Paul Cadmus: The Body Politic
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great American artist Paul Cadmus, sailors and sunbathers, models and
mannequins, nitwits and nudes all are suffused with a sensuality born
equally of idyllic splendor and urban squalor, natural grace and
graceful artifice. Active since the 1930s as a renderer of pretty boys
and ugly ploys, Cadmus has spent many remarkable decades honing a
singularly complex style of idealized sexuality and vivid displeasure in
justly celebrated paintings, drawings and etchings of nude figures,
fantastical scenes and supercharged allegories.
While often working quite deliberately in the genres of social satire
and community critique, Cadmus is just as compelling when exploring the
personal and political proclivities of bodies in rest and motion. Male
bodies, that is. More than most artists of his substantial stature,
Cadmus has detailed with exquisite tenderness and unblinking bluntness
the manner in which gay males--and the gay male gaze--represent the
polemics of aesthetics.
Think of it this way: Cadmus's nudes--and, to a lesser yet still
relevant extant, his studies of societal strata--offer us an opportunity
to consider that beauty, though woundingly, agonizingly, deliciously
seductive, also can be a ruthless guise, a four-letter word, an escape
from Alcatraz, and a narcissistic, velvet-lined trap. Beauty, in fact,
is everything your parents told you was bad for you as a child. Cadmus,
to our enormous benefit, understands that beauty is bodies, brains,
buttocks, bathtubs, bicycles, Bach, bravado and bad behavior; beauty is
all things B.
Born in New York City in 1904, Cadmus was encouraged by his parents
(artists both) to pursue his creative desires. After abandoning a career
in advertising, Cadmus studied fine art and traveled throughout Europe
in the early 1930s with his lover and fellow painter, Jared French.
While gallivanting about Mallorca in an expatriate fever dream, Cadmus
learned much from French, who tolerated his pal's slavish devotion to
the means and methods of the Old Masters yet also encouraged him--quite
wisely--to transcend the trappings of art-historical tradition and hone
his own unique style.
What should we call it, this strangely anachronistic blend of
neoclassical composition, Renaissance brush strokes (a la Luca
Signorelli), figurative verisimilitude and surreal displacement?
Cadmus's style is peculiar: his technique is exacting, his figures are
elongated or oddly foreshortened, he's equally adept with charcoal and
egg tempera, and his tableaux reflect realities of the wrong side of the
tracks and fantasies of the right side. He's also, I'd venture, a
leftist.
So what do we call Cadmus's style? Let's continue to ponder as we follow
him back from Europa to the U.S., where he signed on as an employee of
the federally funded Public Works of Art Project. His first major work
for the PWAP was the infamous "The Fleet's In!," which answers the
musical question: what can you do with a drunken sailor? In this
extraordinary canvas, a gaggle of randy sailors on leave strike deals
with hookers, ogle t and a, and get a little too friendly with each
other, all while wearing (or planning to strip out of) unusually tight
trousers.
When a certain uptight Admiral Hugh Rodman ordered the removal of the
painting from an exhibition of government -sponsored paintings at the
Corcoran Gallery of Art--where, fifty years later, Mr. Mapplethorpe's
pictures suffered the same indignity--on the grounds of obscenity,
Cadmus's name was splashed across newspaper headlines as savvy critics
rallied behind him. With faux-naïve self-effacement, Cadmus did his best
to appear nonplused by the brouhaha, though in retrospect it seems that
he basked in the scandal and recognized it as a kick-start to his career
as a serious artist. All this for an image of sailors who had never
heard of--and never would have heeded--the "don't ask, don't tell"
policy.
Continuing to play the role of observer rather than participant, Cadmus
gained confidence as an arbiter of moral judgment with his "Aspects of
Suburban Life" series, commissioned in 1936 by the Treasury Relief Art
Project as murals for a post office in the tony Long Island suburb of
Port Washington. Not surprisingly, given their ruthless critique of
noblesse oblige slumming and socioeconomic inequality, the murals were
deemed "unsuitable for a federal building" and Cadmus was politely shown
the door. "Hinky Dinky Parley Voo," in which the dregs of society drink
to the dregs around a bar, didn't exactly endear Cadmus to the
no-nothings, either.
But if the government wouldn't have him, friends and lovers were
plentiful and uniformly supportive. Writer Monroe Wheeler and
photographer George Platt Lynes were close associates of Cadmus's for
years, as were E.M. Forster, Tennessee Williams, Christopher Isherwood
and George Ballanchine. Excursions to Fire Island were not uncommon.
