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Nevertheless, his art was inextricably linked to his life and thus includes references to his male lovers, his love triangles, and the gay places that he frequented, such as Fire Island beaches, the New York City docks, and the YMCA. A son of artists who encouraged his early artistic inclinations as well as those of his sister FidelmaCadmus was an extraordinary painter who became infamous for his gritty, sexually charged scenes, which pushed the envelope of acceptability to the breaking point.

It was French who encouraged him to abandon commercial work to become a fine artist. Like most American painters at this time, French and Cadmus traveled to Europe to absorb its culture and gain recognition for their work. Soon after they arrived, Cadmus painted his first mature painting, titled Jerrywhich was a portrait of French.

With this visual manifesto, Cadmus alchemized their bond as artists. The two artists settled on the Spanish island of Mallorca where, perhaps out of nostalgia, Cadmus created unequivocally American scenes that combined a Renaissance-inflected style with contemporary satire and brazenly gay subjects.

Risking artistic suicide, these landmark works reintroduced the homoerotic beauty of the male body in art after centuries of forced exile. Shore Leave features a menagerie of sailors who interact with sexually ambiguous female figures while a gay pickup takes place in the background.

In Greenwich Village Cafeteriaa man with painted nails seduces the viewer into joining him in the restroom. In Gilding the Acrobatsa circus theme cloaks its nakedness and a clear suggestion of fellatio, which is what Cadmus was interested in. This is when scandal began to raise its ugly head.

When the Whitney Museum unveiled the satirical Coney Islandfeaturing a young man mesmerized by a bodybuilder and a world of uncouth behavior, a Coney Island trade group threatened a civil suit. A few years later, Sailors and Flooziesin which a male-looking woman admires a gorgeous sailor posing as an Odalisque, caused a national scandal.

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Just when their money and their passports were running out, Cadmus received a letter from his sister telling him about a government-sponsored New Deal program called Public Works of Art Project. They returned to the U. A retired U. The painting eventually landed at the Alibi Club, an all-male lounge for high-ranking officials, where it hung for decades.

Outraged that a government official had censored a government-funded work of art, Cadmus furnished newspapers across the country with quotations and photographs related to the painting and the attempt to suppress it. The ensuing scandal catapulted Cadmus to front-page news and national notoriety. Indeed the most striking thing about the Fleets In!

They denounced the loose women and drunken sailors, but once you delve into this scene of general debauchery, you notice at its center an unmistakable gay pickup in progress. We see a well-groomed man wearing a red tie offering a cigarette to a Marine, who eagerly accepts it. In a historic sleight of hand, Cadmus had used satire as his pretext for depicting the cruising rituals of the gay community.

During the brouhaha over the painting, Cadmus received death threats that forced him to stay with relatives until the scandal subsided. When Pocahontas and Captain John Smith was unveiled inofficials objected to the phallic loincloth worn by one of the Indians. Benefiting from the publicity, Cadmus had his first solo gallery show.

More than 7, visitors came through, eager to see what all the fuss was about. But just as he was enjoying the sweet smell of success, Jared French, who was still his lover, married a mutual friend, photographer Margaret Hoening —