Alina Cohen
Paul Cadmus, The Fleet’s In, 1934. © 2018 Jon F. Anderson, Estate of
Paul Cadmus / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
The chorus of poorly
behaved naval officers in Paul Cadmus’s 1934 painting The Fleet’s In! launched
a political brawl that extended far beyond the frame. The work features a wild
scene of debauchery: sailors who are either passed out from drinking, or
smoking cigarettes and heckling well-heeled women. Unsurprisingly, the U.S.
Navy did not appreciate the publicity. Before the Corcoran Gallery of Art in
Washington, D.C., could publicly display the painting in a show slated for that
year, retired naval officer Hugh Rodman demanded its confiscation.
In a letter
published by the Washington Evening Star, Rodman complained to Claude Swanson,
Secretary of the Navy: “This is an unwarranted insult to the enlisted personnel
of our Navy, is utterly without foundation in fact, and evidently originated in
the sordid, depraved imagination of someone who has no conception of actual
conditions in our service.” The paper also ran a photograph of Cadmus’s work.
Publications around the country picked up both the image and the controversy.
The painting became a succès de scandale. Soon, Cadmus was a star.
To be fair, Cadmus
was primed for aesthetic success from a young age. The artist was born in 1904
in New York City to an illustrator mother and a commercial lithographer father.
Cadmus enrolled in the National Academy of Design at 15 years old, and soon
after graduation, he began working at an advertising agency. Yet adventure and
fine art beckoned: In 1931, Cadmus began a tour of Europe with his friend and
fellow artist Jared French (who also became his lover). During the two-year
jaunt, Cadmus renounced his commercial ambitions.
Cadmus returned to
the U.S. when his funds began to run out, and he became one of the first
artists employed by the New Deal Program known as the Public Works of Art
Project (PWAP). This means that, ironically, the American government itself
commissioned The Fleet’s In!. Simply tasked with making art that focused on the
“American scene,” most of the participating PWAP artists veered toward more
conservative figuration. Much of the work was soon forgotten, though two of the
day’s major artists—Ben Shahn and Grant Wood—created notable murals.
If The Fleet’s In!
became notorious for its exaggerated sexuality, inebriated figures, and
unflattering portrayal of military men, one potentially inflammatory element
escaped public debate: its latent homoeroticism. Over the supine body of one
drunken sailor, a well-coiffed blond civilian with a red tie and ringed fingers
offers another sailor a light for his extended cigarette. The former
character’s sartorial choices subtly coded him as gay, and the exchange
signaled a come-on.
Throughout his
career, Cadmus obliquely depicted homosexuality as he paid keen attention to
the male form. In Jerry (1931), the artist painted his lover, Jared French,
bare-chested in bed. The rumpled sheets suggest a recent sexual encounter,
while the close-up perspective indicates an intimacy far beyond that of the
typical artist-model relationship. The Bath (1951) features two nude men
sharing a bathroom, with an emphasis on the toned musculature of their
buttocks.
In a 1998 article
for Art Journal, Richard Meyer wrote that Cadmus’s unique mixture of satire and
idealization enabled him to depict homoeroticism as early as the 1930s—a time
when it was virtually invisible within the public sphere of American painting,
and all but unspeakable within the official discourses of art criticism.
If Grant Wood,
painting in Iowa, had to conceal his homosexuality, the East Coast was more
amenable to Cadmus’s preferences. French married Margaret Hoenig in 1937, and
she not only allowed her husband to continue seeing his lover, but welcomed him
on their Fire Island vacations. There, the lusty trio formed what became known
as the PaJaMa photography collective, taking black-and-white shots out on the
beach. They offered a Surrealist-tinged focus on the body and the geometries of
their sandy landscape.
Throughout his
painting career, Cadmus mostly stayed true to colorful, cartoonish scenes
inspired by Renaissance paintings. As further evidence of his old-school
predilections, he painted with the classical and time-consuming egg tempera
technique. Meyer tells Artsy that Cadmus’s work underwent a major shift in the
1940s. While satire reigned throughout his paintings from the ’30s, the next
decade brought work that was, according to Meyer, “more openly dreamy, informed
by Surrealism and magical realism.”
