American artist Paul Cadmus was a young and unknown painter in 1934, but he became famous overnight when a minor scandal erupted over his painting The Fleet's In!
Its depiction of American sailors on shore leave aroused the ire of Navy officials, and it vanished for decades from the public view. That work, as well as Cadmus's subsequent images, usually featured heroically muscled young men, and he later became one of the first contemporary artists to be recognized as a chronicler of gay life. "I wasn't trying to foster gay rights," Cadmus told Howard Feinstein in the Advocate about the Fleet painting and his other efforts. "I recorded what I saw and thought and knew".
A native of New York City, Cadmus was born on December 17, 1904, and grew up on the Upper West Side, near Amsterdam Avenue and 103rd Street. Both parents were artistically gifted: his father was an commercial lithographer who created advertising images, and his mother had illustrated children's books, but the family, which included Cadmus's younger sister, Fidelma, was quite poor. He told Judd Tully in an interview conducted for the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art that their apartment building was "a horrible tenement. We lived with lots of bedbugs and cockroaches". He also suffered from childhood rickets, a condition brought on by vitamin deficiency.
A native of New York City, Cadmus was born on December 17, 1904, and grew up on the Upper West Side, near Amsterdam Avenue and 103rd Street. Both parents were artistically gifted: his father was an commercial lithographer who created advertising images, and his mother had illustrated children's books, but the family, which included Cadmus's younger sister, Fidelma, was quite poor. He told Judd Tully in an interview conducted for the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art that their apartment building was "a horrible tenement. We lived with lots of bedbugs and cockroaches". He also suffered from childhood rickets, a condition brought on by vitamin deficiency.
