GLR July-August 2022

ESSAY Paul Cadmus’ Art of Cruising I GNACIO D ARNAUDE

W HEN PAUL CADMUS died in 1999, days before his 95th birthday, there was barely a ripple in the art world. It’s hard to recall that 65 years earlier he had been the enfant terrible of the art world when his painting of frolicking sailors, The Fleet’s In! , caused an epic scandal. This is the story of Cadmus’meteoric rise and subsequent erasure, which has complicated his place in art history and obscured his work for younger generations. Throughout his life, Cadmus rejected the label of “gay artist,” asking that we focus on the quality of his work as art. Nevertheless, his art was inextricably linked to his life and thus includes references to his male lovers, his love triangles, and the gay places that he frequented, such as Fire Island beaches, the New York City docks, and the YMCA. A son of artists who encouraged his early artistic inclina

first mature painting, titled Jerry (1931), which was a portrait of French. In this daring work, Cadmus’ lover engages our gaze, bare-chested on tousled sheets that suggest a recent sexual en counter. With this visual manifesto, Cadmus alchemized their bond as artists. French is holding a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses , which was banned in the U.S. for obscenity and thus symbolized their quest for freedom of expression. Cadmus had written that “many Renaissance artists were queer before the emergence of queer identity,” a sentiment that was confirmed when they visited Luca Signorelli’s frescoes (1504) for the Orvieto cathedral in Italy. The revolutionary, openly homoerotic murals, a key influence for Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, left an indelible imprint on Cadmus that stayed with him for the rest of his career. The two artists settled on the Spanish island of Mallorca where, perhaps out of nostalgia, Cadmus created unequivocally American scenes that combined a Renaissance-inflected style with contemporary satire and brazenly gay subjects. Risking artistic suicide, these landmark works reintroduced the ho moerotic beauty of the male body in art after centuries of forced exile. In Mallorcan Fishermen (1932), a wrestler’s leg suggests by its positioning the extended erection of a reclin ing onlooker. YMCA Locker Room (1933) depicts an older man propositioning a young hunk whose scanties barely con ceal his private parts. Shore Leave (1933) features a menagerie of sailors who interact with sexually ambiguous female fig ures while a gay pickup takes place in the background. A beefy sailor with bulging buttocks in skintight pants echoes the sexually charged male figures in Signorelli’s frescoes. In Greenwich Village Cafeteria (1934), a man with painted nails seduces the viewer into joining him in the rest room. In Gilding the Acrobats (1935), a circus theme cloaks its nakedness and a clear suggestion of fellatio, which is what Cadmus was interested in. This is when scandal began to raise its ugly head. When the Whitney Museum unveiled the satirical Coney Island (1935), featuring a young man mesmer ized by a bodybuilder and a world of uncouth behavior, a Coney Island trade group threatened a civil suit. A few years later, Sailors and Floozies (1939), in which a male-looking woman admires a gorgeous sailor posing as an Odalisque, caused a na tional scandal. The painting was removed and later remounted at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Exhibition. § J UST WHEN THEIR MONEY and their passports were running out, Cadmus received a letter from his sister telling him about a gov ernment-sponsored New Deal program called Public Works of Art Project. They returned to the U.S. immediately, where Cad mus became one of the project’s first participants. Instead of creating a typical American scene, Cadmus submitted The

Jerry , 1931. Toledo Museum of Art.

tions (as well as those of his sister Fidelma), Cadmus was an extraordinary painter who became infamous for his gritty, sex ually charged scenes, which pushed the envelope of acceptabil ity to the breaking point. While studying at New York’s Art Students League, he met the remarkable fellow artist Jared French (1905–88), who became his lover and the most impor tant influence on his work. It was French who encouraged him to abandon commercial work to become a fine artist. Like most American painters at this time, French and Cad mus traveled to Europe to absorb its culture and gain recogni tion for their work. Soon after they arrived, Cadmus painted his Ignacio Darnaude, an art historian and film producer, is currently de veloping the docuseries Hiding in Plain Sight: Breaking the Queer Code in Art.

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