In this vein, Cadmus
painted the seven deadly sins as grotesque, fantastical creatures between 1945
and 1949. Threads resembling spaghetti seep from the torn stomach for nude,
overstuffed Gluttony (1949). The androgynous Lust (1945) looks suggestively at
the viewer, hands cupped around what seems to be electrified, genderless
genitals. “He was aggressive in his work so he could be gentle in his life,”
says Meyer. In his paintings, Cadmus “could register his judgments and his
fears, pleasures, and desires as well as his stress in modern life.”
Cadmus considered
human morality and its antitheses—among them consumption, excess, vanity, and
thoughtlessness. Meyer met the artist before his 1999 death, and he remembers
him as kind and humane. He believes “The Seven Deadly Sins” allowed Cadmus to
push his work past satire and into the realm of monstrosity.
While Cadmus worked
steadily within his instantly recognizable style, Abstract Expressionism began
overtaking figuration as the art world’s dominant mode. In the 1940s and ’50s,
critical favor turned towards the innovations of Jackson Pollock, Willem de
Kooning, and their coterie. If art history has continued to privilege their
brand of gestural painting within narratives of American art, Meyer proposes an
alternate story in which Cadmus has a more prominent place.
In his Art Journal
article, Meyer reminds readers that Cadmus participated in 37 annual and
biennial exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, “making him one of
the most frequently exhibited artists in the history of that ongoing curatorial
project.” When the Whitney’s new Renzo Piano–designed building opened in 2015,
its inaugural show, “America is Hard to See,” featured Cadmus’s 1938 Sailors
and Floosies. In the painting, three sailors cavort with heavily made-up women
in a dark, ominous landscape. A sheet of newsprint lies on the ground, its
headline revealing that thousands had just died in an air raid. Just four years
after Cadmus painted his more-lighthearted The Fleet’s In!, global disaster
loomed. The following year, European tensions would erupt into World War II.
The painting suggests a more overtly political message than was usual for
Cadmus, its subjects primed for fatal conflict.
Cadmus created a
thick wood frame for the work, marked with what appears to be graffiti: stick
figures, a drawing of a ship, and scrawled names and phrases (“mind your own
damn business,” “you are a jackass”) surround the central image. “Usually, we
think of the frame as the place where reality asserts itself,” Meyer says. In a
Surrealist vein, Cadmus blurred fact and fantasy, extending the fiction of his
painting beyond the canvas.
Despite the initial
ire that accompanied Cadmus’s The Fleet’s In!, the work eventually found a home
at a prominent gentlemen’s club. Back in 1934, at retired admiral Rodman’s
command, Henry Latrobe Roosevelt, Assistant Secretary of the Navy (and cousin
of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt) marched into the Corcoran, took the
painting, and brought it to his own home. When he died in 1936, he bequeathed
it to Washington’s Alibi Club, where it was enjoyed by an exclusive group of
male politicians, Supreme Court justices, and other local elites. In 1980, the
government reclaimed the painting, sending it to the Navy Department Art Collection
at the Washington Navy Yard.
Throughout its
tumultuous history, The Fleet’s In! has evolved beyond a wry depiction of bawdy
sailors. Cadmus is now celebrated as a visionary within the gay art community,
his painting a key work in the history of American censorship. When the
Corcoran cancelled an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs in 1989
for its explicit homosexual content, the furor over The Fleet’s In! suddenly
seemed like a sadly prescient moment—a reminder that history inevitably repeats
itself.
Alina Cohen is a Staff Writer at Artsy.
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-paul-cadmuss-homoerotic-military-painting-launched-national-scandal?utm_medium=email&utm_source=15511672-newsletter-editorial-daily-12-24-18&utm_campaign=editorial&utm_content=st-V
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