Bicyclists, Paul Cadmus, 1933 Oil on canvas, 91.5 x 46cm, Curtis Galleries, Minneapolis.

Mallorcan Fishermen, 1932, private collection, courtesy DC Moore Gallery, New York City

Mallorcan Quarry, 1932, oil on canvas, 76 x 101cm, Curtis Galleries, Minneapolis.

The Fleet's In!, 1934, oil on canvas, 76 x 152.5cm, The Navy Museum, Washington DC

Herrin Massacre, 1940, Collection Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, gift of Thomas J Lord and Robert E White Jr.

Study for David and Goliath, 1971, acrylic on canvas, 127 x 137cm, Collection Colorado Springs Fine Art Center

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Thanks to his acid satires and his outrageously ribald and frequently erotic murals, artist Paul Cadmus was a 1930s cause célèbre–toasted by New York’s smart set and roasted by just about everyone else. Renowned for his neoclassical compositions and Renaissance brush strokes and compared to Caravaggio and Giotto, he enjoyed a seven-decade career. And it all started in Mallorca.

American painter Paul Cadmus was swept onto the US art scene in 1934 on a tide of indignation and outrage, his name splashed across front pages. His playfully lascivious The Fleet’s In, which depicted boozy sailors bursting out of their skintight uniforms and carousing with common floozies, and, amid the general melee, a gay liaison, was at the eye of a media storm. Newspapers chortled and cried the First Amendment. And navy top brass blustered and thundered and ordered the removal of the offending painting from an exhibition of government-sponsored paintings at Washington DC’s Corcoran Gallery of Art on the grounds of obscenity. Here, at the same venue and in similar circumstances fifty years later, Robert Mapplethorpe’s pictures were to suffer a similar fate.

This “disreputable drunken brawl” came from “the sordid, depraved imagination of someone who has no conception of actual conditions in our service”, fumed Secretary of Navy Claude Swanson. Thanks to the brouhaha, Cadmus’s subsequent one-man show was a sensation and over the next three years his works were bought by five US museums. Over the decades and until his death in 1999, Cadmus continued to paint gorgeous and garish, erotic and frankly homoerotic, ribald scenes of everyday life. After 1941 he mostly employed the laborious Renaissance technique of egg tempera and his work showed the influences of Michelangelo, Giotto, Brueghel and Bosch. Cadmus would always date his celebrity to that moment in 1934 when he survived a brief skirmish with the navy. But he dated his emergence as a painter to a little earlier and world away from 1930s Manhattan. That he said, was in Mallorca, Port Andratx to be precise. The year was 1931.

“I painted some of my best-known pictures there,” recalled Cadmus in a 1988 interview for the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution. “I did the YMCA Locker Room there, the Bicyclists, the first of the sailors pictures, Shore Leave, it was called.

“That was when I really began to be my own self, I think, rather than just an academically-trained painter. The Mallorcan Fishermen was the first elaborate composition that I attempted.”

A graduate of New York’s Art Students League, Cadmus had tossed aside a career as an advertising artist and arrived on Mallorca, aged 27, with his boyfriend Jared French in 1931 after hopping on an oil tanker to Europe and cycling through France and Spain. After staying in Palma the pair looked around for somewhere to live. “We tried Sóller and and Deià. We liked Deià very much except it was on the north coast–it had a very short daylight. The mountains hid the sun very quickly. Robert Graves was there at the time. We used to see him in the hotel where he stayed. He seemed like a very unpleasant man. He didn’t want to meet anyone, obviously, and didn’t want any admirers. We looked at houses in these various towns. Then tried the town of Puerto de Andratx and we stayed at a pensión there.”

While there, Cadmus did watercolours and oil views of the port but his eye was also drawn to the fishermen who lived and worked on the docks. Says David Leddick, author of Intimate Companions, a book on Cadmus and his circle: “One portrait, Juan, resembles the bust of the Roman emperor Caracalla. Cadmus must have seen a resemblance to the emperor in Juan’s strong classical features.”

Lincoln Kirstein, who was to marry Cadmus’s sister and later found the New York City Ballet, claimed that Paul and Jared, both strapping and well-built young men, posed for all the figures in Mallorcan Fishermen, with the artist later adding the faces which were portraits of local young men. “I turned Jared into a little child for that painting,” Cadmus later explained.

