Cadmus, Paul

Paul Cadmus, (born Dec. 17, 1904, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died Dec. 12, 1999, Weston, Conn.), American artist who created paintings, drawings, and prints in a figurative, near-illustrational style during a career that spanned some 70 years.

Cadmus decided upon a career in art when he was still a young boy and enrolled in art classes at New York City’s National Academy of Design (now the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts) when he was 15. He studied there until 1926 and at the Art Students League for the following two years and then went to work at an advertising agency. Between 1931 and 1933 he lived with artist Jared French. The two traveled to the island of Majorca, Spain, and there Cadmus created the well-known paintings Shore Leave and YMCA Locker Room (both 1933).

Upon his return to the United States, Cadmus gained employment with the Public Works of Art Project. It was for that program that he painted The Fleet’s In! (1934), a work of social satire that depicts sailors on shore leave and contains elements of prostitution, homoeroticism, and drunkenness. The work infuriated navy officials, and it was pulled from an exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., in 1934 and was not displayed publicly again until 1981. Controversy surrounded a number of Cadmus’s other paintings—such as Coney Island (1934), displayed at New York City’s Whitney Museum of American Art in 1935 and interpreted by Brooklyn, N.Y., realtors as an insult to their neighbourhood—and Cadmus’s contract for a post office mural project was cancelled because of the sardonicism of the scenes he sketched in 1936. The resulting nationwide publicity fascinated the public, and in 1937 more than 7,000 people attended his first one-man show at Midtown Galleries in New York City.

Although the post-World War II art world paid Cadmus little attention, he continued working steadily. His work was represented in most American art museums, and he was included in several prestigious group shows over the years. Among his other notable works were Sailors and Floosies (1938), The Seven Deadly Sins series (1945–49), and the Subway Symphony series (1975–76). In 1980 Cadmus was made an academician of the National Academy of Design.