Paul Cadmus; Artist Shocked Many With Homoerotic Themes

Paul Cadmus, figurative, satirical American artist who first gained fame--and notoriety--with his Depression-era “The Fleet’s In,” a painting roundly denounced by a Navy official as the depiction of “a disreputable drunken brawl” by an artist with a “sordid, depraved imagination,” has died. He was 94.

Cadmus, who earned a strong following but never major status in American art history, died Sunday at his home in Weston, Conn.

“I never aimed to be controversial,” the handsome Cadmus stated in the 1984 documentary “Paul Cadmus: Enfant Terrible at 80.” The film was shown at film festivals, on local television channels and in 1985 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

But at the same time, Cadmus never seemed too unhappy when his lusty, homoerotic and sometimes brutal pseudo-classic tableaux caused some viewers to wince.

“People’s noses should be rubbed in all sorts of things--pleasant and unpleasant,” he said in the documentary.

As for “The Fleet’s In,” which rocketed Cadmus to fame at the age of 29, Adm. Hugh Rodman’s complaint succeeded in getting the painting, done under auspices of the Public Works of Art Project, pulled from the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The painting remained under close wraps for half a century. In 1934, Col. Henry Latrobe Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the Navy and a cousin of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, declared the picture “will forever be out of sight,” took it home and later bequeathed it to Washington’s private Alibi Club, which hung it over a fireplace. Rescued by an art historian in the early 1980s, it has since been displayed in the Navy Museum and lent out for temporary exhibit.

A similar painting, “Sailors and Floozies,” stirred up another ruckus when it was exhibited in San Francisco.

Other paintings--”Coney Island,” “Subway Symphony,” “Venus and Adonis,” “Seven Deadly Sins” and “Herrin Massacre,” which depicted the slaughter of strike-breaking miners--helped solidify Cadmus’ reputation as the Robert Mapplethorpe of his era.

The term “magic realism,” a phrase coined in the 1940s to describe meticulous style coupled with fantastic or even surreal narration, was often used to describe Cadmus’ paintings, which also smacked of Old Masters Renaissance revisionism.

Born in New York, the son of a lithographer and children’s book illustrator, Cadmus began studies at the National Academy of Design by age 15. He later studied at the Art Students League.

He worked in commercial art until he became the lover of painter Jared French, and the two went to live in Majorca. It was there Cadmus, working in his characteristic egg tempera, painted the bawdy “Shore Leave” and “YMCA Locker Room,” a veritable zoo of semi-nude men.

Returning to the United States in 1933, Cadmus began painting for the Public Works of Art Project, forerunner of the Works Progress Administration, one of the social programs designed to lift artists and others out of Depression joblessness.

Cadmus staged his first one-man show in 1937 at Midtown Galleries in Manhattan. The headlined controversy over his early paintings had an effect: More than 7,000 people attended the show.

The painter’s life and career quieted after the turbulent 1930s, and he continued his small but steady flow of work, producing many drawings but no more than 150 canvases. In the documentary, Cadmus candidly admitted he did more drawings than paintings because they were “more salable, less demanding.”

“I’m slow and lazy,” he said with the wit evident in his paintings, “but how much does one have to say anyway?”

In 1981, Miami University Art Museum in Oxford, Ohio, organized a Cadmus career retrospective that later traveled to other small museums in New York and Connecticut.

Earlier this year, although he often told his admiring fans, “I wasn’t trying to foster gay rights,” Cadmus received the first international arts award from Pridefest America, an annual gay cultural festival, in Philadelphia.

He was elected an academician of the National Academy and member of both the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His work is represented in collections of such museums as New York’s Whitney and Museum of Metropolitan Art, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, the Chicago Art Institute and the Seattle Museum.

Cadmus is survived by his companion and model, Jon Anderson.