In 1933, Cadmus painted Bicyclists, a canvas which harks back to Renaissance wall paintings, says David Leddik. “Strong thighs and buttocks and backs point in opposite directions while the cyclists’ eyes meet. Their gestures have a feeling of urgency coupled with a sense that the two men are not unaware of each other physically.” The painting was later bought by Cole Porter.

Needless to say, Port Andratx in the early 1930s was not quite the tourist playground it is today. “There were a few expatriates there,” recalled Cadmus in the 1988 interview. “English almost entirely. One or two Americans. They liked us and we were very friendly with them and got them to pose for us. Then we would usually meet the foreigners that came to visit.” Rents were low. Cadmus and French found an apartment for five dollars a month.

“It had just a charcoal stove. But it had its own little toilet. It didn’t have a bathroom. You had to take sponge baths and things like that. But it had a lovely view of the harbor–the fishing boats outside. I did a painting of the fishing boats from the window. When the sun was out, it was lovely, but I got chilblains, as one often does in Europe. But in the good weather all winter long we were able to walk to little coves and go swimming. We really weren’t extravagant, I must say. We lived mostly on eggs and onions and fresh tomatoes and fresh figs and fresh produce and things like that. We didn’t even buy fish, which was rather odd, because the fish always came in the market. But maybe it’s partly because our stove was so inadequate. We nearly did asphyxiate ourselves one night using the carbon in our stove with the windows closed. We both got terrible headaches, but realised and opened the windows in time.”

Now and again the pair would cycle into Palma and buy art supplies and, almost daily, Jared would urge his lover to become a serious painter.

“Unfortunately, in those days I liked drawing on newsprint, which is terrible paper. It’s a lovely texture to work on, actually. I enjoyed it, but things have begun to crumble and turn yellow, of course. We didn’t know anything about acid-free things in those days. We should have, but we didn’t.

While in Mallorca, Cadmus began painting American themes: YMCA Locker Room is from this period. Said the artist of the scene: “I was thinking of Mantegna–the low perspective–and also Signorelli when I did it.” That same year, 1933, he painted his first randy sailors in Shore Leave. It was to prefigure the controversial painting The Fleet’s In! which Cadmus painted on his return to the US in October 1933, lured by the generous allowances of the Public Works of Art Project of the Depression-era Roosevelt government.

Cadmus’s next painting under the scheme was Greenwich Village Cafeteria, which art critic Bernard Berenson compared to a Caravaggio. Again it’s a raucous scene of an unlovely, grotesque gaggle hell-bent on having a bit of indecent fun. A similar Hogarthian cast appears as sunbathers in Coney Island, and four decades later in Subway Symphony. There’s a sense in Cadmus’s pictures that “beauty is everything your parents told you was bad for you as a child,” says critic Steven Jenkins. “Cadmus, to our enormous benefit, understands that beauty is bodies, brains, buttocks, bathtubs, bicycles, Bach, bravado and bad behaviour; beauty's all things B.”

After yet another successful show in 1937, Time magazine reported of the paintings on display: “Around the walls sailors tousled their trollops, perverts beckoned from a cafeteria washroom… slatterns rioted on public beaches. These are the principal aspects of US life that attract Cadmus’s attention, and he shrewdly draws and crudely colours them.”

1937 was also a significant year in Cadmus’s private life–his lover Jared left him and married a mutual friend, Margaret Hoening. The three of them remained fast friends, however, and worked together on a number of photography projects, usually on Fire Island. Throughout the late 1930s Cadmus continued to shock–his Aspects of Suburban Life series commissioned as murals for a post office were rejected as “unsuitable for a public building” and in 1938 he showed once again what can be done with a drunken sailor in Sailors and Floozies, this one temporarily removed from the Golden Gate International Exhibition in San Francisco in 1939. Putting it back on the wall, the director of the Palace of Fine Arts said: “If every picture to which some may object is removed, none would remain.”

In 1940 came another rejection, this time from Life magazine, which had commissioned 16 artists to paint significant events. Cadmus chose to portray the massacre of 26 strikebreakers at an Illinois mine by striking miners in 1922. Some were hanged, others lined up against a fence and shot, and in some cases, some were forced to dig their own graves. Here the subject is painted in a quasi-religious, quasi-erotic fashion, the dying and pleading strikebreakers stripped half naked and down to their muscled torsos.

Despite the stream of rejections, the 1930s and 1940s were Cadmus’s most successful years. Professionally, he was at his peak and his social life was an endless whirl of glamorous Manhattan parties where he was feted by friends including EM Forster, WH Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Edith Sitwell, Glenway Westcott and George Platt Lynes.

From 1940 on, Cadmus began painting in egg tempera which he was drawn to because of its “delicacy and its linear quality and the freshness of its color, the fact that it doesn’t darken as oil painting does. And that so many of the paintings I admired most–Italian paintings–were done in that style, in that technique. As a medium it’s particularly suited to a rather small scale work and my work got smaller and smaller about that time. It required panels rather than canvas, so it was much easier to work on a smaller scale.”

Cadmus’s own favourite work is in this demanding technique and dates from 1958. Dr Philip Eliasoph, professor of art history and friend of Cadmus, once asked the artist which painting he would save from the flames in the event of a fire. “He responded quickly, ‘Night in Bologna is the summa of my career.’

“It synthesizes every element of Cadmus’s allegorical, narrative-driven imagery,” explains Eliasoph. “Powerful sexual and psychic tension locks three people in a triangle resembling Piero’s Flagellation, the image he considered ‘the most perfect painting in the world’. Night in Bologna depicts a farce of miscalculated seductions. An Italian soldier yearns for a curvaceous female hooker; she, in turn, tries to seduce a crewcut American tourist, while he gazes back at the Italian man with envy.” And, clearly, lust.

In real life, meanwhile, Cadmus spent much of this period in a triangle of his own. In the post-war 1940s he had been involved with artist George Tooker but the pair broke up in 1949. Said Tooker: “I was looking for a relationship and my relationship with Paul always included Jared and Margaret French.”

But Cadmus was once again to find love in 1964 when he met Jon Andersson, a singer and actor who became his boyfriend for the next 35 years. The young man inspired a series of exquisite nude drawings and the striking Study for a David and Goliath, a homage to Caravaggio, in which Jon brandishes a T square above Cadmus’s head, the painter’s red scarf marking the point of decapitation.

The art world, meanwhile was largely neglecting Cadmus as it became obsessed with abstract expressionism. But in the 1990s, a renewed interest in figurative work and a greater interest in gay subculture led to a revival of interest in the painter, who enjoyed solo exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Dubbed variously a magic realist, a surrealist and a symbolic realist, Cadmus himself preferred the term literary painter. “In fact,” he said, “I think a lot of the greatest painting is really an illustration for literature. The literature usually was the Bible or the New Testament. Giotto’s paintings are illustration or storytelling. In fact, most Italian art was storytelling.”

The story of Paul Cadmus comes to a quiet, peaceful end in 1999 after the painter took his customary stroll near his house in Connecticut days ahead of his 95th birthday and just two weeks after a party at the DC Moore Gallery on New York’s Fifth Avenue, where the artist was surrounded by friends. It’s a story that takes in much of the turbulent 20th century in Europe and the US. It’s the story of the seven-decade career of an artist, a career which began in the tiny town of Port Andratx, Mallorca.

The estate of Paul Cadmus is represented exclusively by DC Moore Gallery, 724 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10019, USA. Tel: 212 247 2111, email: info@dcmooregallery.com. Many thanks to Sandra Paci of DC Moore Gallery, Alice Reimann of Curtis Galleries, Minneapolis and Amy Hutchins of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Many of Paul Cadmus’s works are available for purchase at the DC Moore Gallery, NY. For further reading, see: Paul Cadmus, by Lincoln Kirstein, ISBN: 0876549415; Paul Cadmus: The Male Nude, by Justin Spring, ISBN: 0789305895; Intimate Companions: A Triography of George Platt Lynes, Paul Cadmus, Lincoln Kirstein, and Their Circle, by David Leddick, ISBN: 0312271271. Paul Cadmus, Yesterday & Today, by Philip Eliasoph ISBN: 0940784009