The Parrish Art Museum - East End Stories

Thrown into the national spotlight in 1934 because of controversy surrounding a Works Progress Administration (WPA) painting, Paul Cadmus garnered more attention than he intended. Born in Manhattan in 1904, Cadmus studied at both the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League before traveling to Europe for two years to further his artistic education. Upon his return in 1933, Cadmus joined the WPA and represented his particular vision of contemporary American life. In the painting The Fleet’s In!, Cadmus satirically depicted sailors on leave. He represented the figures engaging in somewhat lewd and raucous behavior, including an allusion to a homosexual encounter in the background of the scene. The work was so controversial that the Secretary of the Navy confiscated the painting. The scandal and attention from the press placed Paul Cadmus on the national radar. He continued to depict scenes that commented on contemporary social reality and were filled with figures with great torsion, movement, musculature, and emotion. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, along with his friends, the artist couple Jared and Margaret French, Cadmus summered in Fire Island. There the group staged a series of photographs of themselves and friends. Cadmus later dubbed the collective PaJaMa, from the letters in the first name of each member. After World War II, he shifted styles from the social realism of earlier works to magic realism, and eventually focused most of his attention on drawing the male nude. Although championed by the gay rights movement in the 1970s, Cadmus has distanced himself from the identification as an homosexual artist, stating, “I do not like to be labeled ‘gay artist Cadmus.’ Gayness is not the raison d’être of my work.”