The Measure of a Man

Paul Cadmus was born into a family of artists on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in 1904. His mother, Maria, was a book illustrator, while his father, Egbert, was a commercial lithographer and a watercolorist. Neither made a fortune this way; in a 1988 interview, Cadmus recalled the lean times they had living in a tenement building, marked by bedbug bites and malnutrition. Poverty did not dissuade Cadmus from pursuing a career in the arts, though. He cut his high school education short to attend the National Academy of Design in New York—then, at age 19, left without a degree to live in Europe with the artist Jared French, who would eventually become his lover. The pair returned to New York in 1933, where Cadmus joined the ranks of unemployed artists at the Public Works of Art Project—the predecessor to the better known Federal Art Project, Roosevelt’s New Deal job generator for the creative class.

Cadmus stayed at the agency for just a few months in 1934 and completed two paintings, Greenwich Village Café—which, in Cadmus’ own words, depicted a rowdy restaurant filled with “beatniks, delinquents, minor gangsters”—and The Fleet’s In!, a scene showing Navy men on shore leave. In this painting, one sailor appears passed out in the lap of another, who reaches across him to accept a cigarette from a man in a suit, locking eyes with him in a moment that reads as mutual attraction. The painting is executed in what would come to be known as Cadmus’ signature style, with facial and bodily features exaggerated to a sometimes-grotesque degree.

The Fleet’s In! was selected for a 1934 show of Works Progress Administration art at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. However, a photograph of the painting fell into the hands of Admiral Hugh Rodman, who wrote to the secretary of the Navy that the painting was “an unwarranted insult” to American sailors. Rodman’s ire finally reached the WPA, which withdrew the painting from the exhibition. The controversy turned Cadmus into an overnight art star. He started to receive regular invitations to the big fetes at New York’s newly founded Whitney Museum and his work was frequently exhibited, to much critical attention—although those critics often echoed the Navy admiral’s concern that Cadmus highlighted the unsavory aspects of life.

Criticism didn’t keep Cadmus from painting in his exaggerated style, or from creating artworks that were even more overtly homoerotic, depicting idealized male bodies, often nude or in states of undress. The 1938 etching Two Boys on the Beach, No. 1 is based on his own 1936 painting Two Boys on the Beach; both depict two muscular young men relaxing on a waterfront—one naked, the other with his pants undone. By the time he created that painting, Cadmus was a fixture at the gay vacation bastion Fire Island, which likely inspired this scene.

Historically, American men had been encouraged to find self-worth in their capacity to work and earn money for a family. With these options stripped away or drastically reduced for many during the Great Depression, historians often describe this era as a time of identity crises for men. In response, many of the murals and other works created by Federal Art Project artists depict muscular men in overalls: laborers, scientists, and designers, all hard at work making things.

How, in a culture that was scrambling to re-center traditional ideas of masculinity, did Cadmus rise to fame by making homoerotic art? It is possible, posits Tony Morris, an associate professor of art history at Tennessee’s Austin Peay State University, that many audience members simply couldn’t see it. Even many modern day viewers, Morris writes in his doctoral thesis on Cadmus’ work, are surprised when the gay overtones of the artist’s work are pointed out to them. “If the homosexual content is often missed by a 21st century audience,” writes Morris, “it stands to reason that it would have been easy to miss in 1934.” The hidden nature of gay life in the 1930s left many audience members ill-equipped to detect its presence in a painting. When contemporaneous viewers looked at images like Two Boys on a Beach, perhaps some just saw two young, healthy, seemingly carefree men—so unlike many of the men they knew who had lost jobs, or who they had passed waiting in breadlines on the street.