| American painter Paul Cadmus was censored five times between 1934 and 1940. His most famous censored painting is The Fleet's In! which the Assistant Secretary of the Navy removed from an exhibition in Washington, DC, but four other paintings were censored in some fashion as well: Coney Island, Aspects of Suburban Life, Sailors and Floozies, and The Herrin Massacre. While there is much scholarship written about The Fleet's In!, the remaining censored paintings have received only cursory attention. This dissertation examines not only The Fleet's In! but also these under-researched paintings to more completely define what angered people at the time.;Because Cadmus was a homosexual and he often represented gay characters, in recent decades his work has appealed to queer historians and theorists, who have focused on the homosexual aspect of his work. These historians have argued a causal relationship between Cadmus's censorship and his representation of homosexual figures. But this dissertation questions the completeness of such a history. Because homosexuality could not be openly discussed in this period, contemporary viewers may well have missed many of the homosexual references in Cadmus's work. Studying The Fleet's In! in conjunction with the other paintings in their broader cultural contexts demonstrates that homosexuality was largely invisible at the time. Viewers clearly recognized that something was amiss, but focused on the artist's representation of alcohol, promiscuous women, and what seemed to be unsympathetic depictions of the working class.;Overall, what seemed to disturb viewers was the unconventional social critique found in Cadmus's paintings. As opposed to traditional satire in which unpalatable figures face terrible consequences, Cadmus employed what Mikhail Bakhtin called the "carnivalesque." This controversial form of satire was based on Medieval festivals in which the conventions of society were temporarily halted. Cadmus's compositions stand in opposition to traditional morality, without consequence and were therefore scandalous in the 1930s. |
