"I don't think art should be shocking, necessarily," says Painter Paul Cadmus, "but it should be disturbing." Cadmus, who combines a steady hand with a jaundiced eye, had never failed to disturb people and earn a living by it, but his first exhibition of paintings in twelve years, which opened in a Manhattan gallery last week, made his earlier works seem almost sissified.
His sharply satirical pictures of sailors spliced to sausage-fat floozies, and Greenwich Village phonies on the loose, made Cadmus famous before he was 30.
At 44, a mild-seeming man with a crew cut and a boyishly diffident manner, Cadmus had...