Shore Leave

Paul Cadmus's Shore Leave depicts a lusty scene of carousing sailors and their new-found playmates in west side Manhattan's Riverside Park, then a notorious site for temporary liaisons. At left, one sailor in a tight-fitting uniform and his eager companion stand cheek to cheek in a clinging embrace, an empty gin bottle discarded on the ground. At right in a tangle of interlocking arms and legs, three couples engage in a boisterous partner-grabbing game as two laughing women and one hesitant sailor are restrained by their companions. Between these groups animated by carnal desire, a man lies on the ground with his legs wide apart; Cadmus skillfully foreshortened his body and his head, which appears to nestle against another reclining figure's legs. In the middle ground to the right, a dapper man places a hand on a sailor's shoulder in an overture to intimacy. Beyond them, high-rise apartment buildings stand on a hill under bulbous high clouds.

  In 1934, ten years after he made his first intaglio prints, Cadmus began to create etched versions of his paintings. This one, based on his painting Shore Leave (1933, Whitney Museum of American Art), demonstrates the artist's use of precedents from Renaissance art, notably in the pyramidal arrangement of figures, which also recalls the composition of the etching The Barker (TF 1995.44) by Reginald Marsh, a contemporary of Cadmus's who also pictured typical modern American urban types. Shore Leave is typical of Cadmus's art in its exuberant celebration of the human figure. This precisely-drawn etching demonstrates his skillful draftsmanship, mastery of social realism, and talent for evoking a carnival of debauchery with a wink and a smile.

Figures and Forms: Selections from the Terra Foundation for the Arts, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, May 9–July 9, 2000.Terra Collection-in-Residence, Ashmolean Museum of Art & Archaeology, Oxford, United Kingdom, September 15, 2022–September 30, 2026.

 

Johnson, Una E. and Jo Miller. Paul Cadmus: Prints and Drawings, 1922–1967. Brooklyn, New York: Brooklyn Museum, 1968. No. 83, p. 21; pl. 83.

American Master Prints: From the Betty and Douglas Duffy Collection. Washington, D.C.: The Trust for Museum Exhibitions, 1987. No. 18.

Beall, Karen F. and David W. Kiehl. Graphic Excursions: American Prints in Black and White, 1900–1950. (exh. cat., American Federation of Arts). New York: American Federation of Arts, 1991. No. 55.