The Brooklyn Rail

Paul Cadmus never wanted to be a gay icon. Occasions when his sexuality was used to frame his artwork elicited great irritation—“Gayness is not the raison d’être of my work”—and any thought of being a crusader on behalf of his community was untenable—“To have the courage and stamina to be a ‘gay activist’ is beyond me.” Cadmus, who died in 1999 at the age of ninety-four, was witness to the tumultuous era of the Stonewall Riots and Gay Liberation movement and, in later years, the pestilential scourge of the AIDS epidemic. Yet his compositions, save for his earliest works, share no indication, make no grand statement as it were, on the times he lived in, oppressive, and for many, deadly as they were. Indeed, speaking of his sexuality, Cadmus once remarked, “I believe that one should accept the nature one is given, to be neither proud nor ashamed of it.” Gay pride this is not. Thus, in an age where being “out” is mainstream, Lil Nas X grinds on Satan’s lap, and Florida promulgates “Don’t Say Gay,” the question begs—what is the relevancy and legacy of an artist who, while not in the closet, preferred to keep his sexual identity behind closed doors? Is Cadmus worthy of icon status?

With Paul Cadmus: The Male Nude, currently on exhibition at DC Moore Gallery, we have an answer—an unexpected one. Billed as the first major solo show of the artist’s works in over two decades, The Male Nude brings together more than seventy pieces by Cadmus, most of them drawings, alongside several well-known and rarely exhibited paintings. Wide ranging in its historical survey and concise in mapping out his development and interests, The Male Nude is a testament both to the virtuoso technical skill Cadmus possessed and the reverence he held for the subjects he painted. Indeed, most of the drawings included in the exhibition are intimate meditations on the male form. As with Male Nude NM 49 (1967) and its depiction of a chiselled Adonis viewed from below, or Male Nude NMA(1965) featuring a muscled hunk in an insouciantly erotic repose, Cadmus readily draws from the Ancient Grecian tropes of masculinity and the Renaissance’s emphasis on the ideal male form. As with Male Nude TS-7a (1955) a masterpiece of the grisaille style favoured by the likes of Mannerist innovator Andrea del Sarto, Cadmus’s depiction of a nude man laying on his stomach, rendered in delicate shades of pencil, crayon and white watercolor, recalls Andrea Mantegna’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ (1483) a ghostly depiction of the felled Messiah. Make no mistake, as the drawings in The Male Nude make evident, Cadmus was a wildly talented artist. But they also underscore that, in most of his later work, he was neither radical or challenging.

This was not always the case with Cadmus—a brush with infamy reveals a more rebellious artist, unafraid to wade into the waters of scandal. Having recently joined Roosevelt’s Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), a New Deal funded program to give artists work, Cadmus painted The Fleet’s In!(1934) an erotically charged scene featuring drunken sailors cavorting with women and simultaneously engaging in coded homoerotic behaviour. While the painting is not on public display, a smaller etching of the piece is currently included in The Male Nude, revealing in detail Cadmus’s subversive sexualization of the sailors, featuring exaggerated crotches and bulbous buttocks in tight clothing. More pointedly, there is the presence of a “pansy” stereotypical to the 1930’s—quaffed and primped—offering a cigarette, and perhaps other things, to an inebriated sailor. The inclusion of The Fleets In!, for a 1934 group show at Washington, DC’s Corcoran Gallery drew the ire of senior US Navy leadership, and it was pulled from the exhibition. It was opprobrium on a national scale, capturing headlines and catapulting Cadmus into the public eye, a spotlight he seemingly relished. “I don’t think admirals have much sense of humor,” Cadmus would tell The New York Times during the scandal’s height, adding that if the picture was destroyed, he would simply repaint it.

So what happened in the years to follow? Where did the Cadmus who thumbed his nose so openly at the morality police go, seemingly replaced instead by an artist who preferred his works to be shown “with dignity, without noise, without fuss,” dedicated to depictions of the male nude in such an established, classical mode. In his comprehensive biography, Paul Cadmus: The Male Nude (published in 2002), Justin Spring makes the argument that though Cadmus began “his career as a satirist, determined to change social awareness through his art,” his male nudes were never intended to be social commentaries or political statements. In many ways, Cadmus’s refusal to address prevailing politics and his distaste for modern artistic movements—he felt post-war abstraction was second-rate at best—forecloses his nudes from a sense of urgency or dynamism in their engagement with the outside world. Instead, they are quiet, technically masterful meditations on an archaic ideal. If Cadmus is to be a patron saint for queer artists, his vision is firmly fixed towards the heavens. For those seeking out martyrs and revolutionaries, look elsewhere.