Once there, Cadmus utilized his close-knit group as subject matter for
portraiture. Sometimes they'd pose for him in the modest glory of their
soft skin.
From the 1930s on, Cadmus steadfastly has painted the male nude within a
milieu in which, as he says, "heterosexuality has always ruled." Given
his clear-cut understanding of this identity-based power dynamic,
perhaps the queerest thing about Cadmus and his work is his (and its)
reluctance to fully acknowledge the queer content that appears so overt
to contemporary viewers who know all the insider signs. While Cadmus
always has been "out,' his reluctance to speak at length regarding the
recognizably gay aspects of his oeuvre stems, I think, both from his
reluctance to be pigeonholed and from the fact that he came of age among
a generation of gay men who typically didn't have "we're here, we're
queer, get used to it" tattooed on their foreheads.
As much as some younger artists would like to see Cadmus adopt the
persona of nonagenarian poster boy for Gay Y2K, he's generally content
to let his images speak for themselves. That's his choice to make; more
perplexing, frankly, is the majority of critical writing on Cadmus that
blatantly ignores his gay perspective and homoerotic imagery. Lincoln
Kirstein, founding director of the New York City Ballet and the artist's
self-defined bisexual brother-in-law (married to Cadmus's sister,
Fidelma), wrote the "definitive" Cadmus monograph with nary a mention of
the artist's crucial homoeroticism, preferring to tiptoe around the
truth with statements like, "As for sexual factors, he has without
ostentation or polemic long celebrated somatic health in boys and young
men for its symbolic range of human possibility. His addiction to
aspects of physical splendor has never been provocative, sly, nor
ambitious to proselytize."
I wish Kirstein had taken a more careful look at the slender lad
sporting a box kite and a noticeable bulge in "Aviator," or the
mine's-bigger-than-yours posturing and relentless cruising on display in
"Y.M.C.A. Locker Room" (not pictured). Even more telling is "Manikins,"
in which two small artist's models lovingly do the nasty atop a copy of
Corydon, André Gide's plea for queer rights. Never before or since has
the body politic been represented so charmingly.
Despite what Kirstein and others have--or haven't--said, Cadmus's work
clearly has been heavily informed by his sexuality; his male nudes and
satiric swipes exude a coolly palpable sensuality. Cadmus isn't
homogenic, however. In "Sunday Sun," a hetero couple seek out precious
rays of light amid the Dickensian grime of their oppressive urban
sprawl.
In "Subway Symphony," Cadmus trains his compassionate yet keenly wicked
eye on a sideshow of grotesques, from ridiculous hippies to religious
zealots, all of whom are having a bad hair day. While some viewers
object to Cadmus's cruel reduction of the masses to broad stereotypes,
the artist insists on his secular humanitarianism: "Will it be said that
I am anti-Semitic, anti-black, anti-white, anti-hard hat, anti-ALL,
anti-people? I am NOT. I am anti a society that makes people this way,
that makes humanoids of humans, an environment that causes this…I am FOR
human beings as individuals."
One human being in particular who Cadmus has been for as an individual
is Jon Andersson, a cabaret singer with whom the artist has been linked
for more than thirty years. In "The Haircut," Andersson snips his older
partner's distinguished white locks. In an ongoing series of chalk and
crayon drawings, Cadmus depicts Andersson as muse, thinker, sleeper,
lover and Beauty incarnate.
Recalling portraits by Michelangelo, Ingres and Degas, Cadmus's images
of Andersson illustrate his comment on the drawing process: "I
specialize in male nudes. I've done many more males than females. I like
to do females too, but they're sort of harder to come by in a way. And
they don't generally pose as well as men. They have a tendency to faint.
I think--and I don't know whether this is just my own idea--that men are
vainer than women in that they work harder at their posing. Maybe women
think that they're so lovely that they don't have to pose well, I'm not
sure." In any event, the subtle highlighting of genitals, hands and feet
in Cadmus's portraits of Andersson suggest that male beauty is a mystery
that the artist never truly desires to solve.
Paul Cadmus has plumbed the depths of this mystery throughout his long
and illustrious career, producing canvases slowly but steadily at a rate
of two or three per year. Now in his nineties, Cadmus shows little sign
of disrupting his annual routine or of ceasing to debate the thrills and
hazards of the body politic. In other words, the fleet is still in.
Steven Jenkins
Dan Doran
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