a look inside 1930s urban gay subculture life.

By the time of his exhibition at Midtown Galleries in 1937, Cadmus achieved enough notoriety to attract over 7,000 people to the show.

Cadmus also joined a circle of gay men who played increasingly influential roles in New York City’s art world. Writer Christopher Isherwood, the poet W. H. Auden and E. M. Forster were among his closest friends.

In 1937, he and French joined French’s wife in forming PaJaMa (“Paul, Jared, Margaret”) a photographic collective. Photographing themselves and friends clothed and nude, they traveled continuously between New York, Fire Island, Provincetown, and Truro.

In 1938, Cadmus and French posed for celebrated gay photographer George Platt Lynes in intimate and sometimes erotically exhibitionistic photographs.

By the mid-1940’s, Cadmus had taken a new lover, painter George Tooker. The couple maintained a relationship with the Frenches, as they gave Cadmus a house on their property in Hartland, Vermont.

“I wasn’t trying to foster gay rights, I recorded what I saw and thought and knew.” — Paul Cadmus

In 1948 Cadmus drew inspiration from Forster’s humanistic “What I Believe” essay prizing tolerance, good temper, sympathy, and human relationships, to produce a painting by the same name. The painting depicts friends and queer figures like Forster and Isherwood as intellectual heroes.

In 1965, Cadmus met and started a relationship with Jon Anderson, a former cabaret star. For 35 years Anderson was Cadmus’s friend, lover, partner and muse. His paintings like The Haircut (1986) celebrate the ordinary domestic life of a gay couple. Despite having stopped painting in his last years, Cadmus continued to draw Andersson and their life in Weston, Connecticut.

Common in the rise and fall of art movements, Cadmus’s style of realism fell out of favour by the 1950s. However, a newly empowered LGBTQ+ community embraced him later in life. Also, artistic tastes had shifted back in favor of representational art.

In 1984, Lincoln Kirstein published an illustrated biography of Cadmus. The next year, PBS produced Paul Cadmus, L’Enfant Terrible at 80 (1985). In 1989, The Drawings of Paul Cadmus was published. In 1996, he had exhibits at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the D. C. Moore Gallery.

On December 12, 1999, just days before his 95th birthday, Cadmus died at home from natural causes.

About the Authors:

Troy Wise is currently a PhD student at UAL Central St Martins and teaches fashion and graphic design at London College of Contemporary Arts. His background is in marketing and he is founder and co-editor of Image Amplified. He lives in, and is continually fascinated by, the city of London.

Rick Guzman earned his most recent MA at UAL Central St Martins in Applied Imagination in the Creative Industries. He currently holds two MA’s and an MBA in the New Media, Journalism and International Business fields. Co-editor at Image Amplified since its start, he lives in London, is fascinated by history and is motivated by continuing to learn and explore.

*

Sources:

GLBTQ Archive

NY Times

CT Post

Pink Triangle

NYTimes