Passed out sailors, good-time gals and blond men offering smokes to bull-necked marines — it’s the scandal that keeps on giving.

Back in the 1930’s, while America was managing to stay out of the brewing wars in Hitler’s Europe, Paul Cadmus did a series of sailor paintings that enraged the Navy and created such a furor in the papers that the resulting publicity made his name in art circles, with his subsequent one-man show attracting a record 7,000 visitors.

Rather than depict the natty, clean-jawed sailor of the recruiting poster, the young Cadmus, a government sponsored WPA artist, painted drunk, sensual gobs on pussy patrol, their skin-tight Navy whites outlining athletic butts and bulges in a way that would have cause eyebrows to raise had not the paintings mirrored the actual fit of those dreamy, creamy uniforms.

In paintings with titles like Shore Leave, Floosies and Sailors and The Fleet’s In, Cadmus created crowded canvases teeming with crossing bodies and twisting shapes. In these paintings the women are all hags but the sailors, like the one at top, are often angelic.

Cadmus had a habit of sneaking a likeness of himself in his paintings. Finding Cadmus in his busy landscapes, though, is a bit like finding Waldo. Still patience is rewarded, and in his sailor paintings, Cadmus appears not literally in self-portrait mode — a move too bold even for him, in the 1930s — but as a close representative, a blond man propositioning the hot Navy trade.

When The Fleet’s In (detail above, full painting at bottom) was first exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Department of Defense, which had up until then taken no notice of the New York art scene, demanded to know what kind of anti-American subversives had permitted this outrage.

The work depicted — in the exaggerated style that was a hallmark of Cadmus’ figurative painting — uniformed sailors on shore leave, surrounded by women of obviously very easy virtue. The work had an almost cartoonish quality — but there was more to it than that. The artist’s view of the scene was not simply unflinching, it was celebratory! Cadmus seemed to be enjoying the rough and tumble of what, at the time, was a common weekend sight in Manhattan’s Riverside Park, a strip of green, wooded land bordering the Hudson River that was notorious as the happy hunting grounds of sailors on summer liberty and the women — and men — who loved them.

Navy officials could not believe that the horndog hijinks of their military were being aired in public. No doubt one part of the work that riveted their attention was all the homosexual pickups in progress. (Detail at left from Shore Leave, note the male couple in the background.) As soon as the top brass learned this was the handiwork of a government sponsored artist, the work was pulled from the show. The government owned the painting, in effect, and had every right to put it in permanent — that is, eternal — storage. And that, you would be forgiven for thinking, was the end of the story.

Far from it.

“Fortunately, I had had the painting photographed before it was sent down,” Cadmus said in an interview shortly before his death in 1999. “So I was able to give photographs to the press when they came to see me when the scandal broke. Next day I was on all the front pages.”

To his surprise famous artists of the era — Thomas Hart Benton, John Sloan — contacted him and asked if they could use their influence to help out. “I did get threats on the phone too,” Cadmus admitted. “People going to come and beat me up — sailors and things like that. What riled them up was I showed what they thought was a disgraceful aspect of our Armed Forces. I mean, the sailors were human beings who went around with prostitutes and behaved drunkenly, and they didn’t want that mentioned. They only wanted them known as heroes and — well, goody-goodies …

“Perhaps I made the people uglier than they were, and I certainly probably put them into tighter clothes than they sometimes wore. I always loved the nude.”

Ultimately though, the scandal made his name and is one of the reasons Nightcharm is remembering him here. “I am,” he said, “eternally grateful to that offended admiral.”

And what of the confiscated painting The Fleet’s In (above, in full)? Ah, there in hangs a tale. At first, it was rescued from deep storage by the Secretary of the Navy, Henry Latrobe Roosevelt, and hung, it is said, in his bathroom. (The mind reels, but there’s more.) Right before his death, as he becomes ill, the Secretary of the Navy bequeathes the painting to the Alibi Club — the Alibi Club being a private preserve in Washington, favored by the three and four-star generals. (And again we are spinning in our pinafores!) There the painting is allowed to deteriorate from ill-care and cigar smoke.

In 1944, the painting, seen only in photographs, inspires Jerome Robbins to create his ballet Fancy Free. It is instructive to read a description of that ballet

The setting of the ballet is in New York City on a hot summer night. Three sailors on shore leave pick up two girls and a fight develops over which sailor is to be left without a partner. In the bar, they stage a competition, each dancing a variation designed to win the favor of a girl, but at the same time revealing his individual character. When the girls are still unable to choose between them, the fight is resumed and the girls slip away. The sailors make up, but one wonders when a third girl passes their way, whether they have learned their lesson.

Hopefully, in future performances, someone will remember the man with the Lucky Strikes. Boys, you needn’t get all up in each other’s faces. There’s plenty of good times to go around.

But we digress.

So with the blockbuster success of Fancy Free, there is a demand to see the actual painting, as well as renewed interest in Cadmus’ work — which by remaining steadfastly realistic has become too conservative for the abstract-art tastes of the mid-century. In 1980, a group interested in mounting a Cadmus retrospective threatens to sue the Alibi Club unless the painting is returned to public hands. The Navy takes title to the painting, still allowing it to remain on loan at the Club but refusing to release it for viewing by the general public. A year later, the Navy comes to its senses, has the painting restored and allows it to be seen at a handful of Cadmus retrospectives. This becomes the first public exhibition of the painting since it was confiscated in 1934.

Today, the painting is on permanent public exhibit at the Navy Art Gallery, Washington Navy Yard — and still stirs up the ole shit storm. In 1995, women visitors to The Navy Museum complained that the painting depicted — what else — sexual harassment. (Drunken sailors, savvy prostitutes, and one man with the glad eye for the straight guy — who, we wonder, is harassing whom?)

Hey, ladies, have it your way. We only wish all women thought like this. Let’s hear it for the poof with the Lucky Strikes!

Paul Cadmus, circa 1934, as he appeared during the time of The Fleet’s In controversy.

To learn more about Paul Cadmus, we recommend the excellent, copiously illustrated Paul Cadmus by Lincoln Kirstein. But hurry. The book is out of print, and the remaining copies are bound to double in price.