Art: Sailors and Floozies

With Paul Cadmus, a babyfaced, 35-year-old Manhattan painter, a favorite subject has always been the U. S. Navy gamboling on shore leave among tousled trollops and floozies. Six years ago, when one of Cadmus’ shore-leave frolics was hung in a Public Works of Art Project exhibition in Washington’s Corcoran Gallery, the late Admiral Hugh Rodman, U.S.N. got good & mad. Said he: “It represents a most disgraceful, sordid, disreputable drunken brawl wherein apparently a number of enlisted men are consorting with a party of streetwalkers. . . . This is an unwarranted insult. . . .” Painter Cadmus’ canvas was promptly taken down.

Last week, at San Francisco’s Golden Gate International Exposition, Dr. Walter Heil, head of the Fair’s European and U. S. exhibitions, heard from one of his subalterns that the Navy was growling about the latest of Cadmus’ naval cartoons, which hung, with other Cadmus paintings, in the Treasure Island treasury of U. S. art. Entitled Sailors and Floozies, it showed two sailors and a U. S. marine gleefully enduring the blandishments of three substantial-looking wenches. Dr. Heil took the picture down. Said he: “There’s too much smell about it. It’s not a masterpiece. It’s just unpleasant.”

By week’s end the San Francisco press had raised such a hue & cry that Dr. Heil’s superior, Architect Timothy Ludwig Pflueger, ordered the picture hung again. Said he: “We have been unable to verify reports that the Navy objected.” Said the Navy (an aide to Admiral Arthur Hepburn) : “What fools we’d be. We’ve learned from earlier foolish Navy squawks against other Cadmus paintings. It does us no good and merely gives the artist publicity.” Said Paul Cadmus in Manhattan: “I don’t think it libels the Navy. Nobody expects or wants the Navy to be made up of Lord Fauntleroys and Galahads. I think the picture portrays an enjoyable side of Navy life. I think it would make a good recruiting poster. I will raise my prices.”