Paul Cadmus is the egg-tempera man. He’s been renowned as a realist painter who uses Renaissance style of painting, which needs small, light strokes application. The procedure enables for few mistakes because when the stroke is ready, it’s hard to change. His Sailors and Floozies epitomize the predilection of the artist for social satire. His usage of tempera, a classical painting medium, as well as the interest in articulating the anatomy and musculature of the human form remembered Italian Renaissance masters; however, his subject matter was modern, even risqué in its mockery of contemporary American life.
The first exhibit of his painting was at the San Francisco World’s Fair at 1940, and quickly incited a national controversy, which led to its elimination from the walls – even though it was reinstalled in the exhibition after two days.
With his painting, Paul Cadmus exaggerates the tight fit of the uniforms of the sailors and the dresses clinging to the bodies of the women to highlight the sexual energy of the scene. The sailor in the front with one arm raised over his head is modeled on the famous Renaissance position of the sleeping faun. His idealized classical beauty is contrasted along with uncouth, harpy-like floozie who hovers over him. Paul Cadmus’ Sailors and Floozies acerbic scenes of carousing sailors create intense debate in their time.
Paul Cadmus was an American painter of Sailors and Floozies (figure 1). He’s sought-after for his egg-tempera masterpieces of social interactions in urban settings. Cadmus also created a lot of highly finished paintings of single nude male figures. His paintings include elements of social critique and eroticism in style often referred as magic realism. Sailors and Floozies is the third painting in his trilogy on the theme of sailors.
In this oil on linen, the artist portrays the romantic theme between sailors. In the foreground, Cadmus illustrates the sailor in white, lying down on the ground while another figure is on top of him. Cadmus’ style of drawing this in painting illustrates his focuses not only on romantic relationships but as well as each figure. Cadmus painted the clothes on figures to be very thin and tight as the muscles are semi-transparent. The rendering of lines and contours define clear bodies parts in the painting. The sailor in white outfit places his right hand on his private area, indicating his sexual desired. The way the artist composition the body of a sailor in white with his left hand over his way while facing the audience could portray as he wants to have physical contacts with the figure on top of him. The artist uses the red, one of the primary colors to draw audience attention. Wearing women’s clothes and have thick layers of makeup on his face, Cadmus define his body by rendering big muscles, and men body type compare to two other figures in the background who are females. The artist purposely painted the homosexual relationship in the foreground while other two couple is heterosexual indicate his main focus and subject are a romantic relationship between two men.
Paul Cadmus painted Sailors and Floozies in 1938. When Cadmus was at the age of 29, his career was rocketed by a stroke of Mapplethorpe-ish luck. His carnal painting, “The Fleet’s In,” a scene of full-bodied sailors and ladies cavorting in drunken revelry, was eliminated from a show at the Corcoran Gallery Art in Washington by the demand of the US Navy (figure 2). Even lustier than The Fleet’s In are two other “sailor” paintings. With “Shore Leave,” burly gobs grope sly bimbos, fleshly urgency stressed by those skin-tight clothes (figure 3). The most explicit of the three, Sailors and Floozies, crawled over by a smirking trumpet, along with other pairs arousing in the background.
According to New York Modern, The Arts, and the City, by Peter M. Rutkoff and William B. Scott, the painter had his art on exhibition at the Whitney “offered sober, critical, and statistical images of contemporary life.” What Paul Cadmus obtained with his painting was very contemporary because he showed something that a lot of people might not even have considered as art and he painted it in a very interesting manner. The painting was scandalous; most critics considered that it was unpatriotic, repulsive and tawdry because it showed drunk sailors through the dawn of the Second World War. It was not the intention of Cadmus though; his picture is more about homoeroticism instead of patriotism.
The acceptance of Whitney of all styles of contemporary American art let it have a much wider range of works with a more eclectic offering. Sailors and Floozies do not follow specific standards of other contemporary formats, but displays vivid and expressive “magic realist” style of Cadmus, as it often termed. The viewer’s eye is attracted in a counterclockwise movement from the reclining sailor, wearing his white dress, where Italian Renaissance art strongly influenced Cadmus that in turn took its lead from ancient Greek and Roman art through a marine who gets with a floozie and rewards him with a slap. More telling details is the front page of the New York Daily News, which sets the scene in historical perspective. Even wrinkled, it’s possible to notice the face of Mussolini on the front page of the paper.
Art and homosexuality feel linked to us according to Christopher Reed, as homosexuals and art asserted their identities around the same time, and in manners, which emphasized their independence from each kind of airtight society. During the 1930s and 1940s, a lot of American artists responded to the World War II and Great Depression with heroic photographs of average people in the Social Realist Style. Cadmus was only artist affiliated along with this movement who committed himself to documenting the experiences of gay people. Gay historians have demonstrated that WW2 was a crucial turning point, which offered opportunities for men to feel and act on same-sex attractions. However, this tolerant environment changed radically after the war, when the goal of the society was return to normalcy at the same time, a renewed emphasis on nuclear family. Men who found their gay desires and had started to create relationships, form relationships and battle for their civil rights discovered themselves prosecuted and persecuted.
Like so many of his works, Sailor and Floozies revive an older, almost medieval system of morality that the painter invokes to cast a satiric eye on his contemporaries. Cadmus depicts the immemorial immorality of women and men as a complex congress of hookers and floozies on the one hand, and soldiers and sailors on the other, all of them gathered in Riverside Park. Although the majority of the innuendo is heterosexual, you will find intimations of homosexuality too. With some exceptions, the figures are loutish and ugly. What the majority of moderns failed to value was that this masterpiece of Cadmus far from being provocative in the way of contemporary art was overpoweringly conservative. Undeniably, it revived the ancient and traditional role of the satirist, who disciplines his contemporaries by evoking them to an early stage of morality. Paul Cadmus wrote “I am a satirist by nature,” and “Satire is the clearest medium I know to express my love of society and my desire, through criticism, to improve it.”
The connection between gay sex and sailors was well established in the United States early last century. The Newport sex scandal linked navy and homosexuality in 1919 and led in a trial in which seventeen sailors were convicted of sodomy. Painters like Cadmus and Charles Demuth frequently depicted sailors in same-sex carousing. The career of Cadmus was established in a scandal in year 1934 when his work, “The Fleet’s In” and Sailors and Floozies was removed from an exhibition. The front-page of the article was “Mr. Cadmus’ Painting Makes Him Famous Overnight,” indicates the entire story. Soon, other satiric masterpieces by Cadmus including “The Fleet’s In,” “Aspects of Suburban Life,” and “Seeing the New” was displayed in newspapers and art publications.
But the significance and excellence of Sailors and Floozies consist in the fact that, even though rooted in the old masters, it appeared entirely modern, because Paul was able to adapt his influences, even as he derived and learned from them. It’s not just in the crosshatchings and figural types, which define the clothing of his figures, but more in the manner in which he has created them, separating the canvas into two halves.
In 1934, the painting of Cadmus, The Fleet’s In, portrayed the pleasures of uniformed sailors. It was also eliminated from an exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery at Washington due to complaints by Navy officers. The “disreputable drunken brawl” came from the “sordid, depraved imagination of someone who has no conception of actual conditions in our service,” fumed by Secretary of Navy Claude Swanson. Similar to a stealth cruiser, The Fleet’s In was kept from any public view until the year 1981 and is now provisionally displayed at the Navy Art Gallery in Washington.
By 1935, the Great Depression was in complete swing and spirits were low across the US. Thanksgiving by Doris Lee became an essential holiday to Americans, as it provided them an opportunity to pull together friends and family and be grateful for what they had in such trying and tough times. An Illinois native, Doris Lee, sought to capture that sensation in this busy kitchen scene (figure 4).
Although the drawings and paintings of Cadmus have been homoerotic from the very start, this element comes to dominate the work from the last twenty years of his career. In spite of its technical proficiency, they don’t represent his perfect paintings, which by and huge were completed decades earlier. In such works, by using his satirical bend to an intense study of older art, Paul Cadmus created a wonderful synthesis, which was unique in his today and perhaps impossible at present.