GLR July-August 2022

the nude, done in a Surrealist style. In jest, they called themselves PaJaMa, taking the first two letters from each of their first names. The photos, which flaunted their alternative sexual lives, also documented the burgeoning gay culture on Fire Island. (They also went to Provincetown.) They gave these images to their friends and lovers as gifts until they started to appear in galleries, where they were now fetching thousands of dollars. A frequent visitor and willing participant in these photo out ings was the dashing artist George Tooker (1920–2011), who became the vertex in another love triangle. Cadmus supposedly boasted that “I had Jerry in the daytime and George at night.” Tooker declared that, while French and Cadmus were crucial for his finding his own artistic style, Tooker had to break up with Cadmus, who always forced French into the equation, while Tooker wanted exclusivity. As this drama unfolded, Lincoln Kirstein (1907–1996), the influential arts patron at the epicenter of NewYork’s network of queer artists, entered their lives. Kirstein, who had cofounded the New York City Ballet, was instantly smitten with Cadmus’ impeccable manners, perfect face, and striking blue eyes. The fact that Kirstein’s infatuation was apparently unrequited didn’t diminish his patronage of Cadmus . Aware that the artist’s work wasn’t commercially viable because of its daring subject mat ter, Kirstein acquired many pieces and commissioned others, such as a scandalous see-through costume for a hunky dancer in the 1937 ballet Filling Station . In a stunning move calculated to allow him to stay close to Cadmus, Kirstein married the latter’s sister Fidelma in 1941, soon after they met. Their marriage lasted until her death fifty years later, but Kirstein continued to have sex openly with men all his life. This is the period in which Cadmus’ near erasure in the art world began. Despite his success, art critics ignored him start ing in the 1940s and continuing until gay studies resuscitated

his work in the 1980s. A key reason is that American art shifted during the postwar years away from representation and toward Abstract Expressionism. Artists like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko eclipsed Cadmus’works of magical realism, which were even accused of being un-American. Nevertheless, this dismissal by the cognoscenti did not clip Cadmus’ artistic wings. Instead, he thrived, creating works that exposed the sexual hypocrisy of his time with hiding-in-plain sight queer images that continued to provoke the conservative public. Remarked Cadmus: “I like to exaggerate, rub people’s noses [in it] so they notice.” The obsession with sailors resumed with Fantasia on a Theme by Dr. S. (1946), where a semi-nude sailor is the focus of all the attention, including a group of phal lic lights around his head. § C ADMUS ’ TIME IN E UROPE in the early 1950s greatly influenced his subsequent work. In Finistere (1952), he directs our attention to the insertion of a suggestive bicycle seat into the derriere of a young man who’s holding a huge loaf of bread while he looks at a potential male partner pulling his tight swimsuit down. In Bar Italia (1955) he depicts the American tourist invasion of postwar Italy in a boisterous scene into which he inserts a self-portrait gawking at the crotch of a burly local man as well as a group of gay men who could be talking about someone’s penis size. In The Bath (1951), two nude men unabashedly share a bathroom as they carry out their ablutions. This scene of gay domesticity, probably the first in modern Western art, anticipated David Hockney’s scenes of gay life by more than a decade. One of Cadmus’ most ambitious works is What I Believe (1948), which was inspired by a 1938 essay by E. M. Forster, with whom he forged a close friendship. Cadmus explains how “I sat on the window ledge drawing Forster’s portrait as he read

What I Believe , 1948. McNay Art Museum